Take a hike

OCTOBER 2000 - Why is everyone into doomsday scenarios ? Firstly, things aren’t bad. They are just terrible, but that’s another issue. Secondly, well I forget what is secondly but that just goes to show it couldn’t be that serious, otherwise why would anyone have forgotten it in the first place, or was it second ? There are far too many pundits spelling gloom, doom and the usual sticks in the mud going on and on with chants of we-have-had-it and the wailing going up all the time. As anyone wearing large and well polished five ton boots will tell you, ‘Nonsense.’

Everyone is depressed the good general has been in office a year and nothing has happened. This is patently false. He has not been in office a year. He has been travelling. It’s not easy selling a military government to the rest of the world. Most people would have preferred to sell ice cream to the Eskimos. In any case how many people do you know who can sell a project that could well have been put together by Don Quixote ? It takes a lot of courage to tell the world to support a military takeover particularly since military takeovers are just about as popular as Mian Nawaz Sharif is in Pakistan. Actually lots of things have been happening and as soon as I can recall them, you will be the first to know. It’s an established fact that the CE has been listening to Javed Jabbar of the curved tongue fame, for months. That’s no small achievement. JJ is a gifted talker who can draw circles around most people without even using a magic marker. So involved is his sentence construction that by the time he is into his third sentence most people are still groping with his first and not making much progress with the second. The good general has not only been listening to him attentively and nodding his head at the same time, he has also on occasion, understood him. That alone should qualify him from holding this wretched office for another year. The CE has made other notable contributions to the country but they are eluding me at the present time. I know they are there.

People have been very critical of his team. So are they of the Pakistan team, which doesn’t mean that the team stops playing or stops losing. If it stops losing, the public will never forgive the team. We get used to everything in due course of time. It took us a while to get used to the good dictator, Gen. Zia ul Haq or was he Field Marshal ? No, that was another one but the name escapes me for the moment. We patiently waited while he honed his speech skills on us using our patience as a sounding board. In the end, he was a gifted and eloquent speaker and weaved magic on the government’s most dreaded media monster, PTV – for some strange reason every government that takes power in Islamabad knows before it does so that they will avoid PTV at all costs, but then simply get seduced by the one eyed monster within minutes of snorting in Islamabad’s highly stoned atmosphere. We should give the CE at least ten years. Rome was not built in a day if it was built at all. As for the team that people think contains more pulp than a wet tissue box, this is simply not true. Just because a few have left and others are leaving and the rest are going about in circles means nothing. In Islamabad everything moves in circles and the perpetually giddy motion is responsible for some of the strangest decisions that flow from here. The team that the CE has, is good and should be allowed to continue. They certainly cannot be held responsible for anything, since they haven’t done anything.

People are basically thankless. Not happy that the army has the big boy in the slammer at Attock, they want a fast trial. The public is simply not willing to understand that trials take time, but so hooked is the nation on one day cricket that nothing less than a five minute trial will please them. In this the army has been something of a disappointment. Most of their countrymen were willing to believe that being short on questions and fast on draws, the khakis would decide cases within minutes, some in less than sixty seconds. This has not happened. The armed forces in-charge of various things, and these are quite various you understand, have been plodding through tons of paperwork which is not easy if you are used to negotiating rope bridges only. Paperwork can be tricky stuff. The public is convinced that at the dizzy speed adopted by NAB, it may well be another 500 years before all the evidence in the Nawaz Sharif vs. The State is completed. The Lady of the Lecture Circuit is yet to grace the rest and recreation facility at Attock but one of these days when she runs out of lecture material, she might even take a chance and head

back to her beloved (and surely smelly) masses. We all know she likes nothing better than to mingle with the masses. So to all those people who are into fast paced spectator sports, just be patient and give the boys a chance to understand how civillians work. Once they get the hang of that, in about a dozen years or so, things will move at a speed faster than anyone can imagine right now. As for characters like the MQM man in London whose name I cannot recall immediately, those who fly off on a tangent every time the Man opens his large mouth and hurls another obscenity at this country, are no better than the Man himself. I recall he was particularly good at using drill machines on people who were not very appreciative of his ways. A talented man with drills, electric saws, knives, sharp and blunt instruments both, ropes, all the 52 Chinese torture tricks and an artist with human bodies but given all that, still a cracked pot given to making very long and boring phone calls.

Which brings us to the big bugbear (or is it bug bigbear ? One can never tell these days), this business of being perpetually short. Everyone is going about wearing a long face (how they manage this is quite amazing) complaining that we are broke, poorer than all the church mice put together and that things are getting from bad to worse and from worse to bad. First of all, this is nonsense. We are not short of anything, least of all money. We are experiencing a slightly anxious situation placed as we are between a rock and a hard place, but then how many people do you know who aren’t short of money at any given time ? Money, as we all know, comes and goes although it is true that in Pakistan’s case, it mostly goes. The books need a little balancing and undoubtedly this will happen soon enough. In the meantime if onions cost a little more, simply use less. It’s as simple as that. As soon as you do that, the price of onions will come down. So will a lot of other things, but that is to be expected. Contrary to what you might have heard, in spite of four increases in petrol prices – actually they weren’t increases, just adjustments, the price of goods for the common man have remained the same. This is nothing short of a miracle and the government needs to be congratulated. Something other leaders have not been able to achieve, we have managed in no time at all. Instead of being full of praise for the government, some people have taken to criticising it. Others are complaining that the dollar costs more. To fight that, simply stop buying dollars or switch to a more Paki-friendly currency like the Italian lira.

Pakistan is doing very well. The economy is booming, the people are happy, the crime rate has vanished and the common man is no longer common. Even the new flu varieties are getting better, so to all those saying the end is here, take a hike.