We Are Still The Best!

Pakistan is a strange land. It is the only place in the world where you can find the most talented, intelligent, hardworking and resilient people but simultaneously see infinite samples that have achieved the highest level of ignorance and stupidity and nobody can beat them in this trade.

Our youth can make bridges during the floods within 48 hours single-handedly and save lives. Swat’s 27-year old Wajid Ali made a chairlift with cables/pulleys within eight hours and saved 700 lives. Within 48 hours, he had made a full-fledged sturdy wooden bridge. He was not a bridge designer, engineer or architect but a craftsman.

Mazhar Ali, 47, has built a dam alone in Balochistan that is 12 feet high, 40 feet long and 24 feet wide with a storage capacity of 860,000 litres rainwater. The dam is 2,100m above the sea level in the Mohardar mountains behind Boko and Ziarat Koh.

Ahmad Shahzad, a youth from Faisalabad has made an e-bike out of scrap, that can run at 25 km/h.

On the contrary, a convict like Engineer Waqar Agha convinces us that he has invented a water-fuelled car and the father of our nuclear bomb – Dr A Q Khan – rushes to TV channels to endorse him.  Whereas, nobody believes the reputed physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy who rightly exposes Agha as a fraudster.

While arranging marriages of our kids, we first of all dig the prospects’ background. But we don’t exercise this caution while electing those who later decide our generations’ future. For the last 40 years, we are electing the same thieves, opportunists and turncoats again and again.

Every religion admits the importance of cleanliness. Our religion says that cleanliness is half of faith and we practice it the best. We keep our houses clean and throw the garbage in the streets.

We are told 24/7 that Pakistan is the impregnable citadel of Islam. It does not matter that in 1971, this citadel was resized and reshaped. With more than half of its body, we saw the emergence of Bangladesh. But we never lamented our disintegration. We proudly told the world that we have given the Muslim Ummah another baby!

We also believe that we are the bravest people on this planet. A tanker full of petrol would fall on ground and we will rush to collect a bottle of the highly inflammable liquid while smoking a pipe. Dozens of people will burn alive but we will repeat such spectacles of chivalry whenever we find such a battle ground. In fact, we are always looking for a fallen fuel tanker to prove our valour.

We desperately look for a tree when we are out and we have to park our cars. We hardly find them for we have cut down all of them to build plazas or widen roads instead of launching a mass transport system. During long marches like PTI, we desperately look for a tree to set it on fire. PTI loyalists torched dozens of fully grown tall and dense trees on the Islamabad Expressway during the long march show.

In a bid to liberate the Kashmiris from the tyrannical bondage of the Hindus, we lost East Pakistan in terms of territory. We lost Balochistan in terms of state writ. In fact, we have lost writ everywhere. Any crippled cleric can stage dharna (sit-in) or a mentally challenged leader enforce a long march and paralyze the country. The state can do nothing except talks! Our friends now make fun of us. They say we should first of all liberate Aabpara Road from the bondage of the Lal Masjid before reclaiming Kashmir.

But we are the best. We can challenge and convince the atheists that God exists. When our official preacher Tariq Jamil visits them he presents the case of Pakistan. Atheists instantly become believer with just one argument.  If there is no God, then how Pakistan is still alive and acting as the hero of the Muslim world!

Jokes apart, the same Pakistanis while living abroad follow the traffic rules; stand in queues; throw garbage in dustbins, pay taxes and work extremely hard. Some of them like Fazlur Rehman Khan (not to be confused with Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman of diesel fame) become the father of high-rise building structural engineering. How many of us know him and the fact that he was a Bengali, our ex-compatriots that were always held in contempt!