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Sunday May 05, 2024

Wonder world

This is a country where a wannabe wizard had claimed to run the internal combustion engine on water and had a clutch of top politicos and TV anchors eating out of his hand, where the teeming millions are regularly regaled with news of the country sitting atop the largest reserves

By our correspondents
September 02, 2015
This is a country where a wannabe wizard had claimed to run the internal combustion engine on water and had a clutch of top politicos and TV anchors eating out of his hand, where the teeming millions are regularly regaled with news of the country sitting atop the largest reserves of practically every conceivable mineral and natural resource known to man which if (and a big if) mined properly could catapult us into the stratosphere, where the constant parroting of the millennium development mantra has got everyone glassy-eyed.
This is a country where head honchos vow to build the biggest of everything in the world, ie, the biggest steel mill in the world and bullet trains that could whiz you around the country at insane speeds, where even if you end up doing something really big like starting work on a 1,000 megawatt solar power plant, you actually mess things up because, as news reports indicate, only about 17.5 megawatt of power was produced when a 100 megawatt section of the plant was energised recently. In such a country you could be forgiven if you still wonder why the country hasn’t progressed as it ought to have despite all the furious pedalling.
Farid Nawaz
Islamabad