Daily Times

Sir: Populations in many rich countries consider children a liability (a sacrifice upon current comforts). This is not the case with Pakistan. Here, children are considered an `asset’ worth caring for. Pakistan is rightly called a relatively `young country’, as our population between the age groups of 15 and 64 is 55.10 per cent.

Any `leader’, who wants to change Pakistan, must focus on the young and sadly, neglected segments of our population. We could learn from Mao Zedong. Before embarking upon his Long March to change China, Mao Zedong asked himself which community was in the majority in China and he realized the answer was the young people. So, he and his actress wife started their journey, despite occasional backlash from old guard for their support for the young population in the country. In Pakistan however, one of its promising ‘new’ political parties seems to have adopted a different approach, and abandoned its young `tigers’ in favour of the old guard.

All Capitalist economic models, mathematical or descriptive, treat `labour’ and `socio-economic milieu’ as a factor of production in the capital-formation process. Even Marxian model aims at establishing dictatorship of the proletariat.

There are no libraries, sports grounds and gymnasia for our youth. Frustration has led our youth to two addictions: drug addiction and compulsive video-gaming. The former recently forced a prestigious university to threaten to set up check posts within its premises in order to fight this menace, while the latter was classified by the World Health Organization as a mental disorder.

Drug addiction is a big problem across the border in India as well. Villagers in Indian Punjab started a 230-mile trek to their Chief Minister’s office to remind him of this threat. In order to save face, the chief minister hastily wrote a semi-official letter to the central government to amend their laws and introduce a death penalty for drug peddlers. Now there have been cases of vigilantism against drug dealers as well as addicts, as people are sick and tired of this terrible affliction. Perhaps we can learn from our neighbours as well.

SAMAN MALIK

Islamabad

Published in Daily Times, July 6^th 2018.