The PTI government has completed two years in office. Can you feel the change? Imran Khan has said that you can. That means you can, and I for one will not say any different. What the change means, is another matter. If it means eating less flour and products using sugar as an ingredient, then he’s succeeded in certain terms.
All this talk of a wheat shortage and a sugar dearth shouldn’t be used to conceal the fact that both are bad for you as they are likely to give us diabetes. World Diabetes Day is commemorated every November 14, and this year, Imran himself should be the chief guest at the main function. By putting flour and sugar out of the reach of the ordinary man, Imran has prevented so many Pakistanis from developing the disease which not only is a precursor of high blood pressure and heart disease, but also a predisposing condition for Covid-19 infection, and death.
Imran knows about diabetes, you see, from having managed Waseem Akram, his second greatest discovery (the greatest being Usman Buzdar), who is a diabetic.
Imran isn’t entirely happy with his contributions to medical science in the field of diabetes treatment but is also upset at Mian Nawaz Sharif’s great escape, and his pretensions of being ill. Nawaz somehow got the medical board constituted by the Punjab government to certify that he could only be treated abroad, even though Imran could form pictures of him in the air ambulance that he was doing just fine, not to forget the shot of the back of Mian Nawaz’s head in a restaurant. Thus, Imran established his credentials as a great diagnostician, greater than Dr W.G. Grace, the last doctor to play Test cricket.
Test cricket is going on, and luckily for Imran, neither of his two potential successors, Shaheen Shah Afridi or Naseem Shah, has done much. True, Zac Crawley has scored almost the highest for anyone making a maiden hundred for England, but ask any PTI supporter and he would tell you that if Imran had been playing, Crawley would have been dismissed in pretty short order.
Well, COAS Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa didn’t have time to watch cricket with his efforts to get Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia back on an even keel. And those efforts succeeded. Anyone who disagrees must immediately change his mind, or NAB will come after him.
Unfortunately, the Saudis didn’t show him as much respect as a Pakistani COAS deserves. The Saudis should remember that the British Indian Army, which is the Army from which the Pakistan Army was carved out, played a key role in the fight against the Ottomans, which the Saudi founder Abdul Aziz ibn Saud joined.
However, in a slightly post-Ottoman development, some splinter groups have rejoined the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP). I wonder if they know that the TTP is as banned as them. It’s an old trick if you’ve been banned, set up another organisation. Businesses could use the same method to avoid paying taxes, but I suppose they don’t want to lose brand loyalty.
I mean, if Usman Buzdar was a drinking man, would he want to put Kakicola in his liquor instead of Cocacola, if the latter ever got banned?
The reference against him on the issuing of a liquor licence seems to have yielded a lot of information about the alcohol-induced hoax present within the Punjab government, which also explains why Mian Nawaz got away. Not because anybody was corrupt or incompetent, but because everyone was too sozzled to do anything but desperately sign while Buzdar watched, fighting off the sudden urge to go to the nearest toilet bowl and start heaving. The DG Excise says he issued the license because the CM told him. The CM has not taken the defense that he was slurring too much, or that the DG is in no position to remember what happened, being too fuddled at the time, but has simply said the DG acted off his own bat, possible. If a man has had enough, there’s no telling him what he’ll do.
In fact, our being a dry country might explain why we are not as badly hit by the coronavirus. We don’t have any bars or any other places where we can get so badly sloshed we can’t walk. We don’t have any place where we can have fun, defining fun as imbibing so much alcohol that one or more sensory centers shut down. I suppose, instead, we have just the opposite: religious congregations. But there seems to be nothing to beat a bar, where not only is everyone getting wasted, but the music is on really loud, and you have to shout to be heard (thus increasing the chances of getting infected).
Let’s hope we get a vaccine soon, not that we’ve got the greatest of records when it comes to vaccines. Instead of eradicating polio, we have to have its vaccine teams arrested by cops, and team members are at risk of being killed. I wonder if that will happen to the Covid-19 vaccinators.
Maybe that’s why Buzdar wanted the liquor license issued. So that vaccinators who’ve made it through the day have a place to go to unwind.
from Pakistan Today
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