SPOTLIGHT: Will daily protests snowball into major rioting, civil disobedience or even widespread loot and plunder? - Options before four ordinary (desperate) Pakistanis!

Let us take a look at the lives of a few of our fellow countrymen who have fallen on desperate times for no fault of their own and groan under unbearable burdens due to poor governance and corruption in the country. Are they the only ones? By no means! They hypothetically represent a miserable life millions in the country are fated to endure today.
Asghar Khosa workshop owner in Punjab
Ahmed, about 40, ran a small workshop in Faisalabad. His was a success story in the neighbourhood. With no skills or education he managed to get a job as a lowly worker in a small workshop five years back. He made good use of the opportunity and was soon able to operate the machines in the workshop like other trained, experienced operators. He decided to strike out on his own, bought a second-hand lathe machine on instalments and after many difficult months, by honest hard work, was able to pay off the cost of his bread-earner machine and was in relative prosperity. He got married, had three children and started dreaming of giving them the education he had missed himself. Then it happened. The lifeline to his machine, the electric supply, began to fail daily for long periods from load shedding month after month. His earnings fell so drastically that he was not able to feed himself and his family. To save the family from starvation, he was forced to sell one by one all saleable items in the house and eventually the machine itself at a throw away price. He applied for work at the workshop where he had started work, but that workshop had also fallen on bad times and was not able to employ Asghar on more than one or two days a week. So Asghar and his family became destitute, ended up in a class described as "below the poverty line" and into its starvation tier. Rulers are unresponsive; neighbours cannot help being in the same boat, more or less. What would you advise Asghar to do?
Manzoor Khuhro farmer in Sindh
Manzoor is a subsistence farmer, ie with just enough land to be able to feed himself and his family. His three children would help him in the field or work on and off for more prosperous people in the neighbourhood for a little money to supplement their father's. Going to school was something other children did. In a "good" year (timely rains and a good harvest) he would perhaps buy a couple of goats and a brood of chickens to provide meat and a little extra money to buy another cot, repair his dilapidated shack here and there, maybe add another mud-walled room and so on.
In a "normal" year it would be just hand to mouth and none of the "luxuries" mentioned. In a "bad" year of poor rains it would be semi starvation with food cooked only the other day. Then came this particularly bad year when in place of the more common too little rain, there was too much of it when the sky opened up and the rivers in the area broke their banks and swept away his small crop and his mud-walled hut along with all his paltry belongings in one fell swoop, leaving only mud and water in an area for miles around.
The immediate question was that of survival. How to spend the day and the approaching night - shelterless, exposed to wind and rains, where to find food for the family especially the children, how to protect the family from snakes also rendered homeless by the floods, where to find clean water to drink, how to fight diseases caused by ingesting untreated flood water, the only kind available. How to endure the weeks and months ahead is the big question staring the family in the face. Talk of millions of dollars received from abroad to help sounds like voices from a distant world because little of it has found its way to where Manzoor and his family sit, without food, without shelter and what is most important, without hope.
What would you advise Manzoor to do?Nazir Ahmed shopkeeper
Nazir ran a small grocery shop located in a big market. He had been in this business for 20 years. His teenage son helped him with the daily chores especially those involving running around. Nazir was getting old and hoped to take much needed rest by going into semi-retirement after passing the main burden of running the shop to his son. But he was in trouble for some years now. Every few weeks gun-toting extortionists came around and deprived him of the day's income. The police was no help. The demands of the extortionists were growing in frequency. The shopkeepers in the area were in the same boat and decided one day not to give in to the extortionists' demands in a joint resolve. Accordingly Nazir refused to meet their demand when the extortionists next visited him. Two days later he was shot dead, his shop burnt down. There was no help or relief from any quarter. Here was Nazir's son then, no father, no shop and a sizable family of mother and three siblings to support and no capital with which to re-establish a shop from scratch and with rage and hate eating into his heart. What do you suppose he should do?
Ajmal Khan, vegetable seller
Ajmal's lucky day was when he had saved enough money to buy a lowly wheeled handcart on which to ply stock of vegetables around on the lanes of the big city and with what he could earn carry home flour, cooking oil and other stuff for the next day's meal for his family of five. Ajmal's luck arose from the fact that he would no longer have to pay rupees fifty everyday for a hired cart. That represented big saving and a notch up in the business! His eldest son Akram Khan was twelve and worked at a garage to supplement his father's income. The happy story did not last long because Ajmal was killed the very same day by a bullet said to have been fired in a case of targeted killing. That left Akram at a tender age himself to fend for himself and his family. The killer was never caught despite having been identified by witnesses to the murder. Authorities who had failed to provide security of life to his father also failed to provide him any relief. Akram is angry and desperate. Misery and anger, a potent combination, have made life no longer worth living in his young mind. The thought of his mother and young siblings keeps him from doing something desperate and awful. But for how long and where does he go from here?
Royal living style of high-ups
Could there be more something more hurtful than the ever ballooning crime ranging from the high corruption by the "high and mighty" of the land to the uncountable cases of petty crime? Yes, the royal expenditure on the persons of our high and mighty - The President, the PM, the army of (an unbelievable 96) ministers and numerous top bureaucrats. Some reported examples: President's and PM's foreign tours Rs 2 billion, PM's servants Rs 45 million, motor cars and conveyance Rs 24.6 million, gardens: Rs 14.3 million and so on to name some of the items of royal expenditure incurred by our elected leaders. No hope of getting help from that quarter! What options do people like Asghar, Manzoor, Nazir and Akram have? Give children into bondage? Abandon them on streets? Dump them in charitable homes if such places have any room left for more children? Kill them? Alternatively take to stealing or, getting more desperate, turn into dacoits and killers. When the number of such desperados grows, can looting and plunder be far off? Are we on the threshold of a period in which these angry, desperate, starving millions of the land would break into shops and stores, into houses of the affluent and into 5-star hotels to help themselves to whatever they can lay their hands on. Are we going to enter a period of anarchy? Take care before what appears improbable at this time, actually comes to pass.
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