Daily Times

I must confess I have always been fascinated with the ‘cuckoo’ clock! As a child, I just could not get enough of the ‘cuckoo! cuckoo!’ dot on the hour, every hour, but in spite of my fascination, I have never actually owned one: neither the cuckoo nor the clock! Talking to a friend once, who was a bit ‘cuckoo’ like me, about her proud acquisition, I discovered that maybe one had to be a bit more cuckoo to indulge in the vice of owning a cuckoo clock. She lamented that after the initial euphoria wore off, all the cuckooing got on her nerves. I suppose it is a bit too much, round the clock, to have an obsessive-compulsive cuckoo pop out to remind one just exactly how much of a cuckoo one is, keeping stringent track of time.

Woe-be-gone to those who live in Cuckoo-land; no, not the ‘cloud’ variety, the actual genuine Pakistani-Cuckoo-Land, where there is an unrestricted and abundant population of cuckoos, with no threat of any kind of endangerment in the near future. In this Cuckoo-land, we can celebrate Eid on different days in the same country; on one occasion, we even had three Eids; Guinness Book of Records anyone? But what boggles my mind is how can we celebrate Eid-ul-Azha on a different day than Saudi Arabia? To my immature, minutely cuckoo mind the logic is simple; yes, I know logic and cuckoos do not normally gel together but I am an exception, so please bear with me! If there is only one place on the entire planet Earth where Allah ordered Hazrat Ibrahim (Abraham) to build His house, which in this case is Makkah — that by the way is in Saudi Arabia and not Pakistan — and it is here that millions of Muslims from all over the world congregate each year to offer pilgrimage and nowhere else in the world, not even Jerusalem, then are we unanimous in accepting that Hajj can only take place in Saudi Arabia? Unless Makkah is in an Atlas like the one recently published by the Punjab government, which might have moved it to Pakistan, in which case I will have to withdraw my case! Therefore, supposing that as announced by the Saudi government, the Arafat Day was on Thursday, October 25, that would be yesterday this year. Now going by the same cuckoo-logic, the day following that would be called — perhaps –the Eid. So would that mean that today is the actual Eid, which the citizens of Cuckoo-land are being forced by a band of all-powerfully-useless bearded committee to celebrate tomorrow? Based on what: moon sighting in a country where no Hajj even in a zillion years can take place? Cuckoo!

I get hungry and that is often, a fact that is now visible by my putting an effort into my newly bought treadmill. But being hungry took on a new meaning a few days ago, even putting the political party dinners to shame. As the story goes, a certain ‘healthy’ female of a reportedly well-known origin, got ‘hungry’ and unlike me, instead of getting on the treadmill to curse and annihilate the horrible pangs, she decided to step into a bakery. The relatively sane and poor employee cleaning there informed the hungry female that the shop was closed to business and she should come back later. Obviously affronted by this remarkable gall and apparent insolence — as if the poor man had told her to go and get on that treadmill — the female in question (relying on the CCTV footage) was livid, obviously not used to going ‘hungry’! Deciding that her hunger could not be satisfied in any other way except by the gourmet delights of the bakery in question, she sent in her goons to teach the ‘ghareeb ka baal’ (poor man’s son) a lesson he would not forget any time soon. Sometime later, apparently not finding anything to curb her hunger anywhere in the entire Lahore, she called in our ‘elite’ force, which is exactly that ELITE to get her the food she desired. Is it any wonder why Lahore is the target of escalating crime? The ‘No Fear’ ELITE, who receive their salaries from the taxpayers money, proceeded to the venue, hauled and roughed up the poor aching employee and departed with him in their police van, probably to feed him to the fearless lions of the Punjab. Bless the media for taking up the issue and bless technology in the Cuckoo-land for capturing the assault on a citizen of Pakistan at the hands of the ELITE! I feel sorry for the ‘hungry’ female’s father: no parent deserves to be insulted, disgraced and subjected to mockery through no fault of his own the way he has been by a shameful act of his daughter. If I were the father in question, I would put the perhaps-obsessively-cuckoo daughter on a treadmill, on the fastest possible speed and the highest possible incline, for all eternity to come and feed her nothing but karela juice to wash out all those toxins! And let us not forget the public apology that the poor beaten man deserves and which should have been delivered by now.

And then there was a picture of Malala posted on my Facebook wall, which allegedly showed her and her parents conspiring against Pakistan in ‘secret’ meetings with Richard Holbrooke and other American officials. Simply cuckoo? For a land that has, nay, whose rulers have, absorbed billions of dollars in aid handed out by the US government, some of us have a pretty selective and myopic view of ‘meetings’ with the Americans. Most of the civilised countries like to promote and nurture children, especially those like Malala, so that they may become incentives for others. And hats off to the two other girls who were injured in the attack, for they and their parents and hundreds like them too are a symbol of struggle, enlightenment and bravery for embarking on a quest for education in such an environment fraught with danger. So while the hate-mongers stand in queues outside the US Embassy, and spew venom against children on the internet to promote violence, there are enough outraged individuals in Cuckoo-land to condemn what happened.

We live in trying circumstances and we the people of Pakistan get points for being able to get out of bed every single day. We get points for sending our children to school in all adversity and we get points for being able to live under a crippling inflation and corruption. We even get points to be able to go to the market despite target killings and bomb blasts. No one can take this away from us. But we definitely do not get points for celebrating Eid two days after the Arafat Day; nor do we get points for bashing up the ordinary citizens of Pakistan in a sheer abuse of power and public resources; and neither do we get points for hate-mongering, spreading vicious rumours and displaying sickening mentality, which the ordinary minutely ‘cuckoo-person’ like me vehemently disowns.

One has to be a bit of a cuckoo to survive in Cuckoo-land to tackle the parasitic obsessive cuckoos! Some parasitic cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other species and the hatchlings are fostered by the hosts; the baby parasite-cuckoo pushes the host’s eggs and young out from the nest, just like we are being pushed out of our nest by obsessive and fanatical cuckoos. It is time we reclaim our nest before it becomes a real ‘cuckoo’s nest’! Have the courage to push the parasitic cuckoos out instead of being the one who “flew over the cuckoo’s nest”!

The writer is an advocate of the High Court