IF the video is outdated and the audio is cranky, don’t be surprised. This is PIA’s Planetarium, which is still playing an educational space video that was probably made somewhere in the 80s.

The grainy video, which at times go blank for some inexplicable reasons, shows information about planets that now seems so outdated and archaic that one wonders if the PIA sleuths really know that Nasa’s $2.6 billion rover, Curiosity, has landed on Mars in August last and is collecting samples for chemical analysis. The Planetarium could use a real-time Mars image instead of a computer generated image. But this probably would be asking too much from an airliner whose planes hit trolleys on the tarmac.

In fact, the video is so old that it would seem quite plausible that some of the scientists shown in it might as well have died. In a measure of austerity, it seems, the PIA just copied the audio-video material from its Planetarium in Lahore and shipped it to Peshawar.

In doing so, they did not seem to bother that the information they were disseminating to schoolchildren would take them years back, if not decades, and that this would not put them any wiser on the developments in space information since then.

Instead the video played out on the big dome-shaped screen shows an old computer-generated image of the red planet, coupled with a narration that is equally antiquated. Little wonder, the show, which should be exhilarating experience for the kids and informative in terms of knowledge about the space, is yawningly boring.

In this age of high-speed internet and flow of information and state-of-the-art 3-D technology, the show at the PIA’s Planetarium at Hayatabad is still conducted manually as well electronically. This means that while you stretch out your neck to look at the large dome-shaped screen to show a star-lit night, you have to keep at least one eye on another picture frame – sort of a picture-in-picture that runs simultaneously on part of the tomb.

Karachi has had its Planetarium since 1984. Lahore got it in 1987 and it would take the PIA, which generates a lot of revenue from passengers from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata who work in the Middle East and continue to use the almost crumbling national flag carrier - decades to think of building one in Peshawar, too.

But as is the case with almost everything else in this God-forsaken country, the PIA, too, built the Planetarium in Peshawar and then forgot about it, signs of these years of negligence could still be discerned from the cobwebs and most of the empty rooms there.

Little wonder that the Planetarium, which lies juxtaposed to the grand Zarghuni Mosque and the beautiful Ghani Bagh, remains an obscurity even for the people of Hayatabad. A few people, who do come to know about its existence by coincidence, visit it and even if they do, there is little chance they would either want to come back or recommend it to friends to bring their children to it.

A German-made projector supplied in 2008 that cost a whopping $600,000 was not installed until April 2011 when the Planetarium was finally commissioned into service and a former PIA officer was hired on contract to run it. The development of infrastructure cost another Rs30 million.

Had the PIA known the art of making money, they would have at least invested a fraction in getting latest videos on space information to make it more interesting and entertaining for schoolchildren, instead of the difficult scientific jargon and terminologies that even adults find nearly impossible to understand, this would have been a profitable proposition.

Instead the Planetarium in Peshawar is run on no-loss-no-profit basis. Little wonder that the Planetarium overhead expenditure overshoots a thousand miles the meagre – very meagre sum that it makes from wandering visitors once in a blue moon. The Lahore Planetarium at Chauburji and so is the one in Karachi are also running into losses and there is a high probability that instead of fixing the problem, the PIA may eventually decide to close them down.

But then there is so much wrong with the ailing once the great-people-to-fly-with PIA that asking it to fix its Planetaria in Pakistan would amount to a crude joke. One would not be surprised if the PIA decides to close them down and turn them into some sort of museum for fleet of its fatigued Boeings. At least that would draw visitors and money for the cash-starved national airliner.