WHAT about smaller things first? My idea of happiness is to be able to take a train to wherever I wish. If we had a half efficient rail service, I would shun the motorcar altogether, indeed sell off mine, and always go by train.

It need not be anything very fancy like a bullet train. The kind of service we had until the early 1970s would do: clean carriages, punctilious staff, a serviceable dining car, and trains on time. Punctuality may seem a remote virtue today but it existed back then. Even bus travel was more civilized with buses stopping only at designated points and, for the most part, avoiding the packed, dehumanising conditions we see in public transport today.

Sure, there were less people around then and mobility was far more restricted. We were still very much a rural society living in some previous century. But then everything else was also on the same scale. Roads were fewer, and slimmer, and means of transport more limited. But better order prevailed and rules were enforced and obeyed. I remember being fined by a traffic magistrate in Rawalpindi for riding a bicycle without a front light. Tell a youngster this today and he wouldn’t believe it.

Part of the problem is that we have become a more unequal society. It was not unheard of for ‘gentlemen’, especially the rural gentry, because there were fewer cars in the countryside, to travel by bus. Nowadays when going inter-city you can see even the relatively well-heeled travelling by Daewoo but that’s about it. The well-heeled today travel by air or motorcar. It is the rest who travel by bus.

When it comes to things like jihad, religion, nukes in the armoury, F-16 warplanes, the invincibility of national defence, our image in the world, the personal image of whoever happens to be ruling the roost in Islamabad, etc, there is no one to beat us at our word-games. If a nation getting ahead meant words alone, we would leave the rest of the planet behind us. But it is ordinary, small things that no longer seem in our power to deliver: like trains on time, efficient public transport, some basic respect for law and order.

It is not that we are an anarchic people. We are not. The British found us pretty docile and easy to rule. The Pakhtoons especially of the tribal areas, were decidedly unruly and did not take kindly to the concept of settled government. For them the British fashioned a different administrative structure as they did for the tribal elements in Baloch society. But the rest of the areas which today constitute Pakistan — Punjab, Sindh, the Pakhtoon areas of Balochistan, the settled districts of the Frontier — were brought into the framework of empire relatively easily.

The system of administration set up at the time encompassing all facets of national life, from the administrative to the judicial to that dealing with the collection of revenue and the enforcing of law and order, survives to this day despite all the incompetence and worse to which it has been exposed. In order the better to appreciate this point we should remember that British rule in Bengal (where it first gained a foothold) and other parts of India to which it later spread, lasted much longer than it did in the areas now forming Pakistan. Here from the annexation of Punjab in 1849 to partition in 1947 it existed for 98 years. And we have had a state of our own now for almost 59 years.

Compare the achievements of those 98 years with the disasters and follies of these 59 years to get an idea of what the British achieved by way of colonisation and state-building. Of course they came as conquerors to serve primarily their own interests. Living as a subject people is never a pleasant experience. But I am talking of administrative ability. The British were first-class administrators. We have proven ourselves to be rather poor ones.

Miracles or grand schemes can wait. We first need to get better at managing what we have. We must learn to run, or retrieve from the shambles it is in, the railroad service we inherited instead of talking through our heads of bullet trains and other systems which can be sustained only in a technically sophisticated environment.

The ordinary police service may be going to the dogs if it hasn’t reached that destination already, but instead of doing something about that we must create parallel outfits like a patrolling police force as has been done in Punjab. This is but a small example. Our answer to the problems of one department is not to fix those problems but to invent another department.

Basic questions about education we have yet to answer. We can’t continue indefinitely with multiple education systems, one English-medium, the other Urdu-medium, yet a third where the curriculum is religious-based. Yet we haven’t even begun asking the right questions, let alone solving them. But to hear the bonzes of education is to get the impression of titanic movement when on the ground where it matters the state of national education is such that one shudders to think of the future.

A glut of motorcars on our roads is not a sign of progress. Huge billboards on every intersection celebrating the joys of a consumerist culture to which most of our people can never hope to have any access are not an emblem of progress. Worshipping concrete and blasting roads through every last pocket of wilderness are not signs of progress. We are embracing the worst aspects of globalisation unthinkingly.

Not that development is something that should be avoided. An escape to the mountains is not an option for everyone (except the luckiest) in today’s culture. But we can surely pay more heed to our environment and be more respectful of our natural surroundings.

The Kahoon valley where the holy shrine of Katas sacred to Hindus is located will have its great beauty marred if not destroyed forever by the cement factories arising in its midst. How easily this could have been prevented.

Fifty years from now some of the problems that we go into such a sweat about will become meaningless as we realise that the more basic problems will revolve around water, sustainable agriculture and a clean environment. The climate threat is perhaps the most pressing threat facing the planet. We in Pakistan are still lucky. We still have a lot of land, river water, some untouched wilderness, especially in the far mountains of the north, and a long un-spoilt coastline. These are gifts to die for but we are destroying them heedlessly.

(Recently sections of Lahore’s public were up in arms against the proposed cutting of hundreds of trees along the Canal Bank. Here’s news for them. Chief Minister Pervez Elahi on one of his visits to Chakwal announced the widening of the road between Chakwal and Talagang, for which there was no real need because the road was already sufficiently wide. But no sooner was the contract awarded than 4,941 trees along the road — some fifty years old, some predating partition, magnificent shisham and other native varieties — were chopped. All in the name of development.)

I don’t know when we will begin respecting our laws and the Constitution. Perhaps this calls for a miracle the country awaits. But meanwhile it beggars belief why we can’t do anything about such things as the polythene shopper which has already blighted our landscape.

More than an act of creating something new, what Pakistan most stands in need of is an act of pruning, to remove the cobwebs from our thinking and to do away with some of the excrescences that cast a shadow over what remains a very beautiful land.

(We have a McDonald’s coming up in Islamabad’s F-9 Park. We have one which hits you in the eye the moment you step out of Karachi airport. There is one in Jinnah Park not far from Army House in Rawalpindi. Is this the limit of our cultural imagination? The gods save us.)

Sections of the press write about the rape of the environment. But we need to have more of this. We are fortunate in that we now have a hyper-active Supreme Court under the able stewardship of my lord the Chief Justice which has saved many a tree from being chopped and many a public park from being grabbed and despoiled forever. The activism of the Supreme Court is a sorry commentary on the working of the rest of the administrative system.

What a destination this could be, what a great place to visit, and indeed what a place to live in, if only we could do a few simple things right.