PESHAWAR: ‘There is only one sort of a man who is absolutely to blame for his misery and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.’ (The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells) Few of the prisoners languishing in the Bannu Jail could by any stretch of imagination be considered to have read H.G.

Wells; none at least any of those who fled its precincts in the pre dawn hours of April 15, 2012. Freedom would be so facile, they could never have imagined. They did not have to suffer the pangs of resolute fasting to be shifted to the relative freedom of the hospice, but they were quite as determined as Wells would have liked them to be.

The prisoners who had found freedom on a platter leisurely strolled into the nearest mountains, thanking God and His folks profusely. And who knows they might even be relaxing in one of the neighbourhoods in our near about.

Some days after the gaol was so desecrated, a news report caught one’s attention. It said the prison authorities had decided to computerise the jail records on a priority basis. One wouldn’t know in what way would such a measure preclude the possibility of another jailbreak in future although one did know that the idiot box called computer touched the tribesmen’s wild sense of imagination long before laptops were seen on pushcarts in the smugglers’ market at ‘Karkhano’ at the turn of the millennium.

Each time things go haywire or a tragedy strikes our medieval village, one hears that such and such additional measures are going to be put in place to forestall the recurrence of accidents. Of these, computerisation invariably tops the rest. In fact computerisation and various words associated with it like e governance, cyber city, I.T Park have been so grossly overused that the mere mention of these words now sound nauseating. The authorities concerned brandish computerisation as a fanciful weapon of mass deceit to cover up their inefficiency and further as a panacea for all that is wrong within our decayed system of officialdom.

Information technology is nothing more than a facility capable of storing, analysing, retrieving and sending information at a speed otherwise beyond the imaginable capacity of a human mind. But blessed is the human mind that conceived of and devised that technology. It is the human mind that works behind a computer that has spawned wonders throughout the world. In our apathetic case the human minds sitting behind the computers could not be expected to be less imaginative.

The hi-tech militant has outpaced us even in this field; a proof whereof is presented by him immediately on the web in the shape of a video recording of successive adventures on the YouTube.

Perhaps it may never be known what inexorable circumstances had so far stopped the prison authorities from benefitting from the computer technology. The way things work in the official machinery, it looks that the procurement of hardware always gets more emphasis and its further use is left dependent on the next move of the militants and in more bizarre cases to divine intervention that triggers natural disasters. So it must not have been the non availability of computer hardware that delayed the shifting of data to the machine, but just that the slovenly officials were a little too occupied playing solitaire on their sets or were otherwise entertaining themselves watching scandalous videos on the YouTube.

It is so dispiriting that our fascination for the computer stops at the machine being a mere tool of entertainment. Of what one has so far seen of the entire hullabaloo about the information technology can best be paraphrased as, ‘much ado about nothing.’

Gullible parents have been lured by the scheming con educationists to spend their hard earned savings in the name of computer education with the end result of platoons of unemployed frustrated youth. One recently came across a billboard in Peshawar and another one in Abbottabad announcing a motorbike by draw from amongst the first twenty five students getting admission in the so called computer colleges. Things in the sacred gardens of education cannot get murkier and indeed more ridiculous than this.

On the basis of what great sums have so far been spent on computerisation in the public sector, one would have reckoned that by now all relevant data concerning our lives and properties, except of course the sewage running in the drains, must have been fed to the electronic machines. But no, we are now told that the prisoners’ details and history sheets would be computerised only after some of the most infamous of them have already escaped.

But perhaps as things stand in our medieval village called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one would not be able to escape his fait accompli even if everything is suddenly transformed into a state of the art form overnight by a magic wand. It is now a good one decade since the Peshawar to Islamabad portion of the motorway was opened to traffic, but that has not meant any reprieve for the unwary motorists as they continue to fall on the road in big numbers.

This last Sunday, Farhad and his brother Humayun sat utterly distraught and shaken under a canopy that provided them and scores of mourners little shelter from the sun blazing down with untold ferocity on the mud compound. The two brothers were receiving condolences for their respective sons and three other relatives who had been killed the previous night in an accident on the motorway. Perhaps a stray dog had come in their way or something likelier that sent their car crashing down killing five young men on the spot.

The Peshawar to Swabi portion of the motorway, if it could so qualify, should unarguably be the most dreaded stretch of roads anywhere in the world where death is the next happening thing. It is on this particular road where hitchhikers could be found distracting motorists with absolute impunity. The barbed wire on both sides has been pulled out at least twice and is said to be available for sale in the bordering villages.

Symbolically, the Peshawar to Swabi portion of the motorway is the Swat of nearly five years ago where a small time mullah was reported inciting insurgency on his FM Radio but remained unchecked till he threw down the gauntlet and challenged all and sundry.

The mullah has since disappeared, but who knows he or some of his numerous admirers may one day reappear on the borderless, free for all motorway. The authorities concerned will then move to ‘COMPUTERISE’ the motorway, one would guess.