It is huge. It is round. And it hates Pakistanis. Do you know what it is? It is the world.
I know that I am the citizen of the most amazing country in the world. I love my country, I will always defend its honor, and I will give every last drop of my blood for it. ‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave!’ But I also love it when I come back to Pakistan during my winter holidays. And I do not want the military establishment of Pakistan to sell the country to America. That is unacceptable. They should only sell our country to Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, China.
At a time when the Taliban are hurting Pakistan’s global image through a smear campaign in which they openly admit they were trained in Pakistan, and the country is imploding because of problems of law and order, an energy crisis and a weakening economy, we need the world’s greatest minds to sit down and devise a plan to save the country.
This scribe is amongst the greatest minds in the world, and presents the following simple solutions to the country’s most crippling problems.
Problem:
When the night will fall and the whole world will be dark, there will be some blessed homes that will glow like stars in the sky. These will be the homes that have a UPS.
Hours of paralyzing power outages should not worry Pakistan’s citizens and businessmen. There is light at the end of the tunnel. But it has been switched off to save electricity.
Solution:
The solution to this apparently crippling problem is surprisingly simple. All it needs is a college student who can switch a light bulb on and off as fast as possible to make a world record of the most number of times a bulb was switched off and back on in a minute. This record must be recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.
It is pertinent to mention here that regardless of what your parents told you when you were young, this practice will not cause the bulb to fuse. Before you go and confirm this online, I must also break to you that sitting too close to the television does not weaken your eyesight. Yes. They lied.
Problem:
Pakistan has made great sacrifices in the war on terror, by siding with the same militants who killed about 50,000 of its citizens. And we have lost a number of great heroes who laid their lives for their cause, sometimes even before they could finish making their bombs.
But fear or denial is not the answer to this problem.
Solution:
Pakistan can regain its lost face in the global community, if a retired military man could do the highest number of squats in one minute while standing on one leg, wearing a civilian shoe on one foot and holding the constitution in the other. This too, must be recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.
In case that might not be possible, Pakistan could also claim the record for the highest number of attempts at using religiously motivated terrorist groups to exert influence in other countries without learning the lesson that it just won’t work. The Guinness Book of World Records declined to comment, but an official told this scribe privately that the record might have been registered and published in a large number of history books.
Problem:
The state of the economy is so bad, that this scribe would want to demand that the finance minister resign. But then, it might be worth remembering that it may not be possible for the unfortunate soul to find a new job in this economy.
One Taliban source divulged to this scribe that the militants had decided to stop all attacks on civil and military infrastructure in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa until it was upgraded to a decent level.
A recent famine in Sindh was so devastating that it shocked Bilawal Bhutto Zardari when he found out that there was a district called Tharparkar.
Solution:
According to reports, a fat school child has already made the world record for eating the most number of Naans in one minute, during the recent Youth Festival in Punjab.
The Guinness Book of World Record said the very next morning, that the boy succeeded in appearing in the book for the second time, under the most traumatizing restroom experience of all times.
The author has a degree in Poetics of Prophetic Discourse and works as a Senior Paradigm Officer.
Email:harris@nyu.edu
Tweets at:@cyborgasms