So close to power, yet far away
Not only that he can be fined upto Rs1,000 and kept at Bari Imam police checkpost if caught transporting wood by the police and officials of the forest department until the fine is paid. That means loss of an entire week.
He is not the only one but among a group of a dozen or so others from Shahdarra village who come down the hill everyday to sell their wood ‘illegally’ and get back to the village before office timings along with any food item they may need that day. They are part of an area within the capital territory and in the 10 kilometre radius of Prime Minister House where there is only one school in many villages like Phulwari, Kumlari, Rumli and Saryas, there is no water supply scheme or a hospital, not even a basic health unit in many villages.
The wood sale is not only limited to these tiny creatures, called human beings. They are many big contractors who take timber in jeeps and tractor trollies late in the night and sell in Rawalpindi’s flourishing timber market. Naeem remembers when a jeep fell into a ravine last year causing three deaths because the driver the driver switched off head lights to avoid being spotted by the forest officials.
Two years ago, Naeem’s father, 42, suffered a paralysis attack after returning from QAU and could not recover because it took a lot of time for the villagers to take him to Bhara Kahu on shoulders and then to Poly Clinic Hospital in Islamabad. Naeem has, since then, given up education and taken over the role of family’s only bread earner because his other brothers and sisters are too young. On return, he also has to take care of the donkeys of his uncle who stays back to work at a make-shift hotel. They are all human beings but this is how they suffer every day.
He still has a lot of time to go to the school if he so wished but he has lost interest in education. “My father used to sell wood on donkey and my uncle is also doing that. Education will do no better to me”, he says in a serious tone. He knows a grand white building at a small distance from Bari Imam Shrine is Prime Minister’s residence but he does not who is the prime minister. He is equally ignorant as to who is the President of Pakistan and what’s happening in Waziristan but he has listened some villagers talking about the killing of children at Lal Masjid.
He thanks God for not being one of them, for once his father thought of putting him in a seminary in Islamabad but untimely disease did not give him opportunity to materialise his desire. On the way back, he fetches water for Sabir Shah, a deciple of Hazrat Bari Imam staying the hilltop about a kilometre from Shahdarah. “We trust in Allah and hope He will change our lives through Bari Sahb and Shahjee (Sabir Shah)”, says Naeem with confidence.
The only road going up the Margalla Hills from the QAU side was carpeted about 10 eight years ago. Some believed it would open up the doors of development to these hitherto ignored villages but that too had a cost. Now some people drive up to the hilltop in the evening and run away with goats and chickens in their vehicles from Shahdara. In one of such incidents, the villagers blocked the road and recovered their goats when the driver ran away leaving his double-cabin jeep behind. The success was however short lived. Sooner, the police reached the spot and arrested seven villagers on charges of selling goats and then taking the jeep into illegal custody.
How will their destiny change? Naeem says no president or the prime minister ever visited Shahdarah at least in his life or to his knowledge. Even Nayyar Bokhari never visited the area since he was elected to the national assembly almost five years ago. Houses of many villagers were badly damaged in the October 2005 earthquake, according to Sifarat another resident of Shahdarah, but nobody came to them with any support as they saw trucks of relief goods going to Murree, Mansehra and Azad Kashmir.
Naeem has no idea if the poverty has come down in Pakistan, nor he understands what does GDP or for that matter inflation mean. He is completely ignorant that he is being equalised with business tycoons like Arif Habib and Aqeel Karim Dhedi by the economists sitting in P,Q & R blocks through misleading jargons of per capita income and trickle down development. He knows not if rhetorics like “hoarding of wheat and sugar shall not be tolerated” and “price rise in such and such items is not acceptable” have something to do with real world but he knows very well that atta price has gone out of his reach and he and his family hardly have food twice a day. So close to the power and so far away from its fruits.
Lazy thinking and computers
Consider this: in the days of typewriters and before, we had to learn our spellings because that was easier than consulting a dictionary every time we were stuck on, say, how many time the letter ‘u’ appeared in ‘queue.’ A good memory was doubly important since the dictionary was not a couple of google searches away; the document did not point out an error by inserting a squiggly red line and a right click did not automatically fix the problem.
Furthermore, correcting a mistake constituted, at best, fiddling around with white-out fluids and at worst, retyping the entire document. The pre-computer generation learnt the correct usage of punctuation since altering them once they had been recorded was not a matter to be laughed off lightly. Similarly, in the absence of grammar checks, one had to know the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment.
In the age before computers allowed us to cut, paste, replace and track changes with gleeful abandon, we had to think clearly about what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it. Before embarking upon the task of committing anything to paper, we had to pause to marshal our thoughts and assemble the argument in a logical manner. In the pre-computer age, in fact, we learnt to think two steps in advance, to calculate where the sentence was going and what the follow-through was going to be.
The capacity to think in a structured manner is of particular importance in the print media since the field is bound by severe deadline pressures. An inability to put information in a sequential order means that more time will be spent in actually writing up the report.
The many computer tools available to the sub-editor also allow the writer to be somewhat slip-shod about the submission. In the tech age, it is not unusual for a sub-editor to dramatically re-word or even re-write a piece, simply because his computer allows him to rapidly move paragraphs and sentences around, replace hackneyed words with synonyms and run an instant word count or spell check. Even the basic fact checking can be accomplished by running a quick internet search.
Before such facilities were available, the sub-editor simply did not have the time to rework any document to such an extent. As a result, the writer was expected to have high levels of proficiency over language, writing and logical reasoning.
The same argument – that computers allow lazy thinking – is also true of the electronic media. Today, footage is dumped on to a computer after which the editing process is roughly similar to the manner in which words are edited on, say, Microsoft Word. The non-linear video editor can split the continuous recorded images into their constituent frames and then shuffle them. The audio track can be separated, extra tracks can be layered on and any mistakes can easily be rectified without generation loss. Released of the need to work sequentially, the editor can jump back and forth, change the introduction to suit the end, trim or expand in order to meet the programme’s required duration.
Just a few years ago, all the editing was linear. The editor worked with Beta tapes of the original footage and recorded chunks sequentially onto a new tape. If he got it wrong, he would have to start all over again. And most problematically, Beta tapes suffered generation loss — the picture and sound quality was affected by the number of times the tape had been played or re-recorded. As a result, an editor worth his salt would assemble most of the programme in his mind before even sitting down at the machine.
Computers have made our lives easier, no doubt about it. But user-friendly technology has also made it all a little too easy. Machines are turning us into lazy thinkers.
— hmumtaz@dawn.com