Capitalism: A deal with the devil
It has been the greatest success story in the history of mankind. It has fuelled unprecedented economic, social and cultural growth, alleviated millions of people around the world from poverty and economic hardship, and ushered in a new era of technological innovation. However, while none of the political bigwigs and the so-called pariahs of the system care to admit, capitalism has created just about every problem in our world and the majority of its seven billion plus people face daily. It can be argued that terrorism global financial crises, famines, droughts and environmental changes are all the byproducts of the relentless need ...
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Our poisoned education: Shia clothes and Sunni textbooks
When I was studying at university, during a discussion over an economic issue, my professor (a PhD) uttered these words: “Alhamdulillah, I am a Sunni, I am a Muslim.” These words took me and many other students by surprise. The bizarre logic of uttering those unnecessary words in the midst of a discussion, especially when the class comprised of students from diverse religious backgrounds, was unfathomable. Even if she considered it essential to make a reference to the Islamic economic system, she could have easily done that in a mild tone without boasting about her own religious and sectarian affiliations wrapped ...
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Where criminals are secure, and innocents die
Once lucky, twice confident, thrice dead, goes the saying, and more often than not, it does play out that way. Unfortunately, as far as Rana Sarwat is concerned, somebody else did the dying. The convicted kidnapper and under-trial murder accused managed to evade death for the third time in the face of James Bond/Ethan Hunt-inspired assassins, only for two innocent women, the mother and sister of the cabinet secretary, to lose their lives in a hail of gunfire as a pair of gunmen entered the supposedly secure VIP ward of Pims and managed to leave after the incident without any ...
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A Pakistani Spring is not enough
The Arab Spring has captured the imagination of young people around the world with a powerful message about people taking control of their own destiny. In Pakistan, the spirit of the Arab Spring is playing out to a different tune. Instead of adopting “overthrow of the system” as their battle cry ala the Arab Spring, a visible and growing number of young, educated professionals in Pakistan are channeling their energies to incrementally improve the system by engaging with the current set up. Young Pakistanis, including many who have traveled to the West to get educated, are returning home to make active contributions ...
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Paying taxes shouldn’t be this hard
Since my BBA program finished, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home. Taking advantage of the situation, my dad asked me to go and pay the car tax a few days ago. Attempt # 1 Still in vacation mode, I dragged myself to the nearest National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) tax-payable branch at 12:45pm. Here, I was welcomed by a long line out in the sun. I was to be number 12 in the line. Not having much planned for the day, I waited for my turn admiring a stray cat that seemed to be in heat as it ...
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Choices to make: Is cheating ever okay?
A friend spoke with me recently about a dilemma. His brother had gotten in touch and asked for a favour, or rather, had given him a directive. Do this or else… The issue was that my friend’s nephew will soon be sitting the Intermediate exams. My friend’s brother wanted my friend to pull some strings and speak to the teacher who would be taking his viva in the sciences to allow his son to be evaluated ‘fairly’. Apparently, this is the ‘only’ way to get better marks. According to my friend’s brother, regardless of their answers most students are given mediocre ...
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Functional cities need mass transit
Much has been said and written about lack of predictable and efficient public transport system in Pakistan’s major cities – to no avail. Former mayor of Karachi, Mustafa Kamal, who built a swirling network of flyovers and signal-free corridors during his four-year tenure, was smarter than that to realise, and voice, that adding more roads was only a short-term solution. True unclogging of our major cities’ blocked arteries would happen when you remove a significant number of vehicles from the road, which is only possible when you provide commuters with a viable public transport option. But the argument for a mass ...
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De-meriting the merit system
Pakistan is notorious for multiple reasons – ranging from terrorism to illiteracy and poverty. Recently, however, I feel that our merit system has seen a bit of a downturn. It seems that in the professional world, it’s all about who you know, not what you know. And for fresh graduates like myself, that is indeed quite demotivating. My friends and acquaintances will start with the: “my dad knows the head of HR at company XYZ so I’m going to be starting there from next month.” And i’ll wonder what relevance a social sciences degree will have in the finance department. Aah, ...
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Are you an ‘educated’ predator?
Education – slick, elite, expensive education – for which, I attend classes, take exams and tap a phenomenal fraction of my parent’s hard-earned money. Education – there is no word so grotesquely misunderstood. No idea so ill-expressed. Little does anyone realise that the mad rat-race to score better grades does not ‘educate.’ On the contrary, the cut-throat dynamics of the relative grading system merely give us a taste of the usual rat-racing, throat-cutting, leg-pulling and back-stabbing competition that the corporate culture is characteristic of. Relative grading gives you the grade, but it ingrains in you the idea that your success is tied ...
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The futility of justice: Was the movement in vain?
The lawyers’ movement that began three years ago was supposed to restore justice and fairness to the Pakistani judicial system with the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been so unceremoniously dumped from his position by then president, General Pervez Musharraf. But, while Chaudhry returned to his former office, justice it seems got lost somewhere along the way. After nine torturous years, Mukhtaran Mai, who was gang raped and assaulted on the orders of the village council of where she lived, witnessed five of the six accused freed by the Supreme Court (SC). A desperate end to a harrowing ...
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