Author: Dr Farrukh Saleem
Publication: The News
Date: April 15, 2007
URL: http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=51222
One hundred and fifty-nine million Pakistanis
are headed nowhere. If we are going nowhere, I guarantee, that any road will
take us there. The day that the chief justice was 'suspended' my closest friend
couldn't hold back his tears. We wept not knowing whether the tears dropped
for our children, our army or our country. Unprecedented was the fact that
a Punjabi and that too from Faisalabad dared say "no".
I had been away from Pakistan. My heart didn't
want to leave Islamabad but ABN Amro somehow managed to entice me to Dubai,
the City of Gold (thank you, ABN). For two long weeks, tired of playing with
my lonely evenings, I would scan The New York Times, The Washington Post,
The Chicago Tribune, The Associated Press, Reuters, International Herald Tribune,
Financial Express, Boston Globe and The Australian wanting to extract some
good news. The best piece of news that comes out of Pakistan these days is
that Pakistan is going nowhere.
For sixty long years Pakistanis fed grass
to their children so that our army can be powerful; bear the vagaries of poverty,
injustice, unemployment and malnutrition so that our army be powerful.
Last week we found out that nine corps of
the seventh largest army in the world can't even take on the Burqa brigade.
Or is it all politics? After all, I am an awfully poor student of Pakistani
politics with no clue as to who is advising who but our soldier-commando-general-president,
the final arbiter of all things Pakistani, is taking Pakistan nowhere.
In the 70s, Americans had known just two kinds
of Pakistanis - doctors and engineers. Divisional Public School in Faisalabad
taught me physics, chemistry and math. Twenty-nine years ago, my first landing
in America, I would boast to be a Pakistani and my American professors used
to treat me as something superior to other students. Outside of Pakistan,
my twelve-year-old son is now hesitant in telling foreigners that his name
is Mohammad.
At the Universal City Studios in California,
my nineteen-year-old daughter told a group of American, English and French
visitors that she is from Pakistan and that was the end of the conversation.
There are 245 countries, and of the 245 Fiji,
Thailand, Mauritania, Pakistan, Libya and Myanmar are the only ones led by
their militaries. Six military-led countries out of two hundred and forty-five;
why do we have to be one of the six? Of the six, five are going nowhere.
There are 6.5 billion of us and of the 6.5
billion a mere four per cent of world population is led by their militaries.
Why can't we be part of the 96 per cent?
Muslim Iran wants to fence its border with
Pakistan. 'Hindu India' wants to fence its border with Pakistan, and Pakistan
wants to fence its border with Afghanistan. Why do we have to be the most
fenced country on the face of the planet?
I tell my friends that we are going nowhere
and they now tell me that I am being overly optimistic.
The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance
columnist Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com
