Chowrangi

We are responsible for the mess that Pakistan is in. We got independence without much of a struggle, so we never realized how precious freedom is. When the telephone lineman asked us to give him money for repairing our phone lines, we did so, although he was getting a salary to do it. When the electric man said that he could fix our meter so that it would show only a third of the actual energy consumed by us, we readily paid him to do it. When we saw a tree being cut down, we did not protest. We buy smuggled or stolen goods without realizing that every time we do so, the nation suffers a loss. Our brothers in East Pakistan were being slaughtered ruthlessly but we said, “It’s all Indian propaganda.” We did not say a word when we saw our crooked leaders going for Umrah at state expense, and we were silent when billions were taken away and stashed in foreign bank accounts. We see our fellow Pakistanis being bombed and we do not have the courage to tell our leaders that what they are doing is damaging the country beyond repair.

And because we are spineless cowards, we get the leaders that we deserve. And if we do not change, and remain silent when we see injustice around us, we’ll lose our freedom because we do not deserve to be free.

Other posts by Shakir Lakhani

• No limit on foreign exchange taken out of Pakistan - November 12th, 2008
• Some questions about the "forex" scandal - November 11th, 2008
• Enjoying life after sixty - November 7th, 2008
• A Hussein in the White House - November 5th, 2008
• Why are poor Pakistanis always punished? - October 31st, 2008
• Pakistan's Economic Crisis: we're responsible - October 29th, 2008
• How Wall Street operates - October 23rd, 2008
• We’ll always have corruption - October 19th, 2008
• If Pakistan goes to war with United States of America - October 9th, 2008
• Killing of Christians in Secular India - October 1st, 2008