Modern slavery

Those who are ‘addicted’ to living off others become demotivated. A recent comparative study of a nation state and a set of beggars highlighted this phenomenon. The beggars unanimously agreed on the issues that bothered them the most. They said their children could not go to schools,        did not have access to clean drinking water and    had to defecate in public. They also felt that years of begging had atrophied their ability to think or perform any other task. The nation state fared far worse when compared to the beggars on the streets.         It was under a heavy external debt of $74 billion, 22.6 million children were out of school and 84 percent of its population had no access to clean drinking water.

The ‘self-acquired helplessness’ of the nation state had reached a point where it could no longer think or solve simple problems. While it boasted of nuclear bombs, it could not even clean its own cities and streets.        It had to give the garbage collection contract for Karachi to the Chinese    and that of Lahore and Islamabad to the Turks. Perhaps this 18th century English poem, “Rags make  paper, paper makes money, money makes banks, banks make   loans, loans make beggars, beggars make rags” needs to be framed and displayed in all the government offices of Pakistan.         

Naeem Sadiq

Karachi