A GENTLEMAN of my acquaintance is fond of saying that over the course of his lifetime, he has had to come to terms with all sorts of change but one thing has remained constant: the fact that, as far as Pakistanis are concerned, it seems to be a requirement that everyone is an expert in all sorts of fields — except the one that is their own business.

Thus it is that an electrician will not have the answer to the knotty wiring problem presented by his customer, but he will have strong views on what the carpenter is working on. It’s like that old joke about how many men it takes to change a light bulb; five or six at least, one standing on the chair and the rest clustered around, offering opinions and advice. No person is full of better and more prescriptive ideas for children’s illnesses than the old man who has spent his life working in a bank.

Yet, humour aside, the fact remains that if most of us made a push to be fully competent in our own lines of work, and left others to get on with theirs, much in this country would be improved.

The tendency to rely on fate and hope for the best remains.

Some were reminded about this sad reality last week, when a letter was leaked regarding a cataclysmic earthquake in the Indian Ocean, which would trigger a devastating tsunami. This disaster, is, apparently, imminent before the year is out.

Apparently referencing a prior missive from the agency whose name no one dare utter, the one that surfaced on the internet is issued by the rehabilitation wing of the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (Erra) saying that: “[A]n information report has been received ... that there is reportedly, likelihood of large-scale earthquake, as being expected, in the Indian Ocean in the near future which may vigorously shake the Asian continental areas, including Pakistan. There is, therefore, a need to sensitise concerned departments to be on the vigil and take care of any natural disaster.”

The rest of the letter’s text does not need to be reproduced here, but you can find it on the web; news of this imbroglio was reported by at least a couple of established news organisation, including BBC Urdu. Because while a natural disaster is no matter to make light of and if this is not exactly Erra’s remit then it’s hard to say what might be, what further surfaced in this age of digital connectivity is where the information/ prediction had come from in the first place.

It seems that a couple of months ago, an Indian named Babu Kalayil who claims to have ESP made this prediction based on his own skills, and sent a letter about it in this regard to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This was the missive that went viral on the internet back in September. There was much derision and dismissal because such a natural disaster cannot, even through solid scientific means, be so exactly predicted. If that were possible, the world would never have to contend with the fallout of suddenly occurring catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis or volcanic eruptions ever again. In this field, only probable predictions can cautiously be made.

How did such a piece of nonsense end up on the desk of a senior government office department? Were the persons responsible so incompetent as to not look up sources and origins, or even the most basic science? Is the agency tasked with handling the situation in case an earthquake actually does occur so gullible? The story can only be understood through the metaphor of the game of Chinese Whispers.

But as if to underscore the fact that if this episode was comedy then it was the cruellest of black comedies, last Sunday a devastating earthquake struck the area along the northern part of the Iran-Iraq border. On a scale of 7.3, it was felt as far as Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon and Israel, and the US Geological Survey reported at least 150 aftershocks. The Iranian side was worse affected, with over 500 deaths and nearly 8,000 people injured.

In terms of earthquake preparedness, Pakistan has been exposed by this letter episode to be napping. We must do better. The country sits on a fault line, and has suffered catastrophe in the recent past. But the tendency to rely on capricious fate, to hope for the best, remains.

When the catastrophic Kashmir earthquake struck 12 years ago, the first teams to go in conducted aerial surveillance in helicopters. I remember the footage, and the statements by officials, like yesterday. The first reports were that everything and everyone was largely ok, though shaken. It was only later that it was realised that this had appeared so because roofs had collapsed intact over buildings, burying them — so that from the air they still looked okay.

The writer is a member of staff.
hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2017