Aqil Sajjad

It is being said by some people that the present economic crisis is a result of the uncertainty created by the lawyers’ movement. Some other people are saying that the judges issue’ is diverting attention from more pressing national issues. Such arguments are being given for ignoring the judges’ issue so that the economy can be put back on track. Below, I will try to address these arguments.

A closer scrutiny of the economy shows that the present economic crisis has nothing to do with the lawyers’ movement that started on March 9.

Load shedding due to power shortage started in 2006 and any well informed person knew that it was only going to get worse since the Musharraf government had made no serious attempt to address the problem. For example, we can check this news report from 2006: Pakistan needs to tackle energy crisis or this one from Jan 9, 2007: Pakistan’s Energy Crisis to Worsen in Next Two Years

Raza Rumi

I am not concerned with the technicalities of Shoaib Akhtar’s sentence, which have been the subject of much debate across Pakistan and indeed wherever cricket is played and followed. There have been some avoidable outbursts by both Akhtar and his disciplinarians. Akhtar has a chequered past in the conventional sense; and perhaps his tragic flaw is the cavalier attitude that is now a hallmark of his persona. But he is a star whose talent has done cricket, Pakistan, and Pakistanis proud. The quantum of punishment given to him has therefore been viewed as some sort of betrayal, and many have termed it unfair. But this is now a sub judice matter and so cannot be commented upon any further.

However, what lies underneath the narrative of Shoaib Akhtar’s plight relates to the sociological and attitudinal trends that have now engulfed Pakistan, like a poisonous creeper that consumes even the best kept plants in a garden.

Adil Najam

I must confess that the goriness of my last post still leaves me drained and shaken. I offer this picture post on the simpler pleasures of life in Pakistan, partly as a way of shaking myself off the shivers but much more as a way to highlight that not only is another Pakistan possible, another Pakistan actually exists.

It is the Pakistan of this naai (desi barber) in this beautiful picture, from K.M. Chaudary of AP, who has set up his “open-air” barber shop by the canal in Lahore and, while waiting for customers to show up, decides to give himself a little grooming. The charming composition as well as the subject reminds me not only of my own memories (the best shave I ever had – after a period of growing an unruly beard – was from one such naee), but of the fact that very vast majority of Pakistanis are neither robbers who would hold children hostage nor a community of such unbridled anger that it would burn that robber alive. One must never forget this reality either. Largely because this reality gives hope and the possibility of better things. The reality of yesterday only breeds more anger and discontent.

This is not to say that we should ignore or underplay the reality of desperate people brutally burning robbers to death. We at ATP did not. It is to say, however, that the only thing worse than ignoring the ugliness amongst our own is to let it define the entirety of who we are; to let that ugliness make us forget all the beauty that also exists.