A COLOURED flag, fluttering in the light pleasant breeze that has quite unexpectedly contained the onset of the summers of 2012, has only just been posted atop a tall lean concrete structure that in addition to being an out and out illegal entity looks strikingly clumsy on the main University Road Peshawar. The owner undoubtedly appears to be announcing his political affiliations, and quite forcefully at that as the entire structure is draped in massive banners depicting pictures of leaders of various standings and bearings.

Such are the times that man is living in. Brazenness is the name of the game in the land where there are rituals galore and being humane is a trait that is fast disappearing.Nurses working in the Lady Reading Hospital, in the not quite distant past, would leisurely move to and fro between their workplace and their hostels on the opposite side of the road. Motorists, out of respect for the young nightingales in starched white dress, would stop or slow down to make way. Increase in the traffic soon necessitated the construction of an overhead passageway, and decline in old values immediately thereafter led to the conversion of the airy bridge into a claustrophobic cylinder.

Some years earlier when pretentiousness outclassed uprightness, nurses wearing caps was branded as an outrageous sin. It was than pronounced that nurses must wear shawls (dupattas), and for that credit was claimed and it was counted among many such commandments as an achievement of monumental significance for the populace.

It is an outlandish idea to hold a debate in a society where reactionary forces hold sway. Textbooks have done great harm to our level of tolerance. The straitjacket worldview as enshrined in the textbook scheme of things has rendered us as mere claques. A recent attempt by KP to introduce some changes in the textbooks for the matriculation classes provoked such a cacophony of protest that the government had to eat humble pie.

It must be astounding for an outsider that our sixteen year old youth are still made to learn an application to the headmaster for the grant of leave by rote. Such students are then awarded 90 per cent marks and two years later find their way to the professional colleges. A young man, appearing for the masters in the International relations, once confided amid giggles how he got away with writing the same answer in reply to the five different questions in one of his papers and was declared passed.

On the other hand students and their parents opting to go for the alternate systems of education are punished indiscriminately through deductions of marks at the time of admission to the professional colleges. It is so greatly disturbing to hear some leaders, whose own pupil are studying abroad, pronouncing that they will introduce one education system in the country, which by implication means the decayed, effete and rotting textbook system.

One has also seen senseless and highly disparaging graffiti against the feared introduction of a syllabus prepared by the Agha Khan Foundation. And amazingly, the same forces that are in the Lady Reading’s comeuppance and allied matters  forefront of such movements take pride in the fact that their wards have been admitted to the medical college run by the same foundation and that too on scholarships. Well, hypocrisy has overstayed here and has to be bid adieu now.

Of all the places, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with a population of over twenty millions and hardly any bookshop of note to educate them must have zero tolerance for double speak. There are only three bookshops, of sorts, in Peshawar selling general books.

The rest of twenty four districts including Abbottabad, the so called centre of education, have absolutely no outlet where one could find a book other than the textbooks. One could hardly blame the booksellers. They could not be expected to spend their hard earned resources on the purchase of books from outside and then keep waiting the rest of their lives for the one odd buyer.

People lack motivation to read, and worse of all few seem inclined to perform that job. One was shocked to hear a very naïve comment from an honourable lady in a VOA Radio discussion when she opined that people struggling to make the ends meet could not be expected to buy books. ‘But ma’am how come there are queues outside the hundreds of shops selling vanity mobile phones,’ she had nothing to substantiate her argument.

Omar and Farooq, two highly educated young men, who assist their father at their bookshop on the University Road Peshawar in their spare time, encounter strange customers. Farooq was once greatly amused when he saw a couple arguing whether the husband was allowed to purchase a book prized at Rs100. ‘No, you can spend only Rs20, a visibly irritated wife, who had apparently returned from the adjoining designer shop with bags full of clothes, protested resolutely,’ Farooq recalls with a mischievous smile.

The tragic part of the story is that people do not buy books even for Rs20. Suhail 22, who has a second hand bookshop in a not too dark by-lane of Peshawar Cantonment, sells some really valuable books for appallingly low sums. ‘Look the one that you are trying to retrieve from the shelf is about the art of dancing,’ small statured Suhail, who dropped out of school at age 11, complaisantly informed one recently. It is so reassuring to see Suhail knowing so much about his books.

There are people in KP who are rollicking in riches. Some of them have houses where the use of cable cars would not be considered showy, but a necessity to move from one corner to the other. Ironically, however, all that these sprawling houses lack is a small corner for books.

While such is the state of reading here, we love to indulge in our favourite pastime of speculating and indeed pontificating on the hereafter of Lady Reading who built the hospital named after her in 1924. Thousands of patients, including tens of the injured of our present war with ourselves, are getting treatment from the hospital which has since been upgraded to the level of a postgraduate institution. Why for God’s sake do we lack the moral courage to speak kindly of the dead lady?