Desire against desire

There are so many desires within me that it is almost impossible to work out the way out of them; the desire to see equity and improvement in the living conditions of every Pakistani. And yet the desire seems to be impossible to achieve. The deaths in Thar and the deaths in Peshawar speak volumes of my pain. I had seen the fall of East Pakistan and I had seen the carnage that is humanly impossible to justify. I am not looking for blame. We should shun this aspect but that is only possible when the political leadership transcends itself. When liberalism takes hold and selfish interests do not take over we are petty people. Very early on I was introduced to Charles Reade the academic and here is one quote that I will never forget for he said: 'Sow and act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.'
To stage an act of war against evil we have to work and reason long hours and get our academics to wage that war. They have to sow a character in order that we may reap a destiny. It is a battle for our destiny that we are fighting. So the weapon is ultimately education of quality. That is where characters are made and sent forth to fight evil. We have to fight evil that is extrinsic as well as intrinsic to us. And that is done through books. And what of the book trade? Is it blooming? It has stagnated for many years. This world is not made by us and yet we take what it gives us. The desires are converted into undesirable situations that we partake. We trivialise what we have to absorb and what we have to negate. One is unconscious and the other is part of our being conscious. We see it daily on TV and I almost wonder at the naivety of the panellists-thinking that they got it all right. If Dicey [the jurisprudence expert from UK] had been here his very famous dictum would have emerged-'your rights end where your nose ends'. Introspectively I find no core reasons and externally I am surrounded by acidic influences that threaten not only me but by their multiplicities affect the entire nation. The situation is explosive. There are no experts that can handle the existing decline.
We may form committees after committees but the end result is the same. Someone has to consider the deeper decline in our society. Our inability [s] to handle the concepts that lead us to an unacceptable situation have not been on any agenda. The use of force cannot solve it; the use of power can stifle it for a time span but it will emerge again. The new generation will come with a renewed vigour. The route to conformism is lost and we are responsible for all this by our intransigence behaviour; here, everything extrinsic to us is considered rubbish and not worth discussing. The days of protest will remain ingrained in human memory not because it was a protest worth doing but that it allowed freedom to do that had not been allowed by our parents. The end result was what had to be expected. The parents started coming with their children. They got sucked in. The rule is now set. Every once in a while this protest will come forward.
The state [not the government] is a parent to all citizens. That means that a government has to feel for the state. It is part of the governance factor and it is to be honoured by all. If so, what is every Pakistani supposed to do to alleviate the issues emanating to citizens of Pakistan in Thar? They are ours first and foremost. Yet there are deaths recorded and reported on a daily basis. Nothing will be done as the ability to imagination forbids. The French revolution led to three slogans 'Liberty, equality and fraternity'. We had ours but their sequence has changed and who authorised those changes no one knows. We were on Unity, faith and disciplines emphasising that our leaders considered important. France changed but the French kept on having revolutions of sorts all the time. Had we taken matters as seriously as the other nations have done may be just maybe the end result may have been different.
But there is another kind of loss and that has developed over our dependence on others. The fetish that money can solve all our problems has led us in to the lap of the IMF and the World Bank. Money in the hands of the prodigals will be misallocated for projects other than required by the common fraternity. 'Fraternity is no empty slogan. It is a living concept. In my number of visits to the farming community there the offices of the federation of farmers is on Champse Elysees where the French have their governance offices and one of the most coveted places in France. The President of the Farmer federation has his on pane and when I met him that evening he was flying to the UK for a meeting with the PM there.
Where and what are the lessons for Pakistan? An independent will, a will that listens to the calls of the poorest and takes steps to alleviate the issues that they suffer. Can Thar be worked out? Yes it can. Can the government think out of the box? Are we suffering because of corruption? That is another debate. Do we have Caesar's wife around (known for piety and honesty). Pakistan needs no eunuchs in governance? Neither does it want Hitlerian ways of doing things. Imagination is the elder brother of discretion. Both are missing. We have violated all the rules of jurisprudence-justinian or Mohammadan; and we stutter around as the last word in wisdom. Everything is placed in the way of performance. One is looking at some lone voices that are sane or are we sentimental about loyalty and unwelcome praise for those that do not deserve it? Hangers-on will always be there. These are the carrions that live on the left overs that the lions have left of their prey. Jackals all. Savvy!!!