Save PAKISTAN!

This is what needs to be done and what WE can do:

1. Like Ammar said, the responsibility is with us so we need to straighten up our act and start living by the rules that were set for us by our beloved Prophet (PBUH). That means praying on time, planning our day around the prayers, being truthful, not paying or receiving bribes, not dealing in interest, not trying to save the zakat we owe and taking the time out to pay it to the rightfully needy and so on, you get the drift. This may be easier than it sounds or it might sound like rhetoric but until we truly start doing this in letter and spirit, it won't mean a thing, it won't change a thing. Start with yourself, your wife, your parents, your siblings one family, one neighborhood, one town, one city and eventually a country!


2. For god's sake VOTE. Register your vote and your family's vote. The person who works at your home and his/her family, everyone you can get your hands on. If all else fails, people like you and me need to come out on the streets and protest but till we have hope that change can happen within the system, we should try for it. So please let go of what your fathers and grand fathers and families have believed in for the past 60 years as far as political affiliations go and break the mold. Basically vote for Imran Khan. We can debate all day long but all of us know he's the last real hope we have at a glorious Pakistan. Don't get caught up in "the system won't let him change a thing" let him try for once...... I'm not one fro creating messiahs but history is witness that in bleak times, hope is what gets man through.


3. On a personal front, do as much charity as you can and spread messages of peace, patience and hope to everyone you meet or talk to. Project the positives of Pakistan for once and forget the negatives, you'll be amazed at the energy positive thinking and speaking can bring to you and imagine what it can do to a nation if adopted collectively.


4. What the mullahs need to do. I'm not speaking about the terrorists but your everyday maulvis, imams of mosques, ameers of our different factions. Since the onslaught of bad times, basically since the lal masjid fiasco, these mullahs had a collective responsibility of spreading messages of peace and reminding people to mend their ways. Every Friday sermon should be used as an opportunity to do a collective tauba and people in general need to be reminded of repenting continuously both individually and collectively. They should do more than spread hate messages or anti America messages or coming on Alim online and addressing personal, specific masail. Come on TV and hold collective tauba sessions, if we can have donation telethons, we can have tauba telethons. They should be educating people on the minutest details of how to live according to the Prophet's (PBUH) ways. The first step to revival is acceptance of one's fault and asking of forgiveness from the supreme being.


5.The rest will fall in place, the police, the education, the health, the judiciary etc etc. You ask how, well firstly if everyone will have adopted the ways of the Prophet (PBUH) then there really shouldn't be a problem. Secondly, if you have an honest man leading you trying to get your institutions corruption free, then you shouldn't have a problem. Once you create a positive environment, creativity, investments and brains follow. Our institutions are victims of politics and the age old system of associations and loyalties to kinfolk being stronger than loyalties to religion or the state. In order for you to get elected you make promises to your people of jobs and economic security. Once you get elected if you don't follow through, you lose face and/or you lose support of your people hence you have to hand out jobs to the undeserving. now multiply that problem at the national scale and you have Pakistan.

I have more where that came from, so lets stop talking and start DOING.

They say "Pakistan needs to regain its glory days". I say what glory days, we never had those. Zawal uss cheez ka hota hai jo kabhi bulandi par gayee ho, we've never reached the top yaar..... we're still fighting amongst ourselves. So the question should be: "How high is high for Pakistan"

It's all my fault!

This one's been a long time coming hasn't it?? Truth is I just couldn't find the inspiration to write about something that was important to me.....well maybe I did, atleast on 2 occasions. On the first one, my editor (read wife) didn't allow publishing rights, and on the other I was too lazy to put pen to paper, or is it fingers to keyboard nowadays.....

Anyways, to cut a long story short, these days there's a general theme doing the rounds, somehow, I find myself at the center of the universe and funnily enough its not due to me becoming an egotistic megalomaniac overnight. 

I'll quote 2 small incidents in my defense and I would like you as the readers to be the judge and jury, and help me reinforce the theme I've stated above or negate it. 

Incident 1:

A friend has a flight back home in the morning, earlyish, so I humbly offer my services to drop him to the airport, knowing full well that I will not be sleeping most of that night due to prior commitments, still I offer, coz I'm such a swell guy, always willing to help out. The friend readily agrees. The flight is at 9:25am, so we decide on a time of around 7:30am for me to be at his place and for us to be at the airport around 8ish to be on the safe side. Now mind you, this friend has also informed me the night before that he has checked in online, which usually helps and means that you can show up a little later, drop off your baggage and proceed to passport control no questions asked. Now I go to sleep at around 4:30 after the morning prayers, having set all my alarms, but shit happens, so I oversleep by ONE snooze and wake up at 7:40, precisely when the friend decides its now a little late so I better see where Adil is. Ideally I should've been at his place at 7:30 or 7:45 at the latest, as it turns out I reach at around 8 and we reach the airport around 8:25. By the time he reaches the counter to drop off his baggage, the guy at the counter informs him that its too late and that they've closed the counter. So my good friend calls me to tell me to turn back as I'm on my way home as he might have to give me back the luggage as he could still go on with carry on baggage. 

As it happens, he catches a lucky break and somehow gets on the plane with all the luggage, but in the aftermath of the incident, who gets blamed for almost making my friend miss his flight or at best leave his luggage behind. Now all i'll say before leaving the case to your capable judgement is why counldn't he have called earlier? wasn't it his flight to miss? his luggage to check in? but no guess who's fault it is???

Incident 2:

The following day is eid so the prayers are early in the morning. Another friend sends me a message asking what time are the prayers, and I reply saying 6:15, I get a reply saying "Done", thats it, thats all it says. However, I'm supposed to understand from this one all encompassing word, that I'm supposed to wake up this friend well before the prayers and pick him up to go to the mosque together. So when I some how wake up and go to the prayers after only an hour's sleep because, you guessed it, prior commitments, I barely make it through them let alone the sermon that follows. I come home at around ten minutes to 7 and I get a call from the same friend who has now woken up and brazenly accuses me of being the sole reason for him having missed his first eid prayers here in dubai, albeit not in so many words, to be fair to him. Obviously that makes me feel a bit guilty, but because I'm so god damn sleepy, I just hit the pillow and doze off. 

You tell me, ho does one word mean so much?????

Now, I know that based on 2 small incidents, I may be exaggerating a bit by saying that everything that happens good or bad (mostly bad) is my fault, but believe me when I say that a married man already carries the burden of being blamed for everything so when his friends start doing the same, the world does start to crumble. I mean isn't it enough to be carrying the burden of being late for every dawat, forgetting the eggs, mixing up the dhania with the podina, not noticing the minutest change to the hair, not being able to answer spontaneously to the eternal question: "Why do you love me"?, or for the gas running out at the wrong time, for the microwave to stop working at the wrong time, for asking for tea at the, you got it, wrong time; if all that wasn't enough, I'm now responsible for letting my friends down....I'm going to break into a sob now.....

oh wait, it just got worse, there's another power failure in New Delhi, guess who's fault it is?

later.....