| January 13, 2003 | Monday | Ziqa'ad 9, 1423 |
Gone berserk with his ‘proud’ achievements!
Underground electricity system proposed
Of politics and sport
Needed some serious thinking
Let’s hear it for the Nazim
We all feel outraged at the way the US administration is treating Pakistanis settled in America. But then let me play the devil’s advocate. What had happened on 9/11 was unprecedented in terms of human tragedy and in terms of loss of face of the mighty US. It stood there with all its might, atom bombs, daisy-cutters, stealth bombers and all, as some two scores of persons turned five harmless looking passenger planes into deadly weapons. And impotently the mighty US watched its pride mauled as never before. Some 3000 of its citizens turned into ashes in a matter of minutes. It could not do anything to save them. The enemy was faceless. That was, perhaps, even more maddening. The fact that the attack went off in the heart of the US undetected by the world’s most well informed and most sophisticated intelligence network was itself infuriating enough. Add to this the fact that the mighty US did not know where to hit back to avenge the humiliation. And the attack was so innovative that no conventional or non-conventional defence systems seem to possess the capability to help avert a repeat. The US administration was so dumbfounded that while the persons identified as the planners and executioners were clearly Arabs, the consequent blind fury caused it to pick on the poor, destitute Afghans. The saturation bombing that was wreaked on Afghanistan was as unprecedented as the 9/11 tragedy. But Osama bin Laden and Mulla Omar identified as the brain behind the 9/11 attack escaped. We must be thankful to the US for not attacking Pakistan with its daisy-cutters as we were the only publicly declared friends of the Taliban until 9/11. In fact immediately before 9/11 we were going around the world selling the Taliban. The US could have used the daisy-cutters against us on the suspicion that Osama and Omar had fled to Pakistan. But they did not. And for that too we must be thankful to the US. We did not do any favour to the US by joining its war on terrorism. We were paid for the job. And we are still being paid for our services on this front. There is nothing wrong in getting a price for your services. It is nothing demeaning. Only fools offer their services free in this world where there are no free lunches. What is demeaning, however, is to get paid for a particular job and then demand an extra for the same. That is what we are doing when we ask the US not to subject Pakistanis settled in the US to the infamous INS because we are on their side in their war against terrorism.
Why should we live and that too illegally in a country which does not want us? This is demeaning. And it is demeaning as well for our Ambassador in Washington, our Foreign Minister and our President to request the US administration to let our people live illegally in that country when the host country does not feel safe with their presence there. Clearly, the US administration has not yet identified beyond all doubts the culprit behind 9/11. So, it is engaged in a long drawn and tedious exercise of eliminating the innocents through a process. If the Pakistanis or for that matter the Muslims at large living in the US feel that they were being subjected to uncalled for humiliation and harassment through this process, they should also put themselves in the shoes of the Americans and try to understand the reasons why a nation which had styled itself as the world champion of individual freedom and liberty all these years has found it necessary to abandon these values all of a sudden.
Nobody in the world likes what the US is doing trying to get back at those who planned and executed 9/11. The Muslims like it the least bit because it is the Muslims inside and outside America that are being persecuted by the US. And the Arabs, perhaps, like it even less because the focus of the US today is on the Arabs, now that Osama and Omar have vanished into thin air. Look what the US is trying to do to Iraq despite the fact that so far no evidence has been found that Saddam has developed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This attitude, too, is directly linked to the continued impotency that the world’s sole superpower feels in the face of the elusive and faceless enemy that brought it to its feet on 9/11. The way the US has been acting since that September it appears as if it has made up its mind to first cleanse its land of all Muslims, including Pakistanis, and then redraw the Middle East map giving Israel the whip hand in the region and finally render the Muslim countries no matter where they are located totally incapable of even upholding their sovereignty. What can the Muslim countries do to avert such an eventuality? Well, as of today our fate appears to have been signed and sealed by the Americans. It is time, therefore, for prayers. All those mighty Muslim kings and military and civilian dictators, who have been having the best of both worlds because of the support they had been getting from the US all these years, appear now to be on the verge of being snuffed out by their friends in Washington. Would not that be good for the Muslim Ummat! Meanwhile, Pakistanis settled in the US should start planning about their future. Their best bet is to spread their risks. Do not any more put all your eggs in the US basket. Bring some of these eggs back to Pakistan and invest here. Bring as well some of the values you have learnt in that great country — the values of democracy, freedom and liberty. Out of this INS predicament there could, perhaps, emerge a new dawn for Pakistan — a dawn of political and economic sovereignty. This is not say that one does not sympathize with the dilemma of those Pakistanis who have been contributing to the prosperity of that country in their own small and big ways and are now faced with sudden extradition. Their pain cannot be understood by people who have remained homebound. But then let us face the tragedy with equanimity rather than with comparable lunacy.—Onlooker
To some, the Homo Sapien may simply seem to have gone berserk with his “proud” achievements in science and technology.
And Ravish Nadeem has written a good poem (read at the meeting of Halqa-i-Arbab-i-Zauq meeting in Islamabad on Saturday, a kind of a Jawab-i-Shikwa to the inflated ego of man who thinks that by having formulae for atom bombs and cloning in his pocket he can challenge God; the one with whom he was supplicating to be spared of the fury of floods and windstorms. The poem questions the thinking of the modern man, who may at best try to give the image God as resting in the heavens; away from a complicated, gigantic world of man:
Takai bhar ka yeah insan kiya samajhta hai
Khuda hona koi assan ha kiya (What does this worthless man thinks? Is to be God all that easy). Apart from the subject dealt with, there is a lyrical quality about the poem. (Tariq Usman, who presided over the meeting, read a couplet too, as it were, to explain it all:
Khuda kay bab mein yeah ghor kiya hai
Khuda kiya hai Khuda hai aur kiya hai. (What is this deliberation over what is God. What is God. God is God. That’s all.) Some participants called it a poem, T.S. Eliot- like, written in modern sensibility.
The short story, Do hazar Saal Baad (Two millenniums after) by Irfan Ahmad Urfi seemed to be carrying the psychological probing into the nature of relationships in the aftermath of the tragedy of the Twin Towers. The narrator, who enters late in the story has been presented with a labyrinth of underground railway lines of the most populous city of the world where now he only sees derbies. There are posters with announcements for finding out the dear and near ones, poster of a (white) doctor or nurse with her two coloured children; a mother of countless patients from every race, clime and religion. She was seen here, half an hour before the tragedy, but has not been found since. There were announcements of the beloved lost who had left for office and was no more to be found. There are those who have been lost in the stillness of the photographs, and those standing in front of these seemed to have turned into a stony silence. Everyone on the platform does not seem to carry his face, but the debris. The narrator finds an announcement about a missing young boy by her mother and tells us that he had seen this boy sleeping on the last seat of a car of the last train from the last station. He goes in search of the boy in various trains and ultimately thinks that he has found a face resembling him.
He wants to ring up the mother of the boy, but doesn’t have proper coins, neither do people around him. He wants to tell the security person about it but then, in a moment of hesitation, decides not to tell him about the boy because he now thinks may be interrogated for telling about all such persons lost. Some thought that it was a powerfully written story which in the description of the aftermath of the attack on Twin Towers in New York not only brought out the impact of the event but also raised some other important questions. One gentleman thought that it was an exercise to show that states from the third world, “states which get may get wheat, missiles and guns from the super-power share their great tragedy, like a clerk in the Secretariat in Islamabad may attend the funeral of the mother of some boss whom he doesn’t know, because he works under her son. Questions like East is East and West is West and that the twain shall never meet by that “colonialist in thought” Rudyard Kipling were also discussed. Some felt the story to be rather too long.
All said ,it was a neatly-written narrative and fully brought out the impact of the tragedy and the resulting helplessness of the event.
A ghazal by Fayyaz Mahmood Qureshi was thought to be so full of abstraction that some thought it defied understanding. Ms Qureshi’s was the lonely voice which defended the poem and also paraphrased one of the couplets.
Huddled together in the Writers House of the Academy of Letters, the literary “buffs” seem to defying a biting cold January night of Islamabad. Those who took part in the discussion included Ali Akbar Abbas, Asghar Abid, Jaleel Aali, Waheed Rana, Rawish Nadeem, Mr. and Mrs. Fayaz Qureshi, Irfan Ahmad Urfi and a number of others.— Mufti Jamiluddin Ahmad.
MEMBERS of the Sialkot Chamber Of Commerce and Industry have shown interest in Wapda chairman’s offer of introducing the underground electricity system in the city on 50 per cent partnership basis with the Gujranwala Electric Company.
Lt-Gen Zulfiqar Ali (retired), during his visit here on Wednesday last, motivated the business community to introduce the underground electricity system in collaboration with Gepco for better provision of electricity to domestic, commercial and industrial consumers.
He said the Sialkot city was in dire need of an underground electricity system. He said connections would now be given to Sialkot’s industrialists and exporters within 15 days.
He said Wapda was ready to reduce the cost of electricity to Re1 per unit if the government cut the prices of oil and gas.
The chairman said Wapda was considering different options to charge low rates from industrialists and exporters for higher consumption of electricity in factories during some specified timings, besides motivating the industrial, commercial and domestic consumers to use more electricity, which was a parameter to measure the standard of living in a country.
He assured the business community that efforts would be made to reduce industrial tariff to make the local industry competitive in the international market.
MORE than 216 people were murdered in the district in separate incidents during 2002. The district police traced some 188 murder cases and registered 314 cases of attempt of murder, out of which 260 cases were traced.
According to the annual report sent to the Punjab IG police by the Sialkot DPO, the police registered nine cases of kidnapping for ransom, 55 cases of rape and three cases of gang rape, out of which the police claimed to have traced 48 cases.
THE district government has allocated a special grant of Rs44.5 million for the construction of hostels and classrooms in four government colleges for women.
An amount of Rs17.9 million will be spent on the construction of a hostel for 200 girl students in the Government Post-Graduate College for Women, Sialkot, Rs4.4 million on five classrooms in the Government College for Women, Hajipura, and Rs22.2 million on the construction of a new block comprising 15 classrooms in the Government College for Women, Daska.
THERE are reports from Colombo that the Sri Lankan Supreme Court has upheld an appeal by former cricket captain Arjun Ranatunga, now a member of parliament that a law which, when put on the statute book barring politicians from holding office in sports organizations, is a violation of his fundamental rights.
It is said that Ranatunga thinks that the proposed law is meant to prevent him from heading the Sri Lankan board of control for cricket in his country.
This is not such a good decision, is it? I mean that if a former captain-turned politician can head the cricket board of his country, it is all but certain that politics will be dragged into sport or, if you prefer, sport will be dragged into politics.
There is big money in cricket these days and if a politician is put in charge to manage that money, you may be reasonably certain where most of it will go. Ranatunga is no angel and all of us can yield to temptation. No, no, no! I think sports organizations should be headed by senior sportsmen. We must keep sports clean of politics, not matter what the Sri Lankan supreme court thinks of the issue.
What says our own Imran Khan in the matter?
You must have read in the papers the other day that the Allied Bank Ltd (ABL) had beaten Dadu by an innings and 425 runs. According to the Dawn sports reporter in Karachi, this was the third heaviest defeat in the history of cricket in this country. The biggest margin was by an innings and 810 runs when the Railways beat D.I. Khan in Lahore in 1964-65. The second highest margin was by an innings and 575 runs when Karachi beat Bahawalpur in Karachi in 1973-74.
The Dawn sports reporter added that by inducting team as weak as Dadu, The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) was not doing any favour to either the beleaguered team or to the game in this country.
I quite agree with him. But what, then, is the solution? Perhaps we could relegate weaker teams to lower divisions such as ‘B’, ‘C’, etc., to keep well-matched sides in competition against one another. However, the ultimate to be said in the matter is that it is dangerous to put a general in charge of the game for any length of time and then hope for miracles. The PCB boss Gen Tauqir Zia should now quit and give cricket a chance. Enough is enough. No?
Here’s a prediction. Pakistan don’t have a hope in hell. We can forget about the World Cup scheduled for South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe next month. We don’t play cricket with swagger sticks, do we?
Dawn (Sunday) reported US secretary of state Colin Powell as saying that his country “reserves the right, in the absence of international action, to disarm Iraq, to act with like-minded nations to disarm Iraq.”
Very true. The US has every right in the world but no obligations. But the question here is: is there a country in the world which can reserve the right to disarm the United States?
Or can it act with ‘like-minded’ nations to achieve its objective? I want to disarm the US. But can I? Well, all right. Laugh in my face.
TIES with Japan deep rooted: President, said a Dawn headline on Sunday. How deep can deep be? One rule of the thumb is: always measure the depth of the roots of your ties with Japan. It always pays even if the law in operation is that which governs diminishing returns.
ANOTHER headline (same paper, same date). “Party stands for poverty elimination: (Shujaat Husain of Gujrat)”. Poverty elimination? If that’s the case, the party may be over sooner than you think. Other infinitely more powerful people have stood for the same objective.
I HAVE been giving you excerpts from The Statesman: an Anthology (1875-1975). Here are a few more. On October 31, 1900, the paper wrote:
Friederich Maximillian Muller, whose death is announced and who was so commonly known as “Max Muller,” that in 1850 he formally adopted that as his surname, was born at Dessau, the capital of the German principality of that name, on December 6th 1823. At the age of 21 he published his first work, a translation into German of “The Hitopaedesa,” a collection of Sanskrit fables.
VICTORIA R.I 1837-1901.
On January 23, 1901, the paper wrote:
Queen Victoria is dead. Her sceptre has passed to another, and Albert I (or Edward VII) sits on the same throne as his illustrious ancestors. The English nation acclaims a king, and the greatest Queen in modern history is now but a name. Measured by intellectual tests, the Queen’s reign may be described as the Golden Age of English History. In historical literature we had Macauly and Carlyle and Froude, in a fiction a Thackeray and a Dickens; while a reign in which Wordsworth died and Tennyson and Swinburne wrote must rank high in any history of English poetry. What other period of English history, again has beheld such fruitful discoveries in science, or such marvellous achievements in the applied arts? The last half century has witnessed scientific discoveries that have changed our conception of the universe more profoundly than the discoveries of Copernicus and of Newton and altered the ideas of men in their time. It has seen inventions which have brought the ends of the earth together, and, in abridging distance, have lengthened time by multiplying the events which can be crowded into it; an unexampled spread of education, and the popularisation if not the elevation, of literature and art. Turning again to the moral and material welfare of English people what do we find? That crime and poverty have decreased, that wages measured in coin, have risen from 50 to 100 per cent, while commodities have become cheaper, so that comforts which were at one time undreamed of by the workers of the land are now within the reach of all but the poorest classes. Similarly, in the sphere of foreign policy or home legislation, whatever mistakes may have been made, the record is one of progress in almost every direction.
IN this ever-expanding city, land is gold. Land-grabbing is a thriving business. The ‘Qabza’ groups had never had it so good as now. If not all, at least some police stations appear to have joined this business. That only strengthens the hands of the ‘Qabza’ mafia. As commerce, land-grabbing is not new. For centuries, this has been the favourite game of the big landlords in the countryside. In Karachi, however, this trade is relatively new.
Open-eyed citizens will have noted with increasing unease the proliferation in the number of mosques in this city. There was a time when this city was home to no more than 300,000 people. It was the cleanest city in south Asia. It had more than forty libraries. Today it is a city of about 13.5 million people with less than ten libraries, and has ten times more mosques than it needs.
This proliferation is not because we have become more pious and prayer-minded. It is only because mosques have become good business in a city with so many madressahs churning out graduates who are unable to make an honest living by doing an honest day’s work. They are fit only to become mosque muezzin.
So the city needs so many more mosques every year if these Taliban, graduating from these madressahs, are to be enabled to keep body and soul (?) together. First, a group of people start saying their prayers on a vacant plot of land. Then, they spread out a mat, collect a few ewers, ostensibly for ablution. This is the beginning. A signboard is then installed announcing the commencement of a mosque-building project — and soliciting donations for the faithful.
That is just how so many mosques have come to be, and for all we know, also to stay. Senior citizens in Karachi would recall that many years ago, the plot of land in front of the GPO in Saddar (now a bustling shopping centre) was vacant. Some people raised a structure and named it a mosque. It was a blatant piece of trespass.
H.S.Suhrawardy was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. He had little taste for brigandage. He ordered removal of such audacious trespass in the heart of the city. It was removed by state authority, though not without some momentary rumpus. Many years later, a similar state action dealt firmly with such trespass in Islamabad.
Islamabad is a planned city. The Islamabad Master Plan is a statute. Use and purpose of every inch of land is recorded and this record has the force of law. There are more open amenity plots of land in Islamabad than in any other city. This provided plenty of room for trespass.
Mosque building was easy. And those interested in this kind of commerce got cracking. The Islamabad CDA authorities didn’t have the guts to deal with this patently illegal activity. Some citizens consulted the senior teachers at the International Islamic University about the disciplines about building mosques.
These venerable teachers of the Islamic University maintained that in a community/society where the state undertook the obligation to provide mosque, no individual or association or organization could build a mosque. Where the state did not undertake this obligation, a community of Muslims could build a mosque but it would belong to community as a whole. The community as a whole would administer it.
First of all, the community has to ensure that it acquired the land and location in an absolutely clean, upright, above- board and transparently clear manner. The community must be convinced that the title to the land on which the mosque is proposed to be raised is hundred per cent legal and seen by the community to be so. Then, the community must earnestly and voluntarily participate in the process of building the mosque.
They also maintained that for any service considered to be religious service, there is to be no remuneration. A religious service is service to the Almighty and hence has to be voluntary and honorary. It is its own reward. Period. Since every mosque is primarily and ultimately the ‘House of God,’ it cannot be assigned any name denoting any association with any particular sect.
Once these fundamental disciplines regarding building and maintenance of mosques are accepted, it would appear that so many of the mosques in Karachi are in breach of one or more of these prescribed principles. Many a mosque in Karachi would be seen to be sporting a definite name that signifies association with a definite and identifiable sectarian entity.
Building a mosque is not quite like raising a public utility structure like a shopping plaza. It is the ‘House of God’ — hence building and maintaining it is a supremely sacred act. This sanctity demands that mosque-building should not be a commercial or profit-making enterprise in any sense of term ‘profit.’ No service related to the functions of the mosque should carry any pecuniary return, remuneration or reward. As noted earlier, mosque service is reward in itself.
While we hear so much of loose talk about our religion and its commandments, there is almost total absence of serious-minded thinking on the subject. Many thinking citizens seem to believe that the graduates produced by most, if not all, the present madressahs are ill-equipped to fulfil this need for rational thinking. This fact only emphasizes the need for rational thinking.
The city’s Nazim, Naimatullah Khan, in his infinite wisdom recently told a Lahore-based newspaper that his administration intends to require all female students in its schools and colleges to cover their heads. He has also said all vans carrying such students will be told not to play music.
To make this issue not so controversial, he said, he would talk to other parties, including non-governmental organizations, and take their views on the head-covering issue. The Karachi city administration has around 500 schools and roughly 40 per cent of these are for girls and it seems that if passed Mr Khan’s order would apply to several thousand students enrolled in them.
Actually, one has said so much about such matters — that is, forcing one’s view of faith down just about everyone else’s throats — but obviously it doesn’t make an iota of a difference on people like the Nazim. He used to the Jamaat-i-Islami’s city chief before he took up his present job. He inherited a massive city beset with equally massive problems. There is terrible traffic, the law and order is always shaky and fragile, millions of its residents live in shanties with no drinking water and no proper sanitation. It has an ageing road network, with roads dug up every now and then on the whims of various local government agencies. It has tons of solid waste generated every day but only 40 per cent is collected, and it has a tanker mafia which ensures that though you pay water tax you will never get a drop from the main pipeline.
These are just the main or basic problems. And while it would be unfair to say that nothing has been done in the city, whatever has been done is clearly not enough. So, the last thing we all need is politicians telling school girls — that too in only the government schools — that they must cover their heads when they go to school. In any case, that’s not even an issue for most such students, if someone on the Nazim’s staff had bothered to check, because most female students in government schools and colleges normally do cover their heads.
In any case, why should the women always be told to cover themselves up? I mean the reason that they are supposed to do that is to dress modestly and so that they can be ‘protected’ from the eyes of leering men. Well, for a change why can’t the men be asked to lower their gaze and act civil around woman? Perhaps, that’s asking a bit much. In fact, another example of this kind of thinking comes around every year during Eid when the city government bans all woman from entering the zoo. The reason for this decision is that the hordes of men who descend on the Karachi Zoological Gardens are too much for the zoo’s staff to handle and hence the safety and sanctity of the women visitors cannot be guaranteed. So, instead of banning the men, the government does just the opposite shooing away the women.
One hopes, that after consultations with other parties and with the NGOs the Nazim will realize that probably there are more important problems that the city’s residents are faced with than the odd girl going to a government school or college with no dupatta on her head. Perhaps, if the city government is so eager it can even deploy a special ‘dupatta police’ squad to ensure that all female heads are covered.
As for the ban on the music in the schools vans, that should apply also to vans that carry male students. Why should they have to suffer the agony of listening to cacophonous songs?
Emboldened by the MMA’s showing in the recent elections, some members of the fringe lot recently took it upon themselves to censor some outdoor advertising billboards — in the heart of Defence.
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving home past the Sultan Masjid signal at around 2 pm when I got stuck in a traffic jam. Now this is hardly the place where a traffic bottleneck occurs but because of the digging going on along Khayaban-i-Hafiz (for several weeks now, I might add) passing cars do slow down. In any case, as I crossed the signal I noticed a group of bearded men carrying a ladder intending to do something to the signal. I thought nothing of incident then but a few days later while stopped at the traffic signal I noticed that the advertisement, for a sweet, on top of the signal, featuring the svelte Zara Sheikh, had been blackened with paint.
Obviously, who else could have done this but that group of bearded men carrying the ladder. Just think of it. At two in the afternoon, a group of men carry a ladder across a major thoroughfare in Defence, partially block the road in the process causing a traffic jam, hoist the ladder, climb up, and take their time putting black paint on an advertising board, and no one does anything.
Most of the passing motorists and residents of this affluent neighbourhood must have thought nothing of what was going on. One wonders where were the DHA sleuths all this time, or even the mobile from the local police station to stop these self-styled guardians of morality? One would have thought that this could happen, say, in Hangu but in Defence. And not ironically, this happened right in the shadow of Sultan Masjid whose khateeb is known to be very hardline in his views, and according to those who have heard his sermons, a proud supporter of the JUI. In fact, in the recent Eid prayers he is reported to have prayed for all kafirs to become “langra aur loola”.
A Chinese woman and an angry young man have become familiar characters for those who regularly dial numbers with a ‘521’ prefix. In what is perhaps some groundbreaking advance in technology, recordings of these two illustrious figures have replaced the good old engaged tone in the Cantt. telephone exchange. Every time the line is busy, their recordings are activated — causing much mirth or annoyance to callers, depending on how sensitive they are.
The gentleman who speaks in Urdu seems to have had a very bad day when the recording was made. He grumbles his way irritably through the message, abruptly saying something like, “Maaf keejiye aap ka number iss waqt masroof hai”. Anyone listening to him could be forgiven for thinking that he is scolding you for daring to dial a number that is engaged. Given his tone, one almost expects him to say “Aur ab aap dafa ho jaen” after he concludes his message.
And then the Chinese woman takes over in what is meant to be English. Frankly, her message sounds like it has been originally written in Cantonese and then roughly translated to a version of English barely comprehensible west of Singapore. The first reaction is to think that you have mistakenly dialled your favourite takeaway joint rather than your phuppi in Frere Town. You are tempted to order an extra large portion of chicken chow mien. By the time she has finished lisping her way through the message. An odd couple if ever there was one, you will agree.
Surely, PTCL could have found someone with a politer disposition for the Urdu message and someone with a vaguely comprehensible accent for the English? Not many people in Karachi, you must admit, want to be treated brusquely or be given Chinese lessons when they ring up their friends and relatives.
Step into Bohri Bazaar and you should be prepared to indulge in a heavy bargaining session — a part of the ritual of shopping in Pakistan. However, a friend recently got more than he bargained for while looking for a dress for his wife.
Walking into the first shop he came across, he looked at a number of dresses on display with price tags of between 2,000 and 3,000 rupees. The jora he finally selected cost Rs 2,400 so he meekly decided to bargain, hoping that the shopkeeper would give it to him for 2,000. He was wrong. As soon as he asked for a reduction, the assistant desperately said “okay 1500.”
Barely recovering from the shock of hearing this drastic drop in price, he hesitated. The shopkeeper reacted by saying “ okay, okay 1,000.” This desperation to get rid of the dress at any price made the buyer suspicious so he began walking away. The shopkeeper began to chase him, shouting,” theek hai, you can have it for 800!”
Sheepishly returning to the shop, the friend paid up and wondered why the price dipped so precipitously in the space of three minutes. Is the retail trade suffering from such a huge post-Eid slump or was the dress actually worth 500?— By Karachian
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