Daily Times

Time creeps up on us. The first week of the new year is already dead and gone. And as we wrestle with our new year’s resolutions, at least I keep asking myself the big question: are we in Pakistan better off than we were this time last year? For somebody living in Lahore, the answer is probably but sadlyno. People from other parts of Pakistan will of course blame me for being just another ungrateful Lahori, who lives in a city that has received most of the largesse spread around by the PML-Ngovernment and,even after being replete with all the goodies, I see nothing better. Indeed, people who do not call Lahore home have a point. We in Lahore are spoiled. Even if our public hospitals are going down the tubes and our public schools are in a bad way, soon we will be able to whizz through Lahore without ever having to stop at a traffic light. What fun!

If things keep going the way they are, soon enough Lahore will become the perfect ‘potemkin village’. Foreign dignitaries will see Lahore from a vantage point where all will look sleek and modern. Of course, neither the foreign dignitaries nor the local VVIPs will even have to look at any of the teeming masses of unwashed humanity that lurk in the darker depths of the city. But then, as long as I can afford a car and a driver, and have some money to spend in the fancy eateries that have so far escaped the wrath of our crusading foodie, life should not seem too bad. And the flyways and the no traffic-light highways can all facilitate movement, motorcycles, rickshaws and the occasional donkey cart notwithstanding. But are things better than they were at the same time last year? Well, at least as far as the traffic in Lahore is concerned it is still a mess that is made worse by these mega traffic-commuter projects. As they used to say in the old country, “The inconvenience is temporary but the improvement is permanent.” The problem in Lahore is that our brilliant lord and master is most likely to start a new mega project when the present ones are nearing completion. Thus, it would seem that it is the inconvenience that is permanent.

The other thing that makes life a mess is the on-going load shedding of electricity as well as gas. I previously thought that after going through a learning curve demonstrated in the recently off-the-radar Nandipur project,PML-N biggies would finally get the hang of building new electric supply plants. But even so, halfway through the PML-N government’s tenure things are nowhere near any serious improvement. All we are told is that soon all will be well. I have a theory about all this. If the PML-N government fixes the load shedding situation too soon, come election time people will have forgotten all about this great achievement. So, to win the next election it is necessary to fix this problem just before the elections so that this great success is still fresh in the people’s minds. That means things, instead of getting better, will stay the same or get worse until a few weeks before the next elections. And those, presumably, are still a couple of years away. Frankly, I have been hoping persistently that I am wrong about all these ‘negative’ assessments about load shedding but that is the way it is. The same it seems is true of the gas situation that will only be fixed when the expensive LNG from a friendly country is pumped into the gas lines also just before the next elections.

So, what else is better than this time last year? Prices? Other than petrol, everything else is a little bit more expensive. It seems that even bootleggers have upped their prices to presumably keep up with the rising price of the dollar. Not being an economist, the news that our foreign currency reserves are going up like a helium balloon is tempered by the news that our foreign debt is following a similar pattern. Is that good or bad is a question I leave for better minds to wrestle with. But, as far as the masses living under or away from the flyways are concerned, reliable sources inform me that they are definitely not feeling any better. But then, if these people were really as smart and economically ‘productive’ as the people that run this country then they would also have been running the country and whizzing around on these no traffic-light highways and feeling better and ‘betterer’ by the minute. More importantly,when all the mega projects are complete and the Chinese have taken over the country, things will get better for even the most teeming of the masses. So, they should stop complaining and immediately start to learn Mandarin.

But I hate to just complain. Indeed, it is entirely true that terror attacks are fewer now than they used to be all over the country. Though we inLahore have been protected for a long time from such stuff by the superior political acumen of our rulers and the long waiting lines through army and police checkpoints around the city, and on our way to the airport. Personally, I think it is the long lines before these check posts that have really protected us for indeed even the most dedicated terrorist must lose all energy and enthusiasm for serious mayhem after being stuck in traffic for an hour while going through these aforementioned check posts. And that, of course, brings me to that other bane of our lives known as corruption. It is indeed heartening to find out that our rulers in Punjab belong to a political party that is devoid of all corruption and is indeed as pure as a newborn babe. So, I suppose that should make me feel better.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians
of North America (APPNA)