Pakistan - News and Discussion 6

Naresh · 06-04-2006, 02:40 PM

[center]Over the top[/center]

[center]Plunderistan

Masood Hasan[/center]

It would be appropriate to rename the country and call it Plunderistan, because what else can one call it now? With each passing day, the scale on which Pakistan's resources are being devoured by groups of people whose appetites are insatiable is beyond explanation. By and large, the human race is greedy and unscrupulous but what we are mute witnesses to has gone far beyond the stage of rape. What else can explain the way whole tracts of land are being gobbled up, entire forests simply vaporising and water resources a matter of theft and disputed claimants? What lies within each of us, like a demon spirit that can plot, plan and execute with such ruthless and imaginative cunning, schemes that are evil and devious, that turn the country's resources into personal bank accounts? Were the same genius to start working for the common good of the country, we would have gone places, instead of floundering like some flunkeys in lists of dubious and disgraceful company and damning statistics.

In the times of the good old Nazis, Jewish homes were marked 'X' which was just as good a way of letting them know that they were ready for the chop. Now, almost six decades after that horror, what the Nazis did to the Jews is what we are doing to our trees. In the name of some blighted woolly-headed confusion that passes for policy, another thousand trees along Lahore's fabled Canal are ready for the traditional sacrificial cutting. The trees have been appropriately marked 'X' by Herr Punjab Government -- it is, as usual, very hard to find out who has actually ordered this exercise -- everyone is brilliant at playing dumb and no official is going to be so foolish as to stand up and say, "I ordered this.' Instead, a labyrinth of half-truths and deliberate falsehood is being enacted to ease the procedure and cause minimal collateral damage. The cutting of Lahore's trees in this particular case starts from the wretched underpass at Dharampura all the way to Thokar Niaz Beg before this car-crazy city gets out and starts plunging towards wherever they are frantically going -- or coming in thousands to Lahore as is the case every day. There is a long report of cruising speeds that has been painfully reconstructed, almost as if the Canal Road is the start of the Formula I and Michael Schumacher is not going to drive unless we comply.

In a nutshell -- although it cannot fit into any nutshell even though the scheme is the work of nuts, it laments the fact that vehicles plying this stretch are unable to attain the desired cruising speeds of say 60 kilometres per hour, which as any self-respecting Paki-sheeda will tell you, is unacceptable. We are also told that the underpasses of which there is an epidemic on the Canal, have been designed to be of five lanes, whereas they are reduced to two lanes at places which is not acceptable. This tragic reduction into twolanes it seems is holding up this nation's arrival into the next century where it wants to be, although more than half are happy to remain in the seventh century. The usual poppycock about environmental impact assessment and taking 'stakeholders into confidence' has been splayed in the newspapers, but from very bitter and repeated experience, everyone including my spaniel knows that this is just hogwash designed to buy time and ease off the pressure. Once the few people stop shouting or protesting, the demented scheme will continue and in this case that is easy because the victims are simply trees. As any idiot will tell you, trees cannot strike back and chop your head off when you chop their arms off. They are sitting ducks for all that matters, although the resemblance to the duck family is just about the same as good governance is to the present landlords.

One can understand if the rest of the city is speeding away on smooth, disciplined roads and boulevards where everyone follows the rules and traffic flows like melted chocolate, but look at Lahore or any other city, large or small, affluent or squalid and all you see is chaos, disorder, mayhem and a complete breakdown of normalcy. So what is special about the Canal that it must be made to look like the autobahn of Germany? In the days of the dreadful Sharifs, Camelot was located with Aba Jee presiding at Raiwind and all roads led to El Dorado. Fawning supplicants and sycophants, of whom many now worship at the altar of Gujrat, trampled fellow travellers to get to Raiwind first and pay homage at the royal court of buffoons. In a matter of days, the face of the areas adjoining and leading to Raiwind changed. Instead of a rutted, pockmarked and acne-infested rural road that badly linked Lahore with Raiwind, there were smooth as silk highways where the mighty gunned their ill-gotten four-wheelers and attained speeds of ecstasy that Lahore's Canal planners now lust for. Wags in Lahore say that since the new capital of Punjab is Gujrat and all roads must lead to our local Rome, the Canal must be widened, powdered, painted and dressed up so that the powerful can be on the motorway in no time at all, as and when they are not choppering out. Wags go further to say that the way the Canal is receiving all the attention, it could just as well be the new highway to link us with India. Pakistan is a fickle country and fortunes change in shocking haste. The castles of impregnable walls come down faster than a house of cards, the courtiers trample one another in their haste to distance themselves from their falling masters and switching loyalties with the next bunch of desperados who are arriving to take over the spoils, is but child's play for them.

The sad truth is that there is no need to touch the Canal or widen it or chop down even a single tree and not the 914, which are tragically marked for slaughter. Can one plead with General Musharraf for clemency in Lahore and elsewhere? We are slitting our own throats. Happily. Lahore, like any other city, suffers not from lack of roads but a lack of law-enforcement. The traffic cannot flow because the average Lahori has still not figured out how to use two lanes, not to mention five that Tepa, Teva, CDG, ABC, XYZ and 123 are dreaming about. Widening roads, as any ass will tell you, only widens the chaos. The day Lahore police is given the power -- withheld for reasons that are too mystifying and fall in the purview of the occult sciences, to enforce the excellent traffic rules and regulations we have, without fear or favour, the traffic here will improve as if God had indeed created a miracle. There are thousands of cars on the roads in a country where policies are so strangely devised that were they to be put together as fiction, they could go on to become best-sellers. More and more imports are flooding the market. Banks are beating a path to your door begging you to buy a car -- any car while oil prices dramatically head for the magical century mark. Instead of investing whatever little money the government has on a really modern and decent public transport network of trains and buses, the need for which has been staring us in the face for years, they are all driven insane by any scheme that borders on lunacy. The trees will be felled not just in Lahore but elsewhere too -- even the green belts will not be spared and all of Lahore will become a great concrete jungle of burning asphalt and super-heated air, just as its new plaza-infected masters desire. The fate of other cities has also been determined and no amount of arguing is going to make an iota of difference today or tomorrow.

The writer is a Lahore-based columnist. Email: masood_news@yahoo.com

Cheers <img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='cheers.gif' />

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