think big…write small

Someone continuously needs to remind us of the basics to life. Some things so simple that forgetting these is an innocent’s mistake, not bringing these into conversations a perfectly normal gentleman’s convention.

I felt parched this morning, perhaps I forgot to drink water last night, an innocent mistake. On my way to kitchen I might stumble on the running news on tv.

The moment I was gulping water down my empty stomach… a youth in Punjab had just committed suicide on not being able to make ends meet, couldn’t support his family, he just hung himself from the electric wires on the road.

Water stuck in my throat. I felt each drop as solid as his charcoaled body being televised on tv.

He could have killed himself inside his house. He could have done it in front of his family. Perhaps he did not want to hurt his family with this view. He rather wanted us to see his last remains. He wanted to be visible for once in his life, perhaps in the end. He did not want us to gulp his death as liquid as we think it is.

Sun happens every day, so does night and so do these suicides. We don’t discuss sun, neither do we spend minutes on deaths like these, too basic to intervene, too weak to be solid.

Needless to say suicides like these are degrading to humanity, but still I would write about it. Poverty is the biggest enemy, not India not US. A friend commented yesterday that in the future, there would be no wars waged from outside, but there would only be civil wars. I don’t agree with him completely but yes our definition of peace is all messed up. It’s not peace when your citizens are killing themselves due to poverty.

Extracting info from Shahid Javaid Burki’s book… At time of independence some 60% of Pakistani population lived in absolute poverty. Ayub Khan’s regime reduced it to 40%. Bhutto left us with 39%. Zia was the one who yielded the most effective results in this regard by reducing it to 17% and in 1999 the figure was back to 36%.

What’s killing me is that the people who raised the slogans of ‘roti kapra and makan’ were the worst in reducing poverty!

I can fill a novel on this topic, but again you guys don’t need this. Its as basic as the ‘close button’ on the top right of this blog’s window. No one actually taught you this.

A basic view in burgeoning metropolitans