No path to our salvation
It is an unusual March. The cold of winter is still locked in an embrace with the spring like two nervously enfolded lovers who prolong their stay at some railway station knowing that the parting is at hand. The cool scented breeze these days is enough to lift one’s brooding spirits. But while nature’s playful romance is on display, the birds are not alighting with any happy news in our climes. The lovers may be in an embrace, so to speak, but the dark reality of life is fast unfolding around. Bit by bit, the fibers of hope are shriveling in the strongest hearts.
Bread in this land has become a luxury and the poor are forced to sacrifice their dignity in long, gruesome queues where they stand between life and death every day. Reports of stampedes and deaths, of people battling with starvation and hunger, are coming from all corners of the country. News of parents poisoning their children and their own selves to death rather than facing the insult of poverty are some of the fresh triumphs of our democracy. In this holy month, the state has refused to deny the poor even a safer, holier exit from this world.
Coming to match this gradual chaos is the greed, incompetence, and murderous indifference of the governing classes. The high and mighty are busy with palace intrigues. About our mandarins, we have been informed recently that Gymkhana Lahore is paying a colossal sum of only 5000 Rs annually from its rich coffers for the lease of acres of state land in the heart of Lahore. If this insult was not enough, another more fateful one was delivered to the nation that the men in uniform were to be handed 45000 acres of state land on a silver platter to undertake corporate farming in different pockets of the country. Nero indeed was fiddling but he was at least aware that Rome was burning. Our Caesars have surpassed his storied indifference.
During the height of revolutionary fervor in Russia, the winter, which had stemmed the tide of Napoleonic invasion, tested the resolve of the poor standing in long queues for bread. While Petrograd, the heart of insurrection, seethed in anger, the richest wine flowed in abundance in the cellars of Tsar Nicolas II… The theaters were open, the music was on, the Russian aristocracy flocked to art galleries and the wives of civil servants took lessons to polish their French. The propulsive force of life went on, denying the discontent simmering underneath. Our story is not much different today. But here is one enormous distinction above everything else… while the rains continue to beat down on the wheat crops and destroy the hopes of farmers, while the rich continue to congregate in luxuriant lanes of Gulberg, while the well-heeled in the Dhas and Bahrias continue to talk about art and culture from the comfort of their armchairs amidst general chaos, there is no one in the mould of Lenin and Trotsky around to reinvent things anew and infuse a new life to this dispirited land. Far from it, even lesser mortals who occasionally lit a lamp in the darkness are hard to find. Such is the fault in our stars.
Winwood Reade writes when a person in ancient Greece wished to obtain the favor of gods, he went to a priest. But if he suffered from mental affliction or felt disappointed with life, he sent for a philosopher. To whom the people of this luckless land would turn when the sun is down and there is no light to be found in the dark folds of life?