| April 05, 2007 | Thursday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 16, 1428 |
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Religious extremism
World Cup debacle
Woolmer investigation botched?
Top priority
Energy conservation – the only option
Missing coins
Bravo Pervaiz Elahi
‘We will shoot you …’
Inactive senators
Role of judiciary
Readers are requested to restrict their comments to a maximum of 400 words. We reserve the right to edit letters for reasons of clarity and space. Letters, including those by e-mail, should carry the complete postal address of the sender. The views expressed in these columns do not necessarily reflect the views of the newspaper.—Editor
THIS is a response to the letter entitled ‘Undermining Urdu’ (Dawn, March 21). I would like to start by saying that the book Urdu/Hindi Language: An Artificial Divide, tracks down the roots and the linguistics of Urdu/Hindi as one language.
In addition, if some how one is trying to imply that Dr Khan is undermining Urdu in his book because of his Indian background that is completely contrary to what the premise of the book is. However, the book is not trying to limit or assign Urdu to any indigenous region or ethnic group. Hindi and Urdu are complimentary to each other and due to this reason it was adopted by a large segment of the population as well as by the intellectual body of the subcontinent.
In reference to the letter, the writer may not be able to understand the Hindi words ‘Vishwa bharman’, ‘Shabdkosh’, or ‘sumvaad ki kalaa’, but likewise, we also do not understand the eloquent plays by Shakespeare when we read them in our schools and colleges of Pakistan. The issue is whether those who want to comprehend the matter are willing to keep an open mind rather than question the identity of the author or contributors.
In relation to Sarah Fazli’s efforts, it is due to her realisation after reading the book that she was able to convince her professor at John Hopkins to change the name of the course. Credit should be given to the young generation who are making significant changes rather than questioning their ethnic background.
I am proud to be a British-born Pakistani living in the United States, where no one has ever questioned my ethnicity. It does not matter what or which ethnic background one is from. We should be united and appreciate the fact that Dr Khan has produced a great resource for us regardless of being a Pakistani or Indian, and utilise it as a tool and resource to gain a better understanding of our language. We need to see that the book really conveys an important message with an open mind showing us where, when and how our language came into existence, instead of being prejudiced against the author’s ethnicity.
Overall, the book itself has been compiled to shift our thinking towards the acceptance of considering Urdu/Hindi as one language and not undermine any individuals or their ethnic background. Also, the book gives credit to all Muslim and Hindu writers before the two independent nations of Pakistan and India came into being.
YASMIN ALVI
New York
IF ever we need one, the violent behaviour of the Jamia Hafsa girls is a glaring proof that madressahs are training students to physically fight for their myopic and extremely dangerous concepts of religious righteousness and activism.
They are being conditioned for murderous tendencies to impose their extremist way of life on the entire world even if it involves murder, burning other citizens’ houses and properties and, worst of all, suicide bombing spree which is decimating the Muslim population the world over.
Some of the mullas, including the MMA leaders who encouraged Talibanisation, may well publicly condemn such activities but they cannot escape responsibility for these swelling seas of violence. So cannot our army brass.
But one thing is clear. These violent activities which are the very negation of Islamic principles would never achieve the nefarious and devious objectives of the promoters (which include large numbers of drug and arms dealers, land grabbers and criminals) to make a backdoor entry into the corridors of power.
Sensible, rightly-religious, hardworking and simple folks who make up the vast majority of Muslims would ultimately defeat the satanic forces.
S.H. TEHSIN
Karachi
THE students and administrators of Madressah Hafsa, who illegally kidnapped and detained three women and a child in Islamabad (Dawn, March 29), must be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
These hooligans cannot be allowed to take the law in their hands in the name of religion.
Not only did they commit criminal acts, they have shamed their religion, irrespective of what sect they belong to.
Young people like the students at Madressah Hafsa should really be involved in asking tough questions as to why their glorious religion has been hijacked by the fundamentalists, and how they should bring back the liberating and reformist zeal that helped Islam win followers in the time of our Prophet, and establish brotherhood among people irrespective of their religion or sect.
GHULAM MOHIYUDDIN
New York, USA
DR Nasim Ashraf says he was appointed PCB chairman four months before the World Cup and did not have enough time to plan for it.
If this is so, Dr Ashraf’s sponsors must explain why it became necessary to rock the PCB boat so close to the World Cup by installing a new and unheard of individual with no track record in cricket, or management, as head of the board.
Dr Ashraf must explain why he accepted the appointment when, as he now tries to claim, it was too close to the World Cup for him to make any difference except, as it turned out, for the worst.
If the Pakistan team had done well and not crumbled, would Dr Ashraf still have said that his tenure as the PCB head was too short for him to have made any difference and that the credit for the team’s success belonged elsewhere.
Pakistan and its team are getting a lot of stick in the world media, including in non-cricket playing countries.
One reason for this is the inept, unsure and shifty handling by the PCB and team management of the coach’s murder. Why are the PCB, the team and particularly Dr Ashraf himself being so timid and defensive?
Why did the PCB not create a right royal ballyhoo immediately after the murder was discovered and have the hotel security, the Jamaican police and security apparatus, the ICC and anyone else connected with security on the mat for what happened to their coach?
Instead what we saw was the team and the team management trying to articulate their innocence. Dr Ashraf was doing the same until his latest press conference in Lahore.
The show organised by Dr Ashraf as send-off for the team at the Qadhafi Stadium after dislodging the team from there was a clear give-away of the team’s pre-departure morale, and Dr Ashraf’s priorities.
What the TV screens showed were images not of a team brimming with self-belief but of a group of disconnected and surly young men staring vacantly at the goings-on. No sooner the patron left, so did the players, leaving Dr Ashraf and friends to enjoy the travesty.
S.KHALID HUSAIN
Karachi
IF one wants to asses the state of a nation, see the working of its police, security, doctors and the media. The first report on Bob Woolmer’s death stated that he was found unconscious in the bathroom with vomit, diarrhoea and nosebleed.
As a doctor, my impression was he went into a diabetic coma (unconsciousness) due to severe stress of his team’s dismal performance. Stress raises blood sugar, the greater the stress the higher the rise. After the sugar level reaches a very high level, the brain is depressed and patient becomes unconscious and falls down. On falling, the head hits the ground, and head injury can cause nosebleed and vomiting both of which can block the windpipe.
This can also happen due to the tongue falling back into the throat if the person is lying on his back and results in asphyxia (lack of oxygen).
Could the hospital in Kensington, Jamaica, tell us what the blood sugar of the unconscious Woolmer was on admission? All unconscious patients have an urgent blood sugar level test done.
And how was he strangulated if there were no marks of strangulation on his neck? Why was the first post-mortem inconclusive? How will the second one give more clues after the body has decomposed further with time? A more competent pathologist than the one who did it originally should at least do this second one.
In my opinion the attending doctors, pathologist, the police and hotel security were pathetically incompetent and trying to invent a murder mystery out of a simple stress-related death of an overweight diabetic, just because he was Pakistan’s coach.
The media in India and the UK are as usual pointing fingers at Pakistani players. Another preposterous theory now originating from the UK is that he was poisoned by a powdered drug sprinkled on his medicines which cannot be detected in the body.
Woolmer and his team need urgent help from competent doctors, lawyers and intelligence specialists, more now than when he was alive.
DR ZARINA KHAN
Islamabad
KEEPING the current judicial turmoil in mind, I would like to remind the president, General Pervez Musharraf, of his much celebrated slogan “Sub say pehle Pakistan”.
More than ever before, this slogan has many and clear messages for the president himself on how to go about from now onwards.
Be brave Mr President. You can do it.
QASIM USMANI
Karachi
YOUR editorial ‘Need to conserve energy’ (March 19) again highlights the country's serious energy crisis, now all the more inevitable, due to lack of timely action to conserve our scarce resources.
We have been complacent in our planning for energy requirements since no one in authority has really insisted on conservation and efficiency. The result is that our wasteful ways have now brought us to a dangerous ‘free-fall’ situation where we simply cannot afford the cost of energy irrespective of source. No one in the world can ‘afford’ to either operate inefficient power plants with expensive fuels or waste energy in all applications but we seem to be merrily intoxicated in our ‘dreams’ and continue to wish the high costs away.
Instead of working on exorbitant power plants (both inefficient thermal power plants and wind energy type), we could have tapped very big power source totally free of additional fuel costs by converting conventional steam power plants (Karachi's Bin Qasim, Jamshoro, AES, Hub, etc) to combined cycle by adding gas turbines which would have increased plant capacity by up to 50 per cent without any additional fuel consumption. The conversion would be at a far lower cost than setting up new thermal power plants or wind energy projects. But then this would be hard work, with much lower levels of kickbacks. Who wants such a solution?
What do we do in actual practice? We encourage wind energy projects at phenomenal cost of $1,600 per kW when the above-explained conversion to combined cycle design would be in the range of $500 to 600 per kW.
We also take the cake in installing the world's lowest efficiency gas turbine-based combined cycle power plant and that too close to a major residential area in Karachi with high-rise buildings in the path of polluting power plant chimney exhaust.
Worst still, the gas company ‘celebrates’ the gas supply to this most inefficient power plant instead of advising them to bring the plant to an acceptable level (which would have saved at least 25 per cent gas).
The latest craze of high-rise building complexes, copying the mistakes of the Gulf projects, is another major blunder since these building projects are not sustainable (on a national perspective). Who will meet the enormous energy requirements of these wasteful buildings when we have neither low-cost electric power, nor gas, nor any other economical fuel? Whereas the world is moving towards energy-efficient ‘green’ building design, we are going backwards in demanding huge energy sources for these wasteful projects.
If the approving authorities only look around to note what is happening across the globe, it would be very easy to point out the ‘unsustainability’ of these projects. Even so-called wasteful countries of the past have transformed their thinking totally and an example can be cited for the US, where American Institute of Architects (AIA) have set building energy efficiency goals worth emulating.
By 2010 (very near future), AIA would insist on building design with 50 per cent lower energy consumption than their comparable efficient buildings of today. More importantly, by 2035, AIA are planning for buildings of ‘carbon-neutral’ design (energy self-sufficient when all energy produced and consumed are taken in totality).
What are we doing in this present serious energy shortage scenario? Other than a rare example in Karachi's Toyota plant (which is ensuring a definite C02 depression, and thus high efficiency, in all energy planning as per their corporate strategy), we are disgustingly callous.
None of our buildings (including the unsustainable mega high-rise projects) can even qualify for the lowest energy rating worth mentioning. There is no building code applicable to these projects for sustainability, even though both Pakistan Building Code (with simple energy conservation requirements) and Building Energy Code were issued by the then government nearly 20 years back.
Of course, now the demand of energy conservation is all the more critical but we continue to look the other way, wishing the ‘demon’ to go away. The wasteful ways have let us down and it is not only in the energy sector.
We need to conserve all our resources and the time has come for our self-appointed ‘leaders’ to acknowledge this fact and immediately implement strict conservation laws because we have, really, no other option.
AINUL ABEDIN
Karachi
IN every country of the world small denomination coins to one currency unit are available. We also had coins of different fractions to our one currency unit. It is only recently that the coins have suddenly disappeared, as if we have overnight become very rich and we do not need small denomination coins which are so important for a poor/ common man, i.e., if you have to pay Rs11.50 for half a kilo of a commodity etc that sells at Rs23 a kilo, under the present situation you have no choice but to pay Rs12 instead.
Take the example of utility bills: they have even gone to the extent of rounding the bills to the next round figure. You travel in a rickshaw or a taxi, and the actual meter shows rupees and paisas, but one is forced to pay the enhanced figure in rupees only.
This is not fair. We are a poor country. It is becoming more and more difficult to make both ends meet. The coins should be made available to enable a common man pay in small denominations as well.
Moreover, I feel surprised at the statement of the State Bank of Pakistan that the new currency notes are “state of the art”. When we look at the new currency notes, it is difficult to justify the above-mentioned statement. The actual situation is that the colour of the new currency notes fades away in no time, whereas the old notes retain their colour. Moreover the quality of the paper used is so bad that these new notes look older and more crumpled than the old ones.
The size is small to the extent of being odd, specially the 10-rupee note looks as if it is torn from one side. The 100-rupee note and the 20-rupee note oddly resemble the 5000-rupee note and many people have suffered losses due to this strange resemblance.
I hope the SBP should try to improve the quality of paper, colour and design, after which they might be able to justify their statement.
QUDSIA AKBAR
Karachi
PUNJAB CM Pervaiz Elahi raised his loyalty to yet a higher height by sending fake lawyers from Gujrat to disrupt a peaceful rally organised by the lawyers in Islamabad. It was also reported that some of the faked lawyers abused journalists covering the event to get adverse publicity in the press.
I don’t know how Gen Musharraf will view this action by his chosen cavalier, but people in general have been left speechless. Let us applaud both for the good governance they have been dispensing for the last six years.
DR GHAYUR AYUB
London, UK
MY family owns Mules Mansions, a building with a beautiful architectural façade which stands near the Boating Basin at Keamari. It was built 90 years ago, in 1917, by my grandfather, Fakirjee Cowasjee, who was encouraged to put up this fine building by the chairman of Karachi Port Trust, Sir Charles Mules, “… so that people arriving by sea may appreciate the pleasant and enlightened city they are entering” (Shaukat Aziz’s tourists’ paradise?)
The courtyard has been occupied by a group of `unauthorised’ people. My brother, Cyrus and our caretaker, Kalay Khan, have tried to reasonably persuade them to move out. On April 3, they received a letter by mail, purported to have been written by `The Sector in charge, UC8, Burns Road Sector MQM’, a portion of which when translated from Urdu, reads:
“… if you continue to urge Mules Mansions tenants to vacate the building we will take action … firstly we will shoot Kaley Khan and then next we will shoot you. Count your days after 24 hours … we will shift you to an unknown place and finish both of you off. … If you inform the police you know they will be unable to take any action against us”.
The CPLC has been informed as have the seemingly `good’ faces of the MQM, Governor Ishratul Ebad and Dr Farooq Sattar. This is a blighted country.
ARDESHIR COWASJEE
Karachi
SINCE the inception of the current assemblies, especially the Senate, it has been observed that there are a large number of senators who do not perform their job very well.
First, they do not take the trouble to attend Senate sessions regularly and, second, when they at all come to the house, they do not participate in the proceedings. Many have not spoken a single word on the floor of the house. Such members belong to both the opposition and treasury benches.
However, they are always ready to take huge salaries, besides availing themselves of other facilities.
The government and the opposition both should take note of the situation.
IMRAN KHAN SIAL
Karachi
THE apex judiciary must play its role to uphold its credibility and gain confidence of the people who look upon it as a safeguard against the excesses of the executive authority.
M. ALEEM SHAIKH
Karachi
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