Is there no hope?

It gets harder and harder to write everyday. So bizarre is the scenario in Pakistan that the news feed  jacked into my mind is full of people exploding at different places, human bombs strike us every day, killing all around them in their suicides.  Every single day brings reports of suicide bombings in different cities of Pakistan. All of this compounds to an air of depression that hangs around us like a dense fog.

However when I saw this article it struck me so deep that I had to sit down and pen my feelings on it. Basically Germans, really affluent ones have demanded that their government increase taxes on them because they have so much money that they cannot bear to see people suffering from poverty and joblessness in their country. They claim that a 5% wealth tax on them can raise 100 billion euros over the next 2 years and put the country back on track.

I thought people like these existed in fairy tales. People who care so much for their country that they want to help it any way they can. Compare that to the elite of Pakistan and you would be in for a shock. Forget help, all we want to do is to sit in our air conditioned rooms and shoot down anything that happens for the good of this land. This includes spewing obscenities at politicians or at main stream media or any poor sod who tries to speak up. The rhetoric is so deafening that it drowns out all thought and reason.

We clamor against aid but never pay taxes, every income tax season brings number fudging at its highest creative point here and the lawyers have a field day raking it in. We scream against discrimination of Muslims at the hand of Jews but yet employ people at less than USD 80 a month to do our “outdoor” tasks on scooters, they are called “runners” in Pakistan & they do everything from paying bills at counters to getting ice cream for the masters kids on hot days. A friend of mine, a lover of stats just informed me that his swiss banker says Pakistani businessmen have so much money piled up over there that they can pay off the entire national debt in cash and still be left with half.

So why cannot we be more like the Germans? Well its quite simple, most of us do not give a shit about Pakistan. To us it does not matter if the Taliban over take us or not, it does not matter if we disintegrate the dream our forefathers had, it does not matter if someone lives or dies all that matters is that we make our pile and quickly shift it out of the country for a nest egg to live off when we retire to Dubai or Barcelona or wherever it is that rich Pakistani’s retire to.

I am not trying to say that there are no good people here, but I have come to realize that most people here do not want to, or are up to no good and that is because of utterly selfish reasons. Still I am hopeful, because even in this shit storm of negativity there are small islands of strength, people like Salman Mehmood who lived a life affected by Thalaesemia major but never let it hold them back. Salman died a few days ago here in Karachi. He was 24 years old and fought for a cause that nobody gives a damn about. Yesterday the sindh assembly passed a bill which states that everyone will be tested before getting a marriage certificate to check for the disease he had. Even though he might not get credit for it, he lived a life full of pain and uncertainty but contributed to make this happen. Two days before he went into the hospital for the last time he and his sister held a blood drive at Fatmid, a local blood bank here, even at the end he fought for the cause. This is our tribute to him.

I believe that while there are people like this in Pakistan, nobody can bring it down. Not in their lives anyways. Salman keep watching over us man, we need all the help we can get!