One of the most humiliating professions is beggary. It requires sacrifice of both human ego and integrity. One needs great capacity to withstand disdain, contempt, and abuse from other fellow beings to pursue beggary. Once these problems are brazened out, though, the instinct to beg entrenches itself in human genes like a parasite and even carries on generation after generation. Countless poor people have adopted beggary as a profession today. Thousands of professional beggars, mostly alms-seekers in family hordes, encroach upon the length and breadth of Lahore in the holy month of Ramazan. Although our government has promulgated laws to stop beggary a number of times, no serious endeavour has been made to sincerely eradicate the vice. Some troupes of professional beggars, in fact, have full support of high and mighty of our elite, both in and outside government, who get their share of the booty regularly. Begging is a sin in the Islam and banned in most of the Islamic countries. About time we also tried to completely eradicate the professional parasites that crawl our landscape. -ASMA DILSHAD WARRAICH, Lahore, September 17.