Degeneration of generations...

The term “shortage of memory” became popular with the advancement of computers, because as the software grew in capacity and ability, so did its volume, and requirements of available storage space and operational memory. Those of you, who used the computers in rapid development era of 1990s, must have come across this annoying situation on many occasions. But fortunately computers are man-made machines, so the developers (the industry) rapidly worked-out measures to counter this situation.

On the contrary, the human beings are unable to tackle this situation if human memory runs short of requirements. Most importantly this shortage stripes the humans of a chance to look into history, while making decisions. So their decisions or solutions become, more or less, baseless and ineffective. 

For the last few years Pakistan is facing acute power shortages, and power shortages have become an election winning topic. Unfortunately, Pakistani masses suffer from acute memory shortage, as well, so the country is unable to reach viable solutions for the given problem. For example, lots of people don’t remember or even don’t know that power shortages are not a one decade problem. These shortages started in late 70s and it was the executive body of the country, which even invented a special term for these shortages. Pakistani masses did not know the term “LOAD SHEDDING”, before the dictatorial regime of General Zia-ul-Haq coined the term, and the same masses did not know, what acute shortages were, before the same regimen introduced the taste of shortage in the daily menu of hundreds of millions of people. 

It was for the first time in Pakistan, during the dictatorial regime of Zia-Ul-Haq that Pakistani masses came across the shortage of onions.

For an agricultural country like Pakistan, it was a strange phenomenon. But lots of people never understood that it was not the result of agricultural lacking, but of misappropriation of resources.

Those who think that the American war was imposed on Pakistan post 2001, also suffer from memory shortage syndrome, because the American war was brought to Pakistan in the late 1970s. The so-called Afghan-Soviet war was in fact a battle of two super powers, in which Afghanistan was the playground; a decision not made by the citizens of Pakistan. Pakistanis never consented to fighting the war between socialism and capitalism in Afghanistan. It was the Afghan socialist party and the backward religious fundamentalist factions of Afghanistan, which brought that war onto themselves. 

But as far as Pakistan was concerned, it voluntarily became a party to the very non-Pakistani conflict. The evil regime of Zia-Ul-Haq pushed Pakistan into an American war, which apart from burdening our economy, with more than 7 million Afghan refugees to feed, also played its role in misappropriation of Pakistani resources. Pakistan funnelled 90% of its resources into military build-up (who did we buy our arms from? Americans - So we gave Americans 90% of our annual resources for imposing a war on us – great strategy!), instead of investing into agriculture, industrialization, education, healthcare or other important for people activities, which have no meaning for military juntas of Zia style dictatorships.

Those, who naively think that Pakistan fought a war of survival or fought for Islam are not only short of memory, but are very short of processing power as well. General Zia-Ul-Haq, the “great saviour” of Afghan Muslims and “fighter of Islam”, was the same person, who as commander-in-chief of Pakistani military detachment in Jordan, ran an operation to eliminate more than 25000 Palestinian Muslims, standing against the regime of Shah Hussain of Jordan. The important fact here is that Hussain was pro-American, whereas PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was supported by the Soviet Union. So Zia-Ul-Haq’s American ass-licking did not start after him becoming Chief Martial-Law administrator of Pakistan.

Coming back to our power shortage matter, let me remind you that the people of Pakistan lacked adequate reaction, when this whole affair started. Had they reacted properly at that time, maybe today we won’t be facing such problems.

Now, when we try to think of a way out of this inhuman situation, we come across a grand problem of unavailability of resources (money), to undertake power generation plans. Let me tell you that no one gave money to Soviet Union to undertake development programs. No one gave China any money to implement development plans, but these countries did develop. Localizing the situation, let’s see how many countries gave Pakistan funds to develop the nuclear program? The answer is zero. So if we could rely on ourselves to develop a nuclear program, then, why can’t we rely on ourselves to generate power? For those of you who have short memories, let me remind you that it was not the Zia-Ul-Haq regime, which implemented the nuclear program. Pakistan’s nuclear program started in early 1960s and was successfully developed under the leadership of Dr Abdul Salam, before he was removed from his post due to discriminative approach of the same evil regime.

Let me also remind you that all the sufferings that we bear due to power shortages, are not state inflicted. We as common citizens also have a part in it, except for not properly reacting and standing-up against malpractices, we have seized to build our houses according to traditional climate sensitive methods. You might be surprised to know that cavity walls were invented by builders in South Asia. Our lack of self-dependence and misappropriation of priorities has led us to building houses as per European standards, which mind you are not viable for our climatic conditions. For example in cold European countries ceiling height has to be lower, because the lower the ceiling the easier it is to heat the place. On the contrary in countries like Pakistan ceilings have to be high, because the higher the ceiling the cooler the place is without artificial cooling. In our climatic conditions premises need to have cross-ventilation provisions, but instead of increasing ventilation points, we are making houses more and more close-ended. 

So if we want to reach proper solutions for our problems, and we want to do something except for whining, we have to understand that the American war was not imposed on Pakistan by the regime of General Pervaiz Mussharaf, but by the regime of Zia-Ul-Haq. We have to remember that we don’t need any money to buy sand, cement and reinforcement steel for national projects. We have lots of these materials in Pakistan. We have to remember that God gave us life to live not to die, in misery, and most importantly we have to correct our priorities and we need to understand that nuclear technology is not only for military use. It also has a lot of peace time purposes. So, when living in an agricultural country like Pakistan, you are told that we need to import onions, because of reasons uncontrollable, don’t believe it. When you are told that one month after torrential rains in India and parts of Pakistan, we face an unexpected flood, don’t believe it. React properly to these lies and stop future derangement right in the bud!