| April 15, 2002 | Monday | Safar 1, 1423 |
His favourite turncoat
Towards a long, hot summer?
Jumping the queue
Children of a lesser god
EARLY indications seem to suggest that we are in for a long, hot summer. Indeed, summer here is long, anyway. How hot it can get has come to depend on the supply of electric power. Car-lifting has ceased to make any difference to the temperature. So, the KESC is helpfully sending out signals that are enough to occasion visions of a flaming ambience round the next bend.
KARACHI is the infamous city of lights where nights shine brighter than the day and the people are hearty and jovial. If you have ever been to Karachi, you must have observed a very common feature of our beautiful city of lights. It is not the tall, gleaming skyscrapers nor the smooth, sleek roads and bridges or lush green parks. No definitely not any of these but something else altogether. The various piles of trash and garbage accessorizing the many streets and residential areas of Karachi are the very first things a visitor to our city takes notice of.
WITHIN one week of launching his referendum campaign, President Gen Pervez Musharraf has completely demolished the facade of “good governance” with which he was taking this hapless nation on a ride for the last 30 months. To begin with, he has violated all the rules, regulations and traditions of his own institution by going to the general public in uniform and seeking their “yes” vote in the referendum. And by getting the corps commanders to accompany him in the public meetings he has violated a 50-year-old tradition of the armed forces to keep away from such gatherings when in uniform. In his first press conference after taking over he had promised that the only uniform which the nation would see in public during his tenure would be only his and his alone. This promise he has broken umpteen times in the last several months.
He has been accusing the previous governments of abusing power and misusing the taxpayers money and has even sent some of them to jail and barred many from contesting elections for committing such crimes. Now he is doing exactly the same. Misusing the taxpayers money and abusing elected members of local government to extend his personal power in the name of continuity. The Chief Election Commission (CEC) has been reportedly given Rs900 million for holding the referendum. And nobody knows from which budgetary allocation are the referendum related public meetings of President Musharraf being funded? By the time he would complete his country-wide campaign seeking a “yes” vote in the referendum he would have spent another Rs100 million of the taxpayers’ money. So, going by even the most conservative estimates Gen Musharraf’s referendum is going to cost the nation as much as Rs1000 million for which there is no specific allocation in the budget. We are already making do with tight budgets for want of resources. Development budgets, specially those related to poverty alleviation, have been reduced over the years to almost nothing. So, the immediate impact of the referendum would be felt by the society’s poorer sections, the very sections for improving whose lot Gen Musharraf wants to remain in power for five more years! Isn’t it ironic!! But perhaps he has his eyes on the $5 billion of foreign exchange dole which he has been claiming credit for accumulating in the last 30 years and which he wants to protect from the “plundering hands” of Benazir and Nawaz by keeping them out of power for all times to come!!
Musharraf’s referendum has also shown for what it is, his slogan of “empowering the masses”. Since he launched his referendum campaign on April 5, he has been exhorting all the elected members in the local governments to help him empower Musharraf!! Poor chaps, they were waiting since last August when the President installed the local governments for the much promised resources to commence their journey on the road to political, economic and social empowerment. Instead, they are now being asked by the respective governors to mobilize their constituents and spend their own money and efforts to help Musharraf win the referendum. By the time he completes his referendum campaign, all these so-called “apolitical” members of the local governments would have been completely politicized. This is exactly what the previous rulers have been accused of having done with the local governments. And Musharraf had claimed that he had introduced a brand new system of local government which nobody would be able to abuse to promote his or her personal political interests.
What has forced Musharraf to commit the very same political “sins” to eradicate which he wants to remain in power for the next five years? The short answer is: The King’s Party!! This Party seems to have totally disillusioned him. He has not allowed any one of the stalwarts of the King’s Party to share his referendum show. He is not even acknowledging the flags of all those political parties which participate in his public meetings. Seemingly he is snubbing them. Why is it so? Well, the idea of putting together a King’s Party was in fact the brainchild of the former ISI chief, Lt-Gen Mehmood Ahmad who, perhaps, had wanted to use it to promote the “national interests” as he saw them before 9/11 and not as Musharraf is seeing them after 9/11. With the ouster of Mehmood from ISI command the King’s Party seems to have become virtually a party of orphans. Quickly the steam went out of their sails and with the passage of time they seem to have turned into an unwanted political baggage for Musharraf as he found to his utter dismay that they had little or no ability to deliver for him the October 2002 elections without the religious parties including the extremist outfits helping them out on the streets as had been envisioned by Mehmood prior to 9/11. It was perhaps late February or early March that it finally dawned on Musharraf that he cannot take the risk of holding the elections with all his eggs in the basket of the King’s Party. That is when, perhaps, he was advised to hold a Zia-like referendum. That it was all done in great hurry without giving much thought to its adverse implications, side effects, its legality and its ability to achieve the objective is writ large all over the on-going exercise. Zia, despite the referendum, had his name mentioned in the Constitution as the president for five years. This constitutional clause saved him from offering himself as a candidate for the President’s office after the 1985 elections.
After the referendum it would once again dawn on Musharraf that he was back to square one and that he was as far away from achieving his objective as he was before the referendum. Then perhaps he would take the way Zia took and amend the Constitution accordingly. So in order to secure his continuity by the election time he would have committed one by one all those sins which he claimed he abhorred when he took over. But then as it happens in such cases the more he would try to strengthen his position, the more weaker he would become in his own eyes and that would lead him to the inevitable — postponement of election indefinitely!! There are perhaps many who would condone all these sins of Musharraf on the plea that the compulsions of transition leave him no other option. But then as long as he remains the COAS, no matter how many referendums he wins, no matter how many elections he sweeps, no matter which backdoor he uses to make himself the “constitutional” President, no “transition” would have taken place. The political power would continue to remain in the hands of the institution of the Army!! By April 5, Musharraf had destroyed every known and unknown alternative political leadership in this country. He has seen to it that no political leadership in the country worth its salt is left with any credibility. Since April 5, he is engaged in destroying himself with his own hands. And he seems bent upon taking down the credibility of his institution with his own. One shudders at the very thought of looking at the crystalball! —ONLOOKER
I AM a research scholar. When I heard that brother Tariq Aziz of Nilam Ghar fame had been at president Musharraf’s public meeting in Lahore on Tuesday, doing the same things he had done for president Zia and prime minister Nawaz Sharif, I thought I heard a bell somewhere. I remembered that someone had given it to Tariq but good many years ago. As one thing led to another, I eventually found out that friend Masood Hasan had written something about him soon after Ms Benazir Bhutto had become prime minister after the 1988 elections.
Now, I have known Masood Hasan for years and years. Masood is doubly dear to me because he is Khalid Hasan’s younger brother and by corollary, my younger brother, too, because all these years, Khalid has been friendlier than a friend and, as they say, a friend’s brother is your brother or there’s something wrong with you.
To keep it brief, I called Masood Hasan and he said yes, he had written something about Tariq Aziz but would I wait. The confirmation came a little later. Masood used to do a column for The Nation in those days and soon enough, I got a copy of his piece. It was titled, ‘My Favourite Turncoat’ and it had been written on February 10, 1989 — a bit more than thirteen years ago. Masood Hasan began by saying: “Last Thursday, I thought I was dreaming. I usually don’t dream on Thursdays as a rule....”
Well, as it happened, it was another Thursday I wrote these lines and I wasn’t dreaming, either. Usually, I have nightmares and it doesn’t have to be the dead of night for you to have a nightmare. Broad daylight nightmares (or should it be day mares?) are the best. But this is a digression. Let me come to the point.
Talking of Tariq’s performance during the Ziaul Haq years, Masood Hasan wrote:
“.... Tariq began to emerge as the voice of the regime.... but even this was without any real depth or substance. One evidence of this was the increasing number of questions about Islamic history (in his quiz show) asked from people who had no notion about anything anyway. It was the quality of questions that always disappointed even those who blindly and self-righteously claim to be singularly enlightened. The questions were so trivial and of such obscurity that the answers were not forthcoming and if they did, (they) added nothing to one’s knowledge. This charade was carried out under the garb of general knowledge, but it was clear to everyone that they were aimed at pleasing only one general. It was, therefore, no surprise to Pakistanis to learn that Gen Zia watched the programme avidly and derived his ‘general’ knowledge from it....”
I can only tell Masood Hasan that the embarrassment of those years still lives with me.
Masood Hasan’s last two lines in that piece were: “Come on, Tariq Aziz. Be really genuine for once”. Masood can go on making the request until the cows return home. But anyway, I’ve got to thank him for having written on his favourite turncoat long years ago. Tariq Aziz wasn’t very lucky in the end
Either for president Ziaul Haq or Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. For Gen Musharraf’s sake I do sincerely hope he won’t be lucky the third time around.
In the meantime, be prepared for the expected news headlines immediately after the April 30 referendum. One such headline was, “Victory Hailed” (Dawn, December 21, 1984). It may be recalled that the famous Zia referendum was held two days earlier. The story, datelines Islamabad, read as under:
“People representing various shades and sections of public opinion have congratulated General Ziaul Haq on his election as President for the next five years at the referendum.
Those who had congratulated Gen Zia included Mr Ghulam Dastgir Khan, then minister for labour and overseas employees, the Pir Sahib of Zakari Sharif and a minister in the NWFP cabinet, Dr Khalid Raza.
According to another report the same day, the Election Commission “expressed satisfaction that the December 19 referendum had been conducted in an honest, just and fair manner.”
Be prepared for similar news reports after the Musharraf referendum. (I have half a mind to write my congratulatory column well in advance).
The following lines from the Zia referendum story take the cake. Dawn reported:
“Prominent religious, social and cultural organizations in the country have decided to observe Friday, December 21, as a thanks giving day for the massive mandate the nation has given to president Gen Mohammad Ziaul Haq to continue with the process of Islamisation.” How do you like that?
You will remember that I had requested Dawn readers to let me know who was the poet the president had quoted from in his televised address to the nation. A friend from Islamabad rang to tell me that the president had quoted from Shakil Badayuni. The president had said:
Mera azm itna buland heh, ke parai sholon ka dar nahin
Mujhe Khauf aatish-i-gul se heh yeh Kahin chaman ko jala na dey.
My Islamabad friend told me that the ghazal had been sung by Begum Akhtar and he had quoted a few more lines:
Merey ham nafaz, merey ham nava, mujhe dost ban ke dagha na dey.
Mein hoon dard-i-ishq se jan-balab, mujhe Zindagi ki due na de
And the last two lines are:
Woh utthe hein leikey Khum-o-subu, arey aiey Shakil kahan heh tu
Tera jaam lainey ko bazm mein koi aur haath barrha na de
As I predicted not so long ago, the result of the referendum is a foregone conclusion. But don’t you think it would be infinitely more romantic if Gen Musharraf were to lose by the narrowest of margins, say, nine votes? That would usher in democracy as surely as Elizabeth Taylor is my grandma. Your response to this could be a languid ‘Aw shucks’ or a peremptory ‘fiddlesticks!’ But I would have said, ‘How’s that for laughs?’
HERE now are some quotes from some short stories by Somerset Maugham:
Appearance and reality: “... that haughty, Sullen and coldly indifferent demeanour that appears to be essential to the mannequin as she sails in with deliberate steps, turns around slowly and, with an air of contempt for the universe equalled only by the camel’s, sails out.”
Sanatorium: “There are people who say that suffering enables. It is not true. As a general rule, it makes men petty, quarrelsome and selfish....”
The Colonel’s Lady: “They began to talk over whisky and sparkler with which following the Easter habit, they celebrated the setting of the sun.”
“If some damned penny-a-liner had made fun of Evie’s effort in one of the papers.”
A Woman of fifty: “.... but he wears his poverty with great dignity.”
“... it was not stupid nonsense, mind you, it was intelligent and modern, but it was nonsense all the same.” (discussion on art).
“.... she wanted nothing but the security of the humdrum.”
The Happy Couple: “This is a civilised drink, Miss Gray. With your permission I will help myself. I never knew a woman yet who knew how to pour out a glass of wine. One should hold a woman by the waist but a bottle by the neck.”
The Kite: “They would compare their respective kites and boast of their accomplishments. Sometimes Herbert, a big boy of 16 now, would challenge another Kite-flyer. Then he would manoeuvre his kite to windward of the other fellow’s, allow his cord to drift against his, and by a sudden jerk bring the enemy kite down.”
“Mrs Sunbury’s face was brisk with malice.”
These menacing tidings are confirmed by the increasing frequency of unannounced cuts in power supply. Last Saturday, newspapers forecast “prolonged power shutdowns.” However, the Friday ordeal was not a Karachi exclusive. It was shared by power consumers all over Sindh and also Balochistan.
The national grid considered it expedient to ensure trouble-free supply of power to the cities the President was due to visit. That was fair enough. Our loss was the gain of some sister cities. No hard feelings. This was a passing affair and is already forgotten with an amiable smile.
It would be simply marvellous if that teasing string of power failure was a passing jolt. It is not really so. There is much in the situation to deepen the fear that, for all we know or wish for, a long hot summer remains a very likely horror in store.
Like so many other public utilities, power supply enterprises are riddled with financial problems. Deep down, most of them smell of scandals. At the core, all of them tell the same tale: greed for money. This greed is a kind of sickness, afflicting almost all state-(mis)managed outfits. What the National Accountability Bureau is grappling with is only the tip of the iceberg.
If the lowly man out in the streets picked up little crumbs, the bosses upstairs collected their cuts in millions. Quite a few in dollars, deposited in foreign banks. Where the big shots have soiled hands, those of lesser status are bound to contact stains. In many cases the honest ones cannot survive if they do not toe the tainted line from the top.
What ails the KESC is a trait that runs in the family of state-managed joints. It has uncleared debts, owed to many, notably its fuel suppliers. That’s one side of the KESC’s three-sided embarrassment. Oil suppliers and gas suppliers insist on payments on the threat of stopping supplies. If this threat is not warded off, the KESC would be in dire trouble.
On the second side, there is Wapda that has huge claims for power supplied and not paid for by the KESC. However, this is a relatively lighter of the pressures. Wapda is taking a lenient view, may be because there is a kinship between the two. Wapda is a sort of foster mother to the KESC and so disposed to be more kind than the distant cousins like the oil and gas suppliers.
Now to the third side of the KESC’s heartaches. Here this giant has to lick its self-inflicted gashes. Again, like all other similarly state-run juggernauts, the KESC has the tendency to lose money to its weighty and influential clients. Quite as all bad bank loans, the unpaid KESC bills, too, have some big shots on the other side of the counter. Most big bank defaulters are fat cats. The KESC’s defaulters are no mean worms.
How is the KESC going to shed these leeches to emerge into viability? Ordinarily, one would suggest that the KESC start collecting its dues from defaulting consumers and plug in-house leakage. This done, it would emerge into sunshine and will be able to stay there happily ever after.
This sounds so easy, so simple. Quite as felicitous was the decision of the wise mice to get rid of the cat menace. Bell the damned fat cat.
This is infinitely easier said than done. Were it so easy in the first place to make the big consumers pay for the power they guzzle, the KESC would never be in this deep red sea.
According to the bazaar buzz, there may be any number of big mansions that have the devices to pull a fast one on an apparently obliging KESC. Condoning the powerful their sins is integral to our reigning culture. In Karachi we have been having a special drive to check road traffic offences. Thousands have been given the ‘one-way ticket,’ so to say. How many among the punished are the Pajero nobility? Don’t we see their lordships ignoring the red signal, as if it were never invented?
Now we land where the egg-chicken conundrum stares at us. Who did this enigma of the KESC started with — its own top-ranking executives or the big non-paying consumers? Such troubles usually start within the family. If every decision-maker within the KESC were correct from the beginning, there would be no patrons holding a canopy over the bad customers, endlessly piling up huge arrears.
Please do not miss to note that among the easy-going customers, you have a parade of government outfits — from the local to provincial to federal! Eein khana hama aftab ast... (This house is all sunshine...)
I happened to be at the bank the other day. This is the one in Clifton next to Paradise, generally known for the long wait its customers often have to endure. Now a ticketing system has been installed. You don’t have to stand in line, just step up to this machine, press the red button and get a ticket with your number on it. A display board to your left tells you what number is currently being served and at what counter.
All fair and good, one would think. But no. At least twice it has happened with me that people who did not bother to take the required ticket went to the teller, with some sob story I presume, and managed to be served ahead of those waiting. This time, too, the same thing happened. This woman went to one of the counters and since my turn was just two numbers away — after having waited for fifteen minutes and slightly late for work — I stood behind her to hear just what she had to say. The teller heard her and proceeded to serve her at which point I had no choice but to ask him quite aggressively just what he thought he was doing.
“But, sir, this woman here told me that she is in a great hurry.” Hurry, indeed! So then what’s the point of having the ticket system since we are all in a hurry, I told him. Surely, the man didn’t think that we like to wait for hours and hours at our favourite bank.
To make matters worse, when I told him this, the teller quite sheepishly told me: “Well, if you are in a hurry I could serve you early too.” Clearly, he had missed the point.
Without trying to sound like a martyr here, I told him quite angrily that I didn’t mind waiting at all, as long as no one else without a ticket was not served. Despite this, the woman was served. A complaint was lodged with the manager, through one of the customer service staff, but probably nothing will come of it.
April has begun and so has the new academic year in Karachi’s matric schools. In many cases, they are devising ways to increase fees and explain to parents just why copies, journals and other stationery have to be bought from the school itself and not anywhere else.
“You see...sir,” the owner and principal of a school in North Karachi, told a father, “when the name of our school appears on the covers it adds to the school’s reputation. And you know how important that is for the school’s publicity.”
The father reminded the principal, a young man in his late 20s, that he (the father) was a bad target for the publicity since his children were already studying in the school.
Moneymaking aside, this colleague says, certain schools have done things like asking students in class seven to buy books meant for class nine. In one school where this happened, the father of a student went and asked the principal why buy books that won’t be needed for another year. And the principal told him that this way the child will have two years to prepare for the class nine exam.
It is surprising, he says, that the authorities concerned do not know what happens in Karachi in the name of education. Or perhaps they do, and let it all pass.
The venue was a hall in the heart of the city, and the occasion, Dr Mubarak Ali’s rare lecture on the interaction of religion with politics through history. Irtiqa had flown in the learned speaker from Lahore for its annual Dr Hamza Alavi Lecture, thus honouring two of Pakistan’s most brilliant living scholars, but by the powers that be. Dr Alavi also spoke on the occasion.
A colleague who went to the lecture found it so absorbing and refreshing that the event turned into a forum with many rising and asking questions to debate the issue at hand.
The hall was filled to capacity and extra chairs had to be arranged to seat a growing number of people. In the end, many youngsters just stood around the seating area and listened to the lecture. It was encouraging to see that the audience reflected a relatively larger cross-section of society: teachers, lawyers, students, scholars, journalists and trade union workers.
There were those who challenged some of the views expressed by Dr Mubarak Ali. Some even had rational counter-arguments, to which the scholar replied in kind. It was heartening to see that people had quite a bit of tolerance for the differences of opinion expressed that evening.
Books written by both Dr Mubarak Ali and Dr Hamza Alavi were available for sale in one corner of the hall. People thronged the stall all evening, and bought nearly the entire stock and published copies of the lecture. The event was yet another reminder of how many people and the establishment have continued to honour their own set of scholars and men of learning in the post-independence years.
Dr Mubarak Ali rightly commented: “History tells us it does not suit a dictator to honour a real scholar because the dictator knows that a true scholar will not lend legitimacy to his usurpation of people’s right to elect a leader of their choice. Therefore, a dictator creates scholars of his own choice, who would give him that legitimacy. Such scholars are then honoured by the dictator for having done his bidding.”
In Pakistan, our problem has remained a consistent one because we have had two kinds of dictators: those, who came to power through a military coup and those who were voted into power but became dictators over time. No wonder then, the officially honoured scholars in this country have by and large been men and women whom the people never truly respected.
Quality entertainment is rare in our city. Asked with reference to the programmes put on by other foreign cultural centres, the Goethe-Institut’s new director, Dr Marla Stukenberg, recently said at a press conference that what was important was quality not quantity. And according to a friend who went to one recent Goethe programme, she seems to have come good on her promise.
Incidentally, at that press conference some of the journalists seemed more interested in asking questions about food. They asked the director when the German food festival would take place place to which she said that she was there to talk about theatre and cultural events.
And as part of that, two theatre plays for children, produced and performed by the German drama company, ‘Theater Triebwerk’, were staged recently. The group consisted of three actors, one technician and a coordinator.
The group was performing in Pakistan for the first time. Their first performance, Moby Dick, was staged at the FTC Auditorium on April 6. Unfortunately, the date clashed with a concert and the show was not a full house as expected. Before the performance, Dr Stukenberg came on stage to welcome the audience. She hinted at some problems the Goethe-Institut had faced in making the play possible. But then she smiled and said, “in the end art won over bureaucracy”. Apparently, the institute had trouble acquiring the dreaded ‘no-objection certificate’ from the authorities concerned. It’s time that this ridiculous remnant of colonialism was given the treatment it deserves and done away with.
The second play was called A friend of Boltan the Lion. The friend said she found it a bit unconventional since the three actors performed all the roles. They would narrate the story and act out the scenes while simultaneously playing the music.
The result was quite excellent and the audience duly appreciated it, she said, despite the fact that one of the actors (who also played the sax), Erik Schaeffler, had a bad tummy and temperature. His fellow actor, Heino Sellhorn, was quite taken in by Karachi. So much so that he used his tape recorder to record the city’s sounds.— BY KARACHIAN
The beggars are the next things you come to notice about the metropolitan city. You may have been lucky enough to avoid walking into a pile of garbage but they are the ones you must have had the pleasure of meeting. It has often been wondered whether their number actually exceeds the insect population of our city. They hound the city, terrorizing the poor citizens into giving them something, anything.
However, the more seasoned of us have devised a common strategy to escape these two nuisances. Close your eyes, hold your breath and keep walking, fast.
We have developed such an ingrown habit of ignoring a pile of debris that we also tend to overlook the tiny figures carrying over-size jute bags over their shoulders, digging feverishly into the same stinking pile. The instinct of rudely discouraging a beggar has been ingrained so deeply in us that we end up doing the same to someone who’s knocking on your car window for a totally different reason.
Deep brown eyes brimming with innocence, hair the same colour as the eyes neatly combed with oil and a meek, shy voice urging you to buy a rose for your wife, beloved or even your mother. This is how one perceives of Nazir, a twelve-year-old boy who sells flowers on the streets of Karachi so that his family of five siblings and a crippled father can barely scrape together the basic necessities of life. His mother works in other people’s homes for a meagre income.
I came to know Nazir on one of my frequent trips to Tariq Road. The first time he knocked on my car window, I turned down his offer to buy a rose but offered him some money instead. Nazir, in his turn too, declined my proposal.
“I am not a beggar, baji,” he said simply and I was floored.
On our third meeting, I came to know about his family. Nazir told me with a proud glint in his eyes that his younger brothers were able to go to school because he was working along with his mother.
Faraz and Zohra, 14 and seven, respectively, go through the various piles of trash around the city, combing the reeking mounds for anything that would fetch them some money, even taking home the scrapes of food they can extract from the trash.
While I talked to Faraz, he kept holding his sister’s hand protectively. There was a cautious and weary look in his eyes saying that he didn’t trust anyone. He told me that he had a mother and two little sisters at home. His father had died in an accident at his workplace. The owners had paid only a meagre compensation and so Faraz had to give up school and take up two jobs to support his family. He was the man of the house now.
Gul Khan is a ten-year-old proud Pathan boy who hails from the mountains of the Swat valley. He sells newspapers in the morning and flower garlands in the evening on the streets of Clifton. As I talked to him, he kept smiling all the time while balancing his stick of garlands on his knees. He told me that he came from a family of 12 members; ten of them being his siblings and the remaining lot his parents. All his family members were working at different odd jobs except the two youngest ones. They too, however, would be soon joining their clan.
When I asked Gul Khan if he would like to go to school, he looked up at me with thathat same sweet smile and asked patiently, then where will we eat from, baji?” I felt like I was the child there and Gul Khan was the adult.
These are not the only children who have been forced to abandon their childhood from an early age and experience the harsh realities of life first hand. The streets of Karachi are teeming with such kids, each with his own sorrowful and heart wrenching story to tell. Yet there is one thing common among all these children. They have made the conscious choice of not taking the easy way out. They have chosen not to beg.
In case of Nazir, Faraz, Gul Khan and numerous other children in our country, the choices have not been as easy or simple as they should be for children everywhere. To have to choose between enjoying a normal childhood, maybe even going to school or working along their family in order to survive is not the end of story. A more subtle decision that remains under current and usually goes by unnoticed is also there. The question of how to earn this money is faced unanimously by all the Nazirs, Gul Khans and Faraz’s of our country.
Yet these children display an audacity and strength of character at a point where they could have just as easily opted for an easier and financially rewarding profession as beggars, which ironically many grownups seem to favour.
In most cases, one has to spare only a few rupees and a kind word. Even one of these two conditions fulfilled is enough to help a child enough not to shortsell his pride and self-respect.
As I said earlier, ours is a beautiful city despite its many shortcomings. We may have chosen to ignore them, but closing our eyes or burying our head in the sand is not going to make them disappear. It’s high time that we finally decide to view our surroundings with our eyes wide open. Maybe then we’ll be able to tell apart Faraz and Zohra from the stink of garbage and Nazir’s honest voice from a beggar’s nasal whine.