Y’know, one of the consequences of the lockdown has been a new excuse at meals for bringing a laptop to the dinner table. “I’m doing my homework.” The kid in question then keeps on watching his or her favourite show while eating.
One of the problems with a digital classroom, online learning and all the rest of it, is that the homework is equally digital, equally online. There are other things online, like Netflix, Youtube, Dailymotion. And I might be wrong, but it seems to me that they are as essential to surviving the lockdown as mobile telephones, without which youngsters would have lost track of all of those kids who disappeared, and went back home to The Village for the duration.
The village is not necessarily the best of ideas, because the local police may have ideas of its own. Take the pair of brothers in a chak in Renala Khurd tehsil of Okara district. The came back from Gwadar because of the coronavirus. Tested, they were found positive. The local police posted a sentry. The brothers didn’t really dodge this sentry when they got tired of being confined; they hit him with a brick, and then got away. They were caught, but that showed how the police was involved in the pandemic. Those brothers probably didn’t have the money that would have convinced the guards that they should look the other way.
The Sindh government thinks that the federal government is under-reporting pandemic deaths. The federal government says that unless the person was tested positive before or after death as having the coronavirus, it didn’t mean that the person died of it. You see what that means? If you don’t test the dead, pleading that you’re saving the tests for the living, you don’t have to count that death. And if you don’t test anyone, you could get away with saying the pandemic hasn’t reached Pakistan.
That sounds like a plan that a policeman would suggest. They’re all too familiar with the practice of burking, of hiding crimes, or at least minimizing them. Y’know, calling a dacoity a theft, or terrifying witnesses into saying that the robbers were unarmed, not carrying hulking great guns, so that it isn’t an armed robbery, but an ordinary one.
The Supreme Court is also getting into the matter, wanting to know what the government is doing about it. Incidentally, it seems to be asking what the Health SAPM, Dr Zafar Mirza, is bringing to the whole matter, apart from a mane of silver hair that would be an embellishment to the Senate. To be fair to the Supreme Court, it didn’t bring up the silver mane, though it is not uncommon among their lordships.
Actually, apart from that silver mane, Dr Mirza has other qualifications, like having worked for the WHO. Of course, he is not as brilliant a diagnostician as his leader, who doesn’t need to see a patient, or even his test reports, just a photo of the back of his head. The Supreme Court has got itself in an awkward position, for its judges, while highly qualified as lawyers, have no medical qualifications. So far, the Supreme Court seems to have shown a rudimentary understanding of how things work, for it has not issued any order directing the coronavirus to desist. I’m afraid that that would be about as effective as Imran’s speech to the UN telling India to get out of Kashmir.
However, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, guess who got back into the Punjab Cabinet? Yes, Aleem Khan, who insists his friends call him ‘Hairy’ now that a hairy transplant has given him more hair than the Sharif brothers put together. Aleem Khan had left the Cabinet because he had to be arrested by NAB. Once it let him go, and once Babar Awan was taken back into the federal Cabinet, the precedent was simply too strong, and ‘Hairy’ was back in the hope that he would frighten the coronavirus into not infecting people.
It seems that his scaring abilities are what stand between us and the abyss, because the WHO is likely to subside gently, now that President Donald Trump has cut off the USA’s contribution to it. His beef is that the coronavirus is Chinese, and that China is trying to stop America being great again through it. Zapping the WHO isn’t going to help him be re-elected. But somebody pointed out that there are a lot of nationalists, like India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orban, the UK’s Johnson and Brazil’s Bolsonaro, holding office right at the time when the virus is showing us how easily borders are crossed by viruses.
Borders are what make states states. But Imran doesn’t want to do anything that makes a state a state, like look after its citizens. Why else the appeal to rich and overseas Pakistanis to donate generously? Of course, Imran knows what he’s doing. Remember how he got Pakistan its first cancer hospital? We’ve apparently got the right man to be PM.
