Blood tests ordered by my cyber medical consultant, Dr Mahjabeen Islam MD, Toledo, state of Ohio, USA, have plunged me not into any kind of depression - I hope I'm made of sterner stuff - but a decidedly pensive mood.

Confronted with evidence of super-high cholesterol and the readings of what I can only call an outrageous weighing machine, my mind has been dwelling on the vanity of human wishes, the hollowness of human pretensions, the transitory nature of all things, etc. It is surprising how philosophic you can get because of a comprehensive blood picture.

I haven't yet reached the dreaming-of-undertakers stage although my cyber doc helpfully suggests that with cream rather than blood floating around in my veins, and Pakistanis having small-calibre arteries (which is a new one for me), "there is not too much room and it is only a matter of time before there is a clot around a narrowed artery aka a heart attack." Thanks Doc.

Part of the problem, I don't mind confessing, has been a brand of ghee from the good parish of Chakwal itself which I am now informed is the favourite cooking medium of the place from where I regularly used to get my halwa-puri on Thursday mornings. It was a wonderful way to begin a writing day but not so wonderful, as I now realize, for my blood factory.

Local gourmets tell me that this is several lethal stages ahead of regular dalda, our favourite cooking ghee which is pushing Pakistan relentlessly into the top drawer of nations most at risk from cardio-vascular disease.

I think our Islamist salvationists have it all wrong. It is not so much our faith which is weak, although much can be said on that subject as well, as our cooking oil.

In one respect, however, I am sure I disappoint my Toledo consultant. Besides being extremely good at her work, Dr Mahjabeen is also a columnist with an engaging style.

Writing in an English daily the other day she mentions a qawwali she went to in Karachi during one of her visits. "To my horror," she reports, "prior to the start of the qawwali I noticed glasses being carried by many, full of that incriminating light yellow liquid."

When the host announces that since the qawwali would start with a hamd and people should refrain from smoking, she can barely control her anger. "Excuse me. What about the yellow brew?"

Considering her views about the yellow brew, and knowing something of my weakness, she expected my liver to be nearer collapse than my heart. The tests, however, show my liver coping rather well with the wear and tear of recent years. There's a moral in this tale but I'll leave it for later.

The ugliest part of the human anatomy is the belly, or rather the protruding belly (a well-shaped waist being a different thing altogether). As for the Pakistani or sub continental paunch - for we share it with our Indian and Bangladeshi cousins - it is like no other paunch in the world, made more pronounced by our relatively small frames and none-too-spectacular legs.

What the belly breeds is the worst sin of all, gluttony (and imagine when it comes floating on ghee). The yellow brew is at fault not so much in itself as for promoting gluttony.

When I think of the vast quantities of nuts, peanuts and seekh kababs I must have consumed while dabbling in the stuff that so exercises my good doctor, I am overcome by a sense of shame at not having the strength to resist the siren calls of minor gluttony (for big gluttony I never had the stomach).

If I had to do it all over again, what would I do? Cut out the nuts, especially the peanuts which are the biggest culprits of all, and go easy on the greasy stuff.

Too much fat, and of the bad sort, is a more serious national problem than the demonization of things yellow which has stood at the top of our moral agenda since that fateful summer of 1977 when, in order to appease the religious right wing, on the warpath because of the disputed elections of that same year, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto thought he had played a masterstroke by banning drink, gambling and horse-racing.

Far from being appeased, the legions of the religious right became bolder, perceiving that they had Bhutto on the run. When Gen Ziaul Haq seized power not long afterwards, Bhutto's masterstroke became one of the central tenets of state policy, ban this and that, the glory of Islam reduced to a set of punitive decrees.

We didn't become any more Islamic during those years but hypocrisy of the most blatant kind, radiating from the top and reaching to the bottom, became the number one national industry. Appearance, make-believe and sham piety was everything, substance nothing.

Thus official letterheads were inscribed, had to be inscribed, with the kalima, the assertion of faith which makes a Muslim a Muslim. It was not enough to start official functions with the words "In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful..." which one would have thought took care of everything.

Lengthy recitations from the Holy Book were invariably followed by hymns in praise of the Holy Prophet. Never mind that PIA was steadily going to the dogs, it began its flights with a prayer.

Mosques were built everywhere. When time was set aside for prayer during office timings, a bureaucracy not famous for efficiency or hard work had another, higher excuse to avoid work.

Beards and dupattas first invaded then dominated the TV screen. The begums of the great went in for milads in a huge way, at official expense of course. Another practice of the good and great honed in those days but from which we haven't entirely escaped was to perform the Haj and undertake other pilgrimages to the Holy Land at state expense.

Bhutto's ban on drink was not enough. It was made stricter, inviting heavier punishment, by the Hudood laws passed by General Zia in February 1979. All very well and highly desirable if these practices in any way tended to produce a more pious nation. Alas, in its everyday life the nation continued to be as cheerfully sinful and corrupt as before.

"Aaway ka aawa hee bigra hua hai" (things are rotten to the core, a rough translation which doesn't do justice to the original) was one of Gen Zia's most memorable observations.

Despite the officially-inspired sanctimoniousness of his rule, the "aaway ka awa" was as "bigra hua" in 1988 when he left this world for his heavenly abode as it was when he had seized power eleven and a half years earlier.

The crucial difference was that cheerfulness or merrymaking went underground. Two consequences followed: cheerfulness became more expensive and thus beyond the reach not only of the poor but of the white collar class; and a premium was put on make-believe compelling perfectly sensible people to behave in a manner at odds with their natural or spontaneous behaviour.

Ours was a perfectly healthy and normal society, with huge problems of course but with none of the psychological distortions that have crept in now. If we are a sick society today it is not so much because of the elusive quest for constitutionalism and other things political as because of the violence we have done to our social mores, pushing perfectly normal patterns of behaviour into the realm of the criminal and the sinful.

Communist totalitarianism produced a culture of looking over your shoulders before you spoke. The moral brigadism visited upon the hapless people of Pakistan has produced a culture of taking the perfectly normal and natural behind closed doors.

Khawaja Pervaiz who writes regularly in an urdu newspaper is one of my favourite columnists. The title of his column says it all: 'Fake fairies, bald angels'.

In his most recent column he says: "By banning night clubs and considering other forms of entertainment as sinful, and indeed pushing them beyond the reach of the poor, Muslims are managing to produce many more children as compared to the votaries of other religions." Sensible thought: when you have nothing else to do, what do you do?