If Laxmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, knew of the phenomenal profits to be made in the UPS business in Pakistan, he would abandon his steel business and start making UPS and batteries for Pakistan. The government has forced the middle class to add the brutal expense of buying a UPS for ailing parents and studying children. Every essential item, petrol, gas, ghee, name any, have gone up while new kind of expenses have cropped up causing heartaches and sleepless nights to the common man. Pakistan has become a looters' paradise; in the last 100 days, we have seen the height of unchecked, uncontrolled, unbridled loot under the very nose of a government that claims to be pro-poor. They have added to the burden of the common man by the truckloads with highest ever duties, taxes, GST, surcharges and withholding taxes. Add to all this the stupidities of their ministers (the CNG joke was cruelest of all as it also caused 31% increase in one go) and you know why the common man is complaining. The worst economic downslide of our history seems unmanageable for the present government which is going by only on rhetoric and clichs. -ZAINAB Z. RAHIMULLAH, Rahim Yar Khan, via e-mail, July 6.