“How do you define lame-duck?” “A duck, quack, quack, that has become lame. And perhaps it’s all those who hunt and thereby violate animal rights and…”
“What was the quack, quack, in aid of?”
“A duck goes quack, quack, doesn’t it!”
“That’s in English, not our native language.”
“I can’t think what a duck says in Urdu…wait let me go on the internet…it says qain qain…”
“I thought that was a crow?”
“A crow goes caw, caw in English but perhaps in Urdu it goes the duck route.”
“Enough of this silliness…”
“What silliness? I thought I was being extremely philosophical: see in English a duck and a crow make different sounds but in Urdu it’s all the same.”
“Wow I declare your statute as a philosopher equal to Jung, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche…anyway I was looking for synonyms for lame duck and one option that the internet threw at me was incompetent…”
“Nope not right, in the Land of the Pure incompetents have taken key decisions that have shaped the lives of our people well beyond their own lifetimes…”
“Indeed General Yahya comes to mind, Nawaz Sharif part I, 2 and 3 comes to mind of some, the Energy Ministry comes to mind of us all – the incumbents, the retired and those no longer alive, then there is the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Board of Revenue…”
“OK I get it anyway I would define a lame duck as someone with a limited tenure.”
“I don’t think that can apply to our politicians. I mean which of our civilian prime ministers has completed his or her term? There was of course Z A Bhutto who completed his first term and there are cases of a political party completing its tenure but not the prime minister…”
“Even the ever obedient Gilani ousted from power before the end of the term.”
“Excuse me but if you can refer to The Khan as a watch thief then surely you can refer to Gilani as the necklace thief, he kept the necklace of Erdogan’s wife without putting anything in the treasury and…”
“Look at the glass as half full: The Khan paid for everything he kept from the Toshakhana, irrespective of whether it was before, during or after the sale, but the necklace was never in the Toshakhana and so…””
“Both are innocent.”
“You are comparing apples with a grapefruit – one is the party leader while the other owes his all to his party leader.”
“There I agree with you.”
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022