The world as we know it might just be coming to an end. No, I am not referring to the impending end of the ‘euro’ or the Imran Khan ‘tsunami’ or even the ‘Memogate’. What has me entirely hot and bothered are two things that happened recently. First of course is that this Friday, the Pakistan cricket team actually won a match that they were, it seemed, trying their best to lose. The second equally monumental occurrence is the report from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) that as they had reported earlier and then reconfirmed, ‘neutrinos’ actually were observed to be travelling faster than the speed of light.
What is common between these two things you ask? Well, life of ordinary people like me depends on the predictability of things around us. We in Pakistan have come to expect certain things. We expect that as dictated by Murphy’s Law, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And when it does not, we are surprised or perhaps even bewildered. The Pakistan cricket team actually winning a match that they seemed to be trying their best to lose is one of those things. If the Pakistan cricket team actually starts winning matches that they should, that would be enough to upend all our opinions about Pakistan. And if such things keep going on, we might even wake up one day to find that Pakistan has become another Singapore!
But this could of course only happen if reality, as we know it, is no longer real. Here the experiment at CERN comes into the picture. If anything in this physical universe can actually travel at a speed faster than that of light, then anything can happen — time travel, alternate universes, almost everything that science fiction writers have been writing about suddenly enter into the realm of possibility. So the more I think about what has happened in Pakistan recently, the more I am inclined to think that something strange is going on.
One of the recurrent themes in science fiction is about an infinite number of alternate universes where almost similar people live in similar countries but are separated by small threads that diverge over time. So, it is quite possible that in an alternate (parallel) universe there exists a Pakistan that is doing rather well and is so advanced that it is capable of looking at our Pakistan and wanting to do something good for it.
If these ‘good’ Pakistanis from the parallel universe want to make things better for us, the most obvious strategy must be to take our people away to their own Pakistan and replace them with their people in our Pakistan that are similar but not the same. Better but almost imperceptibly so. Where then would they start, obviously not from the top since that would be too obvious, so perhaps as a trial they started with the members of our cricket team. It would seem that Shahid Afridi that we see in the present team is surely different (better) from what he was.
Among the politicians, as I said above, our friendly Pakistanis from the parallel universe would not change the people on the top so they most likely started lower down the totem pole. Mr Imran Khan is an obvious choice. For almost 15 years Imran Khan chaired a political party that in olden times would have been called a ‘tonga party’, a tonga being a horse-drawn carriage and the idea was that all the members of the party could fit into a single tonga.
Anyway, during the last few months, Imran Khan has become a new man. Gone is the dissolute look reminiscent of an aging Peter O’Toole, his face has lost many of its wrinkles and he has a fuller head of hair. Besides these physical changes, he is suddenly dressing in a more age-appropriate fashion and even his style of speaking has improved. All this has resulted in his sudden and, to some observers, his inexplicable popularity. Why Imran Khan you might ask? Well he is a perfect person to be replaced by an alternative; he lives alone, his ex-wife and children being in the UK so any minor changes would largely go unnoticed. Also, his popularity could have an interesting ripple effect in the political landscape.
Another politician that has suddenly changed (for the better?) is Mian Nawaz Sharif. Ever since he had what we in the business call a ‘serious cardiac situation’, Mian Nawaz Sharif has become a different man. The most obvious incident that illustrates my point is Mian sahib’s statements about the Two-Nation Theory being no longer relevant and his insistence that Rab-ul-Alameen (the Master of the entire Universe) is also the Rab of non-Muslims. I do not think that the Mian sahib of old would have said anything like this. Here it is important to point out that if Mian sahib had to be replaced, what better time than when he was sick. Any changes in him would have been attributed to his sickness and therefore escaped detection.
However, I am a little worried that Pakistanis from an alternate universe might not be entirely altruistic but could be conducting a ‘socio-psychological’ experiment and are using us as ‘lab rats’. They want to see if the ‘good’ Pakistanis they sent us will in time make our Pakistan better or will they instead become as ‘bad’ as we are. They might also be trying to see if our Pakistanis, when they come to their Pakistan, become better or whether they make their Pakistan as bad as ours. But I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Friends, neighbours and countrymen, if you see people next door suddenly changing for the better, it might just be ‘friends’ from our alternative universe Pakistan coming here at great personal cost to help us out. So please be nice to them. Allah knows best.
The writer has practised and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at [email protected]