Daily Times

Things are getting bad in Lahore.
First the Punjab Food Authority (PFA) told us how bad the food we ate even in pricey restaurants was, then we found out that the supposedly fresh milk we were drinking was neither fresh and probably not even milk. Then came the news that much of the water in our taps was contaminated with things like arsenic. Before we had recovered from all this news we found out that 40 percent of all our medicines were either substandard or not even medicine. Just as we were reeling with disbelief came the ultimate whopper: somebody out there was trying to sell pig meat as beef. Even the most trusting person must accept that there is a conspiracy out there.
The contamination stuff one can ignore but the selling of pork is difficult to believe. Clearly no Muslim will knowingly and willingly handle such proscribed pieces of meat. Just as no Muslim will kill other Muslims or blow up mosques and imambargahs. So, this selling of pork disguised as beef is clearly the tipoff that all these problems mentioned above are a part of one unified conspiracy to not only contaminate bodies of devout Muslims with bad food and spurious medicines in the here and now but also to deny them their proper place in the life hereafter by feeding them pork. This devilish conspiracy can only have originated from one source and we all know what that is.
Dear readers, you might wonder how ‘the enemy’ could do all this. Well, the enemy has clearly infiltrated the community of milk sellers and meat procurers. Donkey meat was only a diversion to allow dissemination of pork meat. As far as the state of our eateries in Lahore is concerned, it is well known that hundreds, if not thousands, of enemy agents already live and work in Lahore. Considering the sad state of enemy intellectual capabilities, where else could they find jobs and what else could they do except run food joints or make spurious medicines? I have always had a slight suspicion that the fancier eating places in Lahore were financed by the enemy. And their waiting staff always looked a trifle suspicious.
The milk and water we drink are of great significance. Besides making us sick — not all at once but slowly — on entering the body these fluids sap energy, produce lethargy and ennui, and make ordinary people more inclined to believe in sectarian and jihadist propaganda. Anybody who has seen the great movie Dr Strangelove realises the importance of “precious bodily fluids”. In that movie it was clearly demonstrated how an enemy attempt at contaminating precious US bodily fluids leads to annihilation of the entire world. And that is my fear about the enemy attempt to contaminate our precious bodily fluids in this part of the world. It could definitely lead to a local Armageddon. The distribution of pork is obviously a simultaneous attempt to contaminate our precious bodily purity and create eschatological problems for the pure folks who live in the heart of the land of the pure and that is the city of Lahore.
Where do the badly run eateries come into play? Well, a significant percentage of people in this city eat out by necessity or by choice. What better way of contaminating their bodies than feeding them bad stuff in all sorts of places they frequent for their meals? As far as the water coming out of our tube wells is concerned, it is easy to contaminate. Reportedly, much of it contains too much arsenic. What bugs cannot harm, arsenic surely will. And even if it were just bugs, many of the medicines available would not help anyway. So far, nobody has examined the air in Lahore and, if somebody did, we would just find out that it was full of bad stuff that was being sent our way by the enemy. Biological warfare?
There are some that might suggest that all the things I have mentioned above are really an attempt by ‘local’ terrorists to undermine the national will to fight against their nefarious designs. I might have agreed with that point of view except for the use of pork. But then there is one rather dominant point of view among our denizens in the land of the pure that there are no local terrorists but there are only enemy agents doing all sorts of bad things. Here, it is important to understand that the enemy is not the ordinary people of neighbouring countries but rather their ‘establishments’. It is sort of like the Spy vs Spy magazine and cartoons. For all I know, people across the border are also being subjected to attempts at contaminating their precious bodily fluids.
Even if we ignore conspiracy theories, it is indeed alarming for us in Lahore that, within a month, we found out that so many of our places for eating were unhygienic and the food they served was possibly dangerous to our health. We also found out that the milk we drank was often so badly contaminated that the cows it originally came from would probably disown it if they had a chance to inspect it before it was sold. Then we found out that a lot of our meat came from dubious sources and even included pork. On top of this, water from a significant number of our tube wells contained high levels of arsenic. And forget about the state of healthcare, even a significant percentage of medicines we consume are reportedly not even the medicines they claim to be.
In the midst of all these utterly unfortunate disclosures, the one thing we know for sure is that the building of new roads with their iron fences, is proceeding full steam ahead. I suppose ‘progress’ as far as this government is concerned is only measured in the miles of new roads built and the tons of iron used in accompanying fences.

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