The Amazing T-Pad

High literacy under a tree

Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
—William Shakespeare, describing the second stage of Man in ‘As You Like It’

The one who introduced me to the amazing t-Pad was my mother’s only brother, a bespectacled man over six feet tall and a lawyer by profession. The exact year of this story is unimportant; suffice to say that Steve Jobs was still learning how to spell the word apple and humans had not yet learnt to camp outside shops to buy phoney temptations.

In those days, schools genuinely taught a thing or two, education had not become money-minting ‘information technology’, school-teachers never ran private tuition-centres, and the students lived happily ever after even if they secured less than straight A’s in examinations. 

This was when people received landline calls with great courtesy and noted down messages for those away from home, children played with each other for real, and street-smartness had not been assigned the rearmost seat in the theatre of life. In an era when industrialized nations had attained scientific prowess through education in their national languages, an elitist minority in the ‘land of the pure’ (Pakistan) ensured that Urdu emerged as the national language at the expense of richer regional languages. And George Orwell, having told revolutionary truths in his masterpiece novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, had already passed away and left us at the mercy of watchful Big Brothers obsessed with transforming the entire world into a Dystopia.

Strange ink-fellows

There were, in the ‘land of the pure’ two kinds of schools: Urdu-medium and English-medium. The Urdu ones meant for the masses used less glamorous teaching aids and sometimes taught in regional languages which, to the chattering elites, were ‘what domestic servants conversed in’. And the English ones produced future rulers who normally spoke English only within the school’s perimeter. The Irish Catholic missionaries who ran our school introduced paper and pencil to the students from the very beginning. A few years later when we bade farewell to innocent pencils, rubbers (erasers) and sharpeners to welcome the mighty fountain pen, some of us had still not seen what was designed to become less mighty than a sword: a ball-point pen.

Improving one's hand

Too young to know how the French writer, Marquis de Sade, derived pleasure by way of pain, we nevertheless turned our fountain pens—a modern pleasure—into menacing instruments to settle scores by staining our victims’ light blue shirts with dark blue jets of ink. No instruction manuals came with our writing implements; boys just knew how to unscrew the pen’s cap, hold the pen like a charging sword, and then rapidly jerk the nib in the direction of the intended target. Once the scapegoat reached home he received a severe reprimand from the laundrywoman: usually his mother.

Education was a serious matter. Because teachers loved copybooks filled with correctness, scribbling meant survival and failure led to instant corporeal punishment which was as readily available as oxygen to the lungs. To end up being inkless in class was the modern equivalent of having one’s mobile phone run out of credit or battery power. Those who habitually forgot their inkpots at home unashamedly begged for drops of ink in the middle of diligent pen-pushing periods. Instead of relying on audio-visual cues, every boy used extra-sensory PENception to tell when a brother was in need of ink. The donor, after mentally calculating how much one’s own ink chamber would last during the period, usually obliged by transferring an amount of ink that was directly proportional to the strength of friendship with the recipient.

Since all of God’s creatures knew how to go forth and multiply, our ink-chambers too competed wholeheartedly in the race for survival of the fullest. We were like air force pilots who performed air-to-air refuelling, we were ink-transfer artists who prided in returning home without soiling our uniforms or limbs with tell-tale ink marks. Later in life, only the bad artists amongst us faced domestic violence when they reached their homes with lipstick-stained shirt collars. The following episode will demonstrate how laughable our theoretical knowledge about the reproductive nature of life was at that tender age.

One morning, a teacher noticed two back-benchers ‘fidgeting about’ in the classroom. Angrily he waved his thin cane at them, “YOU two! Stand up!”

The aggrieved party stood up to protest, “Sir, he said that I was born when my father injected his ink into my mother.”

The whole class and the teacher produced roaring laughter because the teary-eyed complainant’s father actually owned a stationery shop.

Simca for the loveless

Such and other unmentionable anecdotes taught us one thing: throughout history the value of manly activity-based camaraderie ranked higher than womanly emotional sharing. How could have we possibly toned down our male attitudes when no crystal ball had shown us our future wives detesting us for unwrapping ourselves from around their fingers to sit with old school friends?

Moths around a candle

All young male teachers and the entire students’ fraternity blew their dickies and bonnets on the day the principal installed young Madame Shama Utarid as class-teacher of our naughty all-boys grade five. Always driven by her mother, our teacher’s means of transportation was an early 1960’s camel-brown Simca 1000 of French origin. There was no other Simca on the city roads and there certainly was no other quite like Madame Shama in the entire world.

She ended up living up to her first name which meant candle in Urdu language. Daily she fended off fifty moths that pretended to be good students but in reality only craved for her fragrant proximity. The naughtier ones regularly used the Ma’am-I-do-not-understand-this trick, which required Ma’am to alight from her high desk, walk right up, bend over dangerously and attempt to explain innocently what we already knew. The principal stayed unaware of the fact that our beloved teacher had unintentionally turned a regular class into an imaginative crush factory.

Knowledge with Virtue

The boys used Royal Blue ink while all the teachers used red; I switched to green. From behind the stack of copybooks placed on Madame Shama’s desk, when she smiled I knew my handiwork had unveiled itself before her all-knowing eyes. Her frequent ten-out-of-ten tokens of admiration always arrived with golden stars of encouragement affixed to my copybooks, while her red artistic signature beautifully complimented my green efforts. And thus, through the miracle of my green ink I became her favourite student within a remarkably short span of time, and which turned my envious class-fellows into little green Martians.

During summer morning classes some of our less loved teachers resembled dreamy-eyed Buddhas—courtesy the sleep-inducing lassi (milk and yogurt cold drink) they gulped at breakfast. While pretending to be alert to our mischief, the illumined ones kindly permitted some to absent themselves from the class under the umbrella of the pen-wash excuse. The sages amongst us had already concluded without sitting under Banyan trees that like all human beings, pens needed washing too. The water-coolers, located at a central location in the school’s vast compound, facilitated staying away from tedious learning for almost ten full minutes—a great luxury considering that the single authorized half-break lasted a miserly fifteen minutes during which we chatted while playing, and visited Mushtaq’s tuck-shop for samosas (fried local patty with potato filling) and chilled small Cokes that burst open with loud pops.

Simca for the elites

The ritual of repeatedly filling the pen with water, pumping out the gradually diluting ink and then watching it enter the drain was more relaxing than practising yoga. This frolic sometimes ended abruptly when a temperamental teacher suddenly appeared in the rear and shouted into our sensitive eardrums, “WHAT are you doing wasting time HERE? GO BACK to your classroom AT ONCE!”

We dutifully acknowledged the command with a barely audible ‘yes sir’, and then prayed silently to an Authority much higher than the school’s principal, “I hope you fall down the bloody stairs, SIR!” None of the sirs ever tripped or fell, and which proved they were being protected by God’s senior guardian angels.

Uncle gifts me a t-Pad

It was a time when the written word reigned supreme, real letters required the use of ink upon paper and bathed in perfume if one were in love, relentless texting and e-mail had not sounded the death-knell for the postmen, and cultural invasion and mental slavery had not yet encouraged students to sell kidneys in order to buy costly communications devices. LED was an acronym for love-emitting darling, the interactive touchscreen was always the face of the beloved, family-men never lost small fortunes buying rapidly changing mobile phone models, and every child appeared happy-go-lucky. They were truly wonderful times.

For this story I derived the term, t-Pad, from an Urdu word: takhti. This was a plank nearly a quarter of an inch thick, made out of long-lasting Sheesham (tahli/Tali/ٹالی or Indian Rosewood), measuring about ten inches in depth by twenty inches in width, and sporting a pentagonal handle at one end. When Urdu-medium schoolboys fought bloody after-class battles, they swung these planks at one another without restraint. And just like today’s electronics devices, a takhti too required certain accessories: light-grey coloured lumps of clay (gachni), a pen made out of thin bamboo sticks, ink crystals, and an inkpot.

Shape of the takhti

One summer afternoon, my uncle brought me the above articles and sat down to show what to do with them. “Your Urdu handwriting needs improvement”, he pronounced the judgement while cleaning the t-Pad.

Had he been alive today, he might have cringed seeing touchscreens, peoples’ robotic expressions, their inability to correctly spell full words, and the shameless labelling of all good things in life as ‘old-fashioned waste of time’.

Then my uncle placed a lump of grey clay in a bowl, poured some water to liquefy it, and with a rag applied it to the t-Pad using careful horizontal strokes. “Go and place the takhti in the sun to dry”, he commanded while shaping with a knife a thin bamboo stick, “This is your new qalam (pen).”

He drew on the t-Pad wide horizontally lines suitable for Urdu text using a pencil and a foot-ruler, poured some water over the black ink crystals placed in a dawaat (inkpot), dipped the bamboo pen in it, and carefully wrote alif in Urdu (‘A’ in English). To my untrained eye it only looked like a vertical line but then he showed me how to properly shape it by varying the pen’s angle. Being able to write beautifully was soon going to land me in serious trouble.

Daily I sat under my uncle’s watchful eyes to master the upright alif with a pen whose screeching over the t-Pad produced sounds fit for horror films. The complexity increased with the introduction of each new alphabet, and I finally began to appreciate the manual dexterity, concentration and patience required for calligraphy in Khatt-e-Nastaleeq (Persian-Arabic script).

Calligraphy

By the second week I had mastered the first three alphabets: alif, bay, and pay (A, B and P). My uncle rewarded me with a kulfi (traditional ice-cream covered with crushed almonds and beaten silver foil), “Here are four Annas. Fetch two kulfees from the kulfi-wala; one for you and one for me”.

There was no shame involved in slaving for a snack. More lessons and kulfees followed and by the end of the summer vacations I could write complete sentences on the amazing wooden t-Pad. This made my uncle happy too; his eyes lit up one evening but it turned out those were his thick spectacles which reflected the light of a 60-watt incandescent bulb that glowed without a shade on the discoloured wall.

Although I frequently protested to my mother about not getting enough time to play outside with the neighbourhood boys, what terminated those daily khuskhati (artful writing) lessons were two consecutive inglorious incidents. First, during a fight and in true Urdu-medium fashion, I cracked open the skull of a fellow with my wooden t-Pad. My mother shielded me successfully from my uncle’s wrath.

Second, a girl living next-doors inspired me to praise her lips and eyes in an ‘inappropriate’ calligraphic letter that was personally delivered to her on our common rooftop. Lightening always strikes the poor; she played the return-to-sender trick on yours truly. The generously perfumed communiqué boomeranged directly to my father’s bureau, and which made him promptly decorate my left cheek with a five-pointed medal of dishonour: a reddish imprint of his stern hand.

With such a life-altering experience under the belt, I swiftly put myself on a path less calligraphic in nature and bent over backwards to shower much-expected seriousness on unfinished homework.

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2013

I gratefully acknowledge using the images from:
http://www.starfieldobservatory.com/Nambour/Schooling.htm
http://www.philseed.com/simca1000.html
http://ucapusa.com/lost_marques_simca.htm
Child in a field (graphite on takhti,by Manzoor Ali Solangi)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Learning_Arabic_calligraphy.jpg

Pied Pipers Out Of Hell

Pied Piper of Hamelin

Every earthly comfort is a test; we are surrounded by temptations. The Qur’an clearly warns us with the following verses about wealth, spouses and children by labelling them ‘adornments’, ‘tests’, ‘enemies’ because these temporary joys rank lower than the gifts awaiting all believers in jannah (heaven).

(18:46) Wealth and children are an adornment of this, world's life: but good deeds, the fruit whereof endures forever, are of far greater merit in thy Sustainer's sight, and a far better source of hope.

(63:9) O YOU who have attained to faith! Let not your worldly goods or your children make you oblivious of the remembrance of God: for if any behave thus - it is they, they who are the losers!

(64:14) O YOU who have attained to faith! Behold, some of your spouses and your children are enemies unto you: so beware of them! But if you pardon [their faults] and forbear, and forgive - then, behold, God will be much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace. (64:15) Your worldly goods and your children are but a trial and a temptation, whereas with God there is a tremendous reward.

Our children, our future

We rejoice when our children score much-hyped straight A’s in the British educational system, we proudly announce when they proceed abroad for further higher studies (indoctrination), we become sad but pretend we are happy when they decide to stay abroad to make more money than they would if they were in Pakistan, we break down and weep in private as senior citizens when the apples of our eyes decide to permanently make their fortunes abroad. Is there a more schizophrenic society in the world than ours?

Our precious children are bright because we feed and educate them through hard-earned money. But the elitist schools and many faithless parents prepare the youth to look westwards for solutions to all their problems; the entire system works to export them as ‘cooked and ready to eat’ produce of Pakistan. Once abroad, they either forget Pakistan entirely or pretend, after taking oaths of allegiance to foreign countries, that they are still loyal to Pakistan.

The current issue of people with dual nationalities wishing to vote in Pakistan is a serious one and needs to be understood fully. If one studies the citizenship oaths of America, Canada, or Australia, one will be shocked to learn that from taking up arms against other nations to spying are some of the ‘privileges’ couched in legal language. No matter what freedoms the inter-governmental treaties provide, one cannot simultaneously be the captain of two ships, or dine with God in the afternoon and wine with the devil in the evening. This is conflict of interest as one cannot be patriotic to two radically different systems. One’s motherland need not have two fathers.

American mouse-trap

Under no circumstances must parents allow children’s minds or bodies to be hijacked. The entire Pakistani nation is a family that must be physically guarded by the armed forces, and who in turn must realize that the country was dreamt by a poet-thinker and not by a military-man, and it was carved on the world map by a lawyer’s efforts and not by a judge or a bureaucrat.

What purpose does it serve any state organ to place itself on a high pedestal and beyond public reproach? If true Islamic laws were to be implemented in Pakistan, would they permit contempt of court or defamation proceedings to protect the egos of the judges and the soldiers?

By bringing the corrupt to account (be they politicians, judges, generals or others), the Pakistani judiciary will indeed be able to apologize to the nation for legitimizing numerous military dictatorships so loved by the 'democracy' exporters of the world.

Seed-killers

Recall how the death of Arfa Kareem (14 January 2012), at age 16, brought grief and unity to Pakistanis. Arfa, who died naturally, was the youngest Microsoft IT person in the world. She was a Pakistani computer prodigy who, in 2004 at the age of nine years, became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). Bill ‘Microsoft’ Gates regretted her exit out of the ‘Windows’ of life.

But who is Bill really? The world’s top billionaire-turned-philanthropist, Bill, and his wife Melinda Gates run a foundation that ‘helps’ the poor with a simple covert formula: no poor must remain alive in Africa. They encourage the starving Africans to give up subsistence organic farming and sow instead GM crops (genetically modified organisms) which are designed to destroy the environment as well as humanity through slow poisoning. Bill owns 500,000 shares of the killer American chemical company, Monsanto, that created Agent Orange, DDT, Aspartame, PCBs, dioxins, BGH (bovine growth hormone), and GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

Users of the Windows operating system must know that Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are strong advocates of Monsanto and work diligently for the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma) by funding global vaccination programmes under the guise of ‘better health’—notice how seldom is the term ‘immunization’ used.

What they are vaccinating us all with is now an open secret of the global killer organizations that propose to ‘maintain humanity under 500 million with perpetual balance with Nature’. This idea, engraved in stone by the anonymous builders of the Georgia Stones of USA, proposes to ‘save Mother Earth’ through various global depopulation plans of putting to sleep the teaming billions.

Despite the fact that there is enough food to support fifty billion human beings on God’s green Earth, we are sold the lie that claims ‘over-population leads to global hunger’. For now, it appears that only the poor will die protecting their homes and children from the invasive interventions in education and health sectors; the rest will fly off to Canada, England, England, USA, or to whatever country grants them citizenship.

Monsanto’s patented technology seeds cannot be saved like natural seeds. The company enslaves poor farmers who end up borrowing money from banks to pay for the killer seeds and to later mop up failed crops. Each year the poor must buy new seeds and pay not only for expensive chemical treatments but also dish out royalty for using Monsanto’s wicked products.

Thousands of farmers across India and other countries have committed suicide because of GM seeds whose produce is unfit for human consumption. Many countries have resisted Monsanto’s overtures while some have resorted to class-action lawsuits; the weak unlucky ones simply get sucked into this agricultural black hole.
Monsanto is also active in Pakistan and wants farmers to grow genetically modified cotton and corn. Its executives are extremely well-paid and who ensure their mouthpieces frequently assure our sleeping leaders that ‘it is safe’ to sell our souls to Monsanto when it is just the opposite. Notice how the quality of available fruits has dropped in Pakistan; our organically-grown produce is being exported for dollars while GM products are imported to ruin the national health.

Wherever the multinationals are opposed, they turn their guns on the ‘resistance’. On 18 October 2012, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, where since March 2011 more than 70,000 people have been killed in the pseudo ‘conflict’, issued a law banning GM food to preserve human life. We need people like Indian female scientist and anti-GMO activist, Vandana Shiva,and organizations such as Organic Consumers Association because Monsanto chases after poor organic farmers with their ‘seed police’ and lawsuits. Read about Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s fight with Monsanto, and watch the David versus Monsanto video of the legal battle to understand what is truly going on under our dining tables.

Terrorized New World

In 1961, the always blunt Prince Philip co-founded a charity called WWF (World Wildlife Fund); his other partner in the ‘sustainable development’ fraud at the United Nations was Julian Leonard Huxley. Prince Philip’s opinion about death—whose real meaning we shall shortly see—is:

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

Aldous Leonard Huxley the author of ‘Brave New World’, had a brother: Sir Julian Sorell Huxley who became UNESCO’s head for the Eugenics programme. His race improvement racial supremacy idea successfully entered Adolf Hitler’s head who transformed covert American aid—thanks to Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush—into bullets and bombs.

Julian hailed from a noted family and worked as an officer with the British Intelligence. He was very highly awarded for his pro-Darwin evolutionary outlook and population reduction theories. Julian resigned his chair as professor of zoology at King’s College London to work with writer H. G. Wells who wrote in 1940 in his book The New World Order:

Georgia Guide-Stones, USA

“Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it.”

During his lectures in America, Julian advocated Britain’s involvement in WW-II. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was pro-war but Hitler tried to prevent destruction through King Edward. Oddly enough, Edward married twice-divorced all-American ‘common woman’ Mrs Simpson and instead abdicated the throne. A few weeks after Julian’s lecture tour, Pearl Harbour ‘just happened’, America was dragged into WWII, and lucky Julian became UNESCO’s first director general in 1946. A racist to the core, he was one of the signatories of the Godless evolutionist Humanist Manifesto. Also read the Eugenics Manifesto of 1939 which he signed.

Killers in white coats

Surely, the devil is in the detailed agendas of global organizations. Today, the family in particular and societies in general are directly threatened by the ruling globalists whose wombs are either barren or produce worthless fruit. The imams (prayer leaders) or the tribal leaders in Pakistan continue to persuade parents to avoid giving polio vaccines to their children for reasons given in this article. But to tackle such road-blocks, the globalists pay influential political figures and media personalities to promote vaccination campaigns. But with rucksacks full of dollars coming in, do not be surprised if even the opposition begins to crumble. Money will buy anybody—well, almost.

2007-2012 Air-Power statistics

Polio is not the common cold that one might catch if another person sneezed. 144 reported Polio cases in 2010 should not cause alarm bells to ring in Pakistan. What alarms the de-populators is that not enough people are dying. When 212 pilgrims died at Makkah despite being vaccinated, did the Arabian authorities take the kind of emergency steps we are undertaking?

More people die in road accidents each year, should we stop building cars and roads? At its January 2012 meeting, the Executive Board of the World Health Organization in ‘recognizing the fragility of progress, and the importance of finishing eradication declared polio eradication a programmatic emergency for public health’. Their Emergency Plan (effective from May 2012) placed ‘emphasis on the aggressive application of lessons learned in India to the remaining polio affected areas within an emergency context.’

The WHO officials have repeatedly threatened ‘Pakistanis to be banned from travelling abroad if their country fails to control polio’. But their threats produce more refusals in the resistance belt of Wana-Waziristan-Afghanistan, and encourage beatings, abductions and killing of some from their 220,000 strong vaccination staff who are out to ‘target 34 million Pakistan children under five’.

As of this writing, the WHO is airing plans to not only force-inject our children but also to re-vaccinate them upon arrival in countries they land in. The Polio target countries are Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria (all with abundant natural resources). This article does not condone extremism but what needs to be understood is that our children are being force-vaccinated by the government instead of being forced-fed with healthy food and forced-sent to decent schools. Polio vaccination workers are being attacked and killed while ‘doing their duty’ because the foreign Pharaohs are bent upon killing our firstborns by ensuring that a diseased and sterile generation replaces the current one.

There is enough food for every human being on the planet; only the distribution is wrong. The World Food Program claims it is ‘Fighting Hunger Worldwide’.

Note that the weapons of those who wish us dead are: dangerous chemicals in ‘processed’ food, carcinogenic diagnostic dyes extracted from ‘nuclear waste’, prescription medicines with dangerous side-effects, genetically-modified seeds and killer vaccination programmes that claim to ‘save’ us.

This giant octopus has a million arms and its idea of fighting hunger is to eliminate the hungry through debt enslavement, economic collapses, takeovers of natural resources, brain-drains, artificial famines and sponsored wars—the age-old formulae now in a ‘new improved’ package. To top it off, all the guilt for the world’s current ills—fake ‘global warming’, for instance—is placed on the public’s shoulders. The secret programmes continue unabated because almost all governments are signatories to these swindles of the millennium.

Those who have read George Orwell will recognise that the World Food Programme is designed to create famines and the World Health Organization to promote diseases and death through spread of manufactured viral pandemics and epidemics. Their fear mongering keeps us away from organic food to instead crave for chemical-laden products manufactured by multinational food companies. Within a generation, people have turned to branded bread, milk, and water. Gone are most good things in life. Cancer and heart disease are on the rise everywhere but ironically the cures are not radiation and poisonous chemotherapy. Healthy food is the real medicine; one need not breathe the last in a cancer patients’ ward.

The lying mainstream media

Every day the mass media disseminates untruths about the polio programme instead of providing us with details about these efforts. Our children belong to us and only we, the parents, should make informed decisions when given truthful choices. Only in a Communist country does the State own children and forces official abortions. Those who mistrust western efforts to ‘civilize’ and ‘sanitize’ us surely know from reliable sources what the education-mania (mind-control) and health-scare game is all about. Bird-flu, Dengue-fever, polio, and now measles, how much more germ-warfare will they wage to make us very ‘healthy’?

If uneducated tribal fighters are considered ‘threats to regional peace’, how shall we rate the over-educated manipulators that dwell in the capitols of the world and pose much greater threats to humanity? Five out of seventeen Euro-Zone countries are on the verge of total economic collapse but do the banks care if the people protest? Instead bankers roam about freely and crooked politicians bail out usurious collapsing financial institutions.

Who is ultimately right, the bearded bunch that wears shalwaar-qameez suits or the clean-shaven ones in Italian suits? The scriptures are full of details about the destruction of the corrupt who always wrestle with God by adopting evil ideologies penned by Satan himself. The average wage-earner has nothing to do with what is wrong with the world today. The fault lies not with the one who tills his land to provide sustenance to his family but with those with all the power at their disposal bent upon destroying the whole planet.

Drones from our 'friends'

When the government leads one to war and death it is considered ‘national duty’ and ‘necessary sacrifice’ but when an individual or a group warns the public about clear dangers, he or she is considered an ‘actionable threat’ as ‘enemy of the State’. 

What is worse, being an enemy of an insane State or opposing Divine Laws meant to hold societies together? Keep in mind that even God’s Prophets faced ostracising, suffered verbal abuse, mental torture, beatings, exile and assassinations. Revealed religion is the record of official atrocities committed by ancient governments; it also foretells how the pattern will be repeated and then opposed by the masses. The real reason Godless states hate religion is because it is an organising force to be reckoned with.

Now pause to think: the mass media can help change this world overnight but why does it choose to side with well-paying devils, the NGOs and the covert agencies? And what business does impressionable Malala Yousuf Zai have hobnobbing with high-ranking globalists and dancing to the tunes of various foreign pipers? As already outlined in my three previous articles (see footnotes), Malala is the child bait. Her father has already been rewarded generously by the Crown. Rising from the slums of Swat, Ziauddin Yousuf Zai, is now the UN special advisor on global education and lives in Birmingham as a guest of the Queen. His daughter, Malala, will address the United Nations on 16 July 2013; she is sixteen years old now.

Notice how bombs explode in our mosques, how the faithful are scanned and searched at their entrances, how they are frightened by brain-eating amoeba that ‘lives in fresh water used for ablutions’. The only ones to benefit from the unsafe water scare are the bottlers of ‘safe’ drinking water—a multi-billion Dollar global industry that wants to own all rivers and springs by declaring that ‘water is not a basic human right; it is food fit to be managed only by businessmen and corporations’. All this is designed to frighten one into submission at home and glued to the television. But will this rotten scheme last forever?

The future: drones

Satan has taken upon himself to act as if he is the sole distributor of God’s Grace upon the ‘best form of creation’ (ahsan al-taqweem). Humans have always tended to listen more to the devil than to God, as evident from the pre-civilization case of Satan versus Mankind. Are there sensible minds amongst the real Taliban who can see why blowing up schools helps only our enemies? Alas, we are surrounded by the likes of Mir Jaffer and Mir Sadiq who brought an end to the stiff resistance movements of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula and Tipu Sultan against the East India Company’s meddling into Indian politics and economics.

Only a fool would ever believe what the government says. Have you ever wondered what our leaders discuss at high-level conferences relating to finance, environment and trade under the garb of ‘national security’ or ‘official secrets’? Those who believe that history ‘just happens’ and that there are no conspiracies behind key events, may skip reading this article and instead switch on their 60-inch television sets.

Finally, the following verse of the Qur’an should provide solace to peaceful ones and serve as a warning to all war-mongers:

(5:64) “…every time they light the fires of war, God extinguishes them; and they labour hard to spread corruption on earth: and God does not love the spreaders of corruption.”

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2013

References
For photos copied from various sources, I thank the original photographers.
Throughout my articles, I have used Dr Muhammad Asad’s brilliant translation: The Message of the Qur’an
Kids Rights roster of speakers
Also read my articles:
Malala Yousuf Zai: Genius Or Mouth-Piece (part-I)
Malala Yousaf Zai: Attack Of The Babbling Tongues (part-II)
Project Malala: Famous Lost Words (Part-III)
Warning To Pakistani Parents
Right Burqa, Wrong Lips
Look Ma No Pants

Ladenland: The Funniest Place On Earth

Disneyland is bound to lose its appeal in the near future to a very ‘happening’ place. The rival establishment, initially named La-La Land but now officially re-named Ladenland, is destined to be built in serene Abbotabad, a town made infamous by an American night invasion to ‘get’ Osama Bin Laden.

‘Politics is the art of the impossible’ because politicians get away with stunts that are impossible to perform by ordinary mortals. And keeping in mind that ‘politics is the entertainment branch of the military’, Osama Bin Laden created a Molotov cocktail composed of politics, religion and militancy. First, they all groomed him, then used him and abused him, went on to demonize and declare him ‘the most wanted terrorist on earth’, and finally allowed him to live in Abbotabad before mercifully despatching the US Navy Seals’ Team-6 to seal a pending fate. Rogue agents always suffer more in the end. Osama was a marked man because he rebelled against his superiors at the ‘agency’ and the ‘Made in England’ Arab men in white robes.

Officially, OBL does not occupy the top rung of the al-CIAda ladder anymore; he is now a basement resident of the Afghan Sea which itself produces huge tidal waves inside the mountains of Tora Bora. Before Osama could get to Obama, Obama got Osama; now we cannot tell the names apart. Some say the tortured soul of Osama has taken up residence inside a black body inside the White House to implement policies that fuel the towering inferno of Islamophobia.

Do you have a dream?

Everywhere the ruling Machiavellian princes know that peace is unprofitable and, considering the entertaining electronic luxuries the masses have gotten so used to, there seems to be no going back to what were once happier times. Forget what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed decades ago, instead prepare for how our government, in collusion with other foreign sponsors, is ready to declare the ‘global war on (t)error’ a cottage industry worth investing in. Our photogenic leaders cannot stop terrorism; instead they will turn it into a profitable business model. Defence Savings Certificates will become Offence Erasing Certificates, instead of Prize Bonds we will have Terrorize Bonds, imagine the points our stock markets will gain with such novel schemes.

Speaking of Osama, Zero Dark Thirty is a movie about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden—an infinitely silly production full of depictions of illegal torture, historical inaccuracies and abusive statements about Pakistan. When a female agent is asked what she thinks of Pakistan, she retorts, “Kinda f….d up place.” Or when the cover of CIA’s station-chief in Islamabad is blown, a character theorizes, "ISI f....d you."

Do not give up; read about the wonders our magnificent government has in store for us.

Tourism and sports promotion

In reality it is premature to have Ladenland built, and I will tell you why. The See-Eye-Aye (known as the ‘agency’) waited for three decades after having Che Guevara summarily executed in 1967, ordering his fingers chopped for proper identification and arranging for the remains to be buried secretly. But when his body was discovered the people declared him Saint Ernesto of Bolivia. By contrast, Osama died yesterday and will not have a mausoleum built in his memory but rather have his soul settle for an amusement park dedicated to militancy.

There is one more question we need to ask: in promoting OBL, will we be promoting the Arab way of disagreement with America? Whatever might be the true answer to that hypothetical question, only two choices exist for our politicians: plant insanely apologetic kisses on the cheeks our ‘brothers’ or amuse them to death with Ladenland amusement park.

As far as the idea of erecting a gigantic statue of OBL at the park’s entrance is concerned, the authorities are undecided about whether to place in its left hand an AK47 or the American constitution with 2011 inscribed on it. There is no denying the fact that we do need a believer’s sculpture to compete with the statue of Liberty in New York. Interestingly, Libertas, a pagan Roman goddess, was popular amongst emancipated slaves of Rome. Small wonder the ‘civilized’ western countries use pagan female figures to represent themselves. England uses only Britannia, France prefers Marianne and Libertas, but America first flirted with a native Indian princess and after a ‘complicated’ relationship with Columbia, settled for Miss Libertas.

CNN and other media parrots have shown so many doctored videos of OBL, nobody remembers what he truly looked like except his handlers. Hence, we might end up having the statue of a double agent’s own double at the main gate. In any case, the park will have seventy-two smaller gates, each manned by a fully armed virgin.

They claim the 50-acre park will take eight years to complete which is impossible because nothing lasts for one and a half government tenures in Pakistan. Both the ‘greatest country in the world’ and the Khakis will have itchy fingers if such civility is uninterrupted by a democratically-sanctioned dictatorship. The reason our widowed President got away with completing his five-year tenure is that his sponsors wished to cause maximum damage to the ‘fort of Islam’ that his late wife gifted him two seconds before being attacked by her own SUV’s sunroof.

The sole aim of the province-wide tourism and amusement promotion is similar to that depicted in the movie ‘Borat: cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan’. The project is fully private-public and will cost only $30 million which is a small price to pay to improve the image of Abbottabad where Osama Bin Laden was ‘killed’ the American way on May Day, 2011. It would probably cost fewer dollars to improve the image of our entire country.

Before the Abbotabad raid, Washington insinuated that the PMA (Pakistan Military Academy) was an amusement park because less than a kilometre away from it lived their disgruntled asset. Now that our pretty Foreign Minister has had the status of the PMA restored by the ‘US and A’, we are being pushed into building an amusement park over the rubble of the OBL compound in order to destroy the forensic evidence of coordinated wrongdoing. There was a time when people flocked to see Osama’s most wanted villa, then the visits dwindled but now with Project Ladenland firmly in the pipeline, expect to witness large crowds shouting hallelujah for Obama and Allahu Akbar for Osama.

Water, electricity and natural gas be collectively damned, we all want more bemusement through amusement. The five-stage scheme envisages a water sports complex in Khanpur-Haripur, tourism in Naran-Kaghan, and an amusing park in Abbottabad. The government insists that twenty per cent of what it will earn through such projects will be lavished on the respective area’s development; what will become of the remaining eighty per cent is best left unsaid.

Let us now preview the promised attractions of Ladenland.

A zoo

The world’s smallest zoo is expected to have only one animal in it which is not an endangered species in Pakistan: the mighty Sycophant. Visitors will get to ogle at it for hours, feed it with hollow compliments, and utter all kinds of unkind words behind its back because a rather large rear is all it has with nothing visible up front. Due to security reasons, lions and hares will not be housed in the same compound because of the Sycophant’s inclination to hunt with the former and run with the latter. The wretched animal will have many political cages around it to entertain the public with its natural skills of party-hopping, loyalty-selling and about-facing.

An adventure club

Pakistan is Marlboro country right now, an adventure club for crème de la crème of agencies with unsmiling ‘Intel Inside’. With no natural gas to heat our homes, not much of electricity in the dead of winter, and bomb-blasts and shootings obliterating the citizens, let us enquire from the Chief Justice how much more adventure can we legally have? Will foreign visitors to Ladenland experience the joy of being without all the utilities and relish wasting their lives in long queues to pay fake inflated bills?

Paragliding

Alas, this sport is no more. Visitors will not be able to glide without detection into the lush lawns of the Pakistan Military Academy during the institution’s working hours. The true thrill will be a newly invented sport called paradigm-shifting, which is believed to be far more adrenalizing than paragliding.

Restaurants

Food outlets will not cater to desires such as ‘eat all you can for $10’. Due to security reasons—and our beloved Interior Minister has given us zillions of such reasons—instead of printed menus they will have obfuscating oral summaries of what might be truly ‘cooking’ in the kitchen cabinet. Eatables will never be mentioned by name; only veiled references will be made to their existence by effeminate dancing boys from Bannu. There will be absolutely no restriction on people wishing to eat, drink and marry.

Waterfalls

Water will fall in totally unexpected ways. Here instructors imported from Guantanamo Bay will demonstrate the techniques spotlighted in the acclaimed global best-seller ‘Water-boarding Techniques for Dummies’. DVDs of extracted fairy-tale confessions
using enhanced interrogation techniques (good old torture), of mock trials and happy-meal executions will be sold at the gift-shop.

The Rides

How can Disneyland be ‘the happiest place on earth’ when Ladenland can be the funniest? We know how non-stop and exhilarating the various behemoth rides are in Disneyland but Ladenland promise all-new rides that will stop dead in their orbits or tracks during electricity load-shedding. The quality of fun associated with intermittent electrical power will be purely heart-breaking.

Expect a political roller-coaster of immense proportions that will allow riders to feel souring and warming of relationships with the world’s sole policeman, colonial masters, financial hoodwinkers and economic hit-men.

A shooting gallery will allow visitors to shoot themselves—you guessed it—in the feet and then blame it all on the ‘chosen people’.

A giant Ferris wheel with more wheels in it will allow the masses to catch a glimpse of how all governments truly operate.

Dodge ‘Em cars will enable drivers to experience the sort of escape routes that many noted Blackwater killers took to dodge our security agencies.

A merry go-round will allow merrymakers to go around a statue of George W. Bush. As an added attraction, the public will get to stone the high-profile devil.

Heritage Centre 

Heritage means ‘something inherited from the past’ and not incessantly dreaming of Muslim glory in medieval Spain, living in the past or insisting that God will help us in the near future even if we did not help ourselves. There is no end to our national follies. If one looked around today, whatever little heritage the masses once had has been usurped by the authorities. The worst example of this is the outlawing of the annual spring kite-flying festival in the province of Punjab. Now nobody can tell an elected representative to go fly a kite.

The post-9/11 heritage is an imported one: of killing those who disagree with religious or political views and of blowing up those who oppose terrorism and extremism. In Ladenland’s museum expect to see meticulous displays of designer suicide jackets that will spoil any party, ball-bearing collections, vending machines of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), miswaak collections (twigs of certain trees such as peelu or olive that have been used by Muslims for centuries to clean their teeth), and lota collections (a utensil for washing the hindquarters without resorting to wiping it all with just toilet paper).

The planners have already waxed eloquent about having a Madame Tussauds’ like museum for displaying life-size wax sculptures of noted international terrorists, financial criminals and political animals. 

Running tracks

Running is serious business. Famous ‘pardoned’ criminals will show how to evade the iron hand of the law, the law-enforcers will demonstrate how to dodge the terrorists’ bullets, and NRO-certified crooks will demonstrate how to evade the Chief Justice’s Suo Moto actions.

In conclusion

How can Hollywood claim it entertains when it only projects Washington’s deadly plans in action-thriller movies? Sending their ‘boys’ into the jungles and mountains of Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and just about every other country on the globe may secure natural resources for wasteful Americans but such acts also make their hedonistic way of life not loved but truly hated.

Why is it alright for governments to commit treasonous acts but never stand trials? Are laws made to protect the people or their overbearing governments? Washington insists her killer remote-controlled drones save American lives, her assassinations are legal, and that no wrong is ever done in global hunts for suspects. God’s Eternal Law states that His wrath visits nations that attempt to impersonate Him on earth.

In conclusion, the only way to achieve progress, attract foreign investment, and generate jobs in one’s hometown might be to shelter an internationally wanted person, and then betray him to the masterminds of the global war of (t)error. Of course, it is a preposterous idea but it is an idea whose time has finally come.

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2013

For your reading pleasure:

Hotel Abbotabadia (a song parody of ‘Hotel California’ by the American country-rock band, Eagles) 
Osama Bin Laden: Letter To The American People 
Al-Qaeda: What Is It, Where Is It? (Part-I)

Pakistan plans ‘amusement city’ for bin Laden town 
For photos copied from various sources, I thank the original photographers.