We Are Still The Best!

Mohammad Shehzad

Pakistan is a strange land. It is the only place in the world where you can find the most
talented, intelligent, hardworking and resilient people but simultaneously see infinite
samples that have achieved the highest level of ignorance and stupidity and nobody can
beat them in this trade.

Our youth can make bridges during the floods within 48 hours singlehandedly and save
lives. Swat’s 27-year old Wajid Ali made a chairlift with cables/pulleys within eight
hours and saved 700 lives. Within 48 hours, he had made a full-fledged sturdy wooden
bridge. He was not a bridge designer, engineer or architect but a craftsman.

Mazhar Ali, 47, has built a dam alone in Balochistan that is 12 feet high, 40 feet long and
24 feet wide with a storage capacity of 860,000 litres rainwater. The dam is 2,100m
above the sea level in the Mohardar mountains behind Boko and Ziarat Koh.

Ahmad Shahzad, a youth from Faisalabad has made an e-biked out of scrap that can run
at 25kmph.

On the contrary, a convict like Engineer Waqar Agha convinces us that he has invented a
water-fuelled car and the father of our nuclear bomb - Dr A Q Khan - rushes to TV
channels to endorse him. Whereas, nobody believes the reputed physicist Dr Pervez
Hoodbhoy who rightly exposes Agha as a fraudster.

While arranging marriages of our kids, we first of all dig the prospects’ background. But
we don’t exercise this caution while electing those who later decide our generations’
future. For the last 40 years, we are electing the same thieves, opportunists and turncoats
again and again.

Every religion admits the importance of cleanliness. Our religion says it is half faith and
we practice it the best. We keep our houses clean and throw the garbage in the streets.

We are told 24/7 that Pakistan is the impregnable citadel of Islam. It does not matter that
in 1971, this citadel was resized and reshaped. With more than half of its body, we saw
the emergence of Bangladesh. But we never lamented our disintegration. We proudly
told the world that we have given the Muslim Ummah another baby!

We also believe that we are the bravest people on this planet. A tanker full of petrol
would fall on ground and we will rush to collect a bottle of the highly inflammable liquid
while smoking a pipe. Dozens of people will burn alive but we will repeat such spectacles
of chivalry whenever we find such a battle ground. In fact, we are always looking for a
fallen fuel tanker to prove our valour.
We desperately look for a tree when we are out and we have to park our cars. We hardly
find them for we have cut down all of them to build plazas or widen roads instead of
launching a mass transport system. During long marches like PTI, we desperately look
for a tree to set it on fire. PTI loyalists torched dozens of fully grown tall and dense trees
on the Islamabad Expressway during the long march show.

In a bid to liberate the Kashmiris from the tyrannical bondage of the Hindus, we lost the
East Pakistan in terms of territory. We lost Balochistan in terms of state writ. In fact, we
have lost writ everywhere. Any crippled cleric like Khadim Rizvi can stage dharna (sit-
in) or a mentally challenged leader enforce a long march and paralyze the country. The
state can do nothing except talks! Our friends now make fun of us. They say we should
first of all liberate Aabpara Road from the Islamic bondage of the Lal Masjid before
reclaiming Kashmir.

But we are the best. We can challenge and convince the atheists that God exists. When
our official preacher Tariq Jamil visits them he presents the case of Pakistan. Atheists
instantly become believer with just one argument. If there is no God, then how Pakistan
is still alive and acting as the hero of the Muslim world!

Jokes apart, the same Pakistanis while living abroad follow the traffic rules; stand in
queues; throw garbage in dustbins, pay taxes and work extremely hard. Some of them
like Fazlur Rehman Khan (not to be confused with Maulana Fazlur Rehman aka Diesel)
become the father of high rise building structural engineering. How many of us know
him and the fact that he was a Bengali, our ex-compatriots we always held in contempt!