Talking about revolution

Seemingly disheartened citizens have been heartened by the word ‘revolution’ coming out of the mouth of the prime minister. A man industrialist by profession has not perhaps astonished the common consumer who has long been praying to God to send a true revolutionary from heaven to deliver ‘sasti roti’(bread) and clean drinking water for good health.

Old citizens say good health along with education is must to defend the homeland.

There are people from different walks of life who had predicted a ‘bloody’ revolution as the only elixir of all miseries afflicting masses.

Similarly, elders who as children took part in the struggle for Pakistan talk about the circumstance in which achievement of an independent and sovereign state was considered a mission. But they also tell the new generation why the object of making the new homeland a welfare entity could not be achieved as envisioned by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his comrades.

They say the aim could not be attained because of slow pace of socio-economic progress and dependence on foreign aid and loans with strings. The lack of people’s unity, faith and discipline and sporadic political fighting and change of government acted as decelerator.

The centuries-old class system has been a bottleneck in overall development of the nation, and is still regarded by experts as a hurdle in the promotion of human rights and national uplift.

City elders, patient lawyers and teachers and non-political youths emphasise the main problems we’re facing are disunity, illiteracy, unemployment and poverty in the backdrop of overpopulation which, they assert, is ‘mother of all problems’. In a nutshell, they say we’re reaping what we had sown in the past.

They say human values and brotherhood are fast evaporating and self-interest is taking their place. Lawyers and educated youths spiritually devoted to the cause of the hard-earned homeland express their anger in a different way.

“God will punish us; it’s time to wake up to reality on the ground and realize that everybody has to work willingly and collectively to rise again as a united nation and achieve economic power urgently needed for common man’s welfare; that’s the only way to bring about a revolution today,” loudly says an old vendor of Kohati Bazaar of Rawalpindi in front of Liaquat Bagh.

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