Authority figures in space

My belief in authority figures has been shaken. Mothers, fathers or policemen. I’ve come to know that they can be wrong. Which means their facts can’t be trusted, but at least they can be trusted themselves. What they might be going is wildly wrong, but at least they mean well, they want the welfare of their child. You can generally trust parents and cops.

Well, not all the time. Some of the most spine-chilling reports have come in, from as far apart as Louisiana, USA, and Lahore, right here, the city these notes are usually about. In Shreveport, Louisiana, a man had a bone to pick with his wife, probably because she was seeking a divorce. It seems he went to see her, and one word led to another, until he went and shot her.

He didn’t kill her, but he went off in search of his kids, and killed all six of them when he found them at their aunt’s house, along with the aunt’s son, who was playing with them. He also shot and wounded his wife’s sister. He was shot and killed by police after a car chase.

The mother in Lahore who killed her three kids was in Shah Jamal, where she slit the throats of her three children, after her husband had accused her that the children were not his. In response, she accused him of making her go with other men.

Well, so much for parents. The cop, a former South Carolina trooper, was arrested before he went on an armed rampage in New Orleans, at a music festival, where he intended to target Black Americans. Of course, white cops killing black youths has become a common trope in the USA. But still, cops are supposed to be reassuring to victims of crimes and other innocent people, right?

The PSL is rolling along, and heading towards a final. In the meantime Fakhr Zaman has returned to the Lahore Qalandars after a two-match suspension for what one commentator called ‘bowel tampering’. That might have sounded like he had tried to mix laxative in the opposing team’s lunch, given them a case of what an English team touring to India called ‘Delhi Belly’, which is said to have made a fast bowler continue his run-up past the batsmen up the pavilion steps all the way to the john.

I suppose Fakhr would prefer that name rather than what he actually got banned for, which was ‘ball tampering.’ Why should he go, he might wonder, when David Warner, the architect of the 2017 ball tampering saga, is captain of the Karachi Kings, and Steve Smith is playing for the Multan Sultans? Are those two being entirely good boys?

There is a cocaine culture in the PSL which is now being frowned upon, thus undoing all of the good work done by Imran Khan, who as captain of the national team, and then as PM did so much to make recreation for cricketers acceptable. Not only has Doug Bracewell, the New Zealand fast bowler, been banned for two seasons, but Muhammad Nawaz has been banned too.

I see two young men have been nominated to go into space on the Chinese Space Station. PAF officers. I don’t want to start any inter-service rivalry here, but why no representation for Army Aviation? Let’s not talk of Naval Aviation.

Things are happening in space. We launched a satellite from China. Will we have an independent space programme. That entirely depends on whether we have a launching pad.