Be Nice to Police Wallas!

"Be Nice to Police Wallas." I know any Pakistani or person who has every felt wronged by our esteemed law enforcement agency will have a severe intestinal spinning reaction to this statement, but just bear with me. We Really Should be Nice to the Police, especially in Pakistan. Now, based on overwhelming consensus, most are corrupt and there may be a shortage of traditional honesty in the ranks, but one can contend that even the corrupt ones deserve to be treated with respect, and for the few occasions where one actually encounters an honest cop, they ought to appreciate the rarity.

Why? because frankly, they do a lot for us which we either  ignore or don't appreciate their work as they are merely 'doing their jobs'.CEO's get big bonuses for good performances, police wallas get.....squat. The truth is that, we, the Pakistani populace is part of the problem. If this was a business, we'd be the annoying customers who everyone unequivocally hates. Let's be honest, we all love to bitch and whine about our corrupt bribe taking gun toting Cops, but we fail to consider the circumstances that they operate in. All in all, their lives suck.

Perpetually disrespected: Let's face it, no one respects the work that cops really do in terms of maintaining law and order. We have some cultural mindset defect that at the first sign of trouble we want the Rangers to be brought into the city to save us with their big guns and heavy equipment. My driver even mentioned at a recent traffic jam near the Sheraton that if the rangers were brought in to manage traffic that traffic jams would become extinct.

I'm a particular fan of the traffic police who ensure the smooth-ish flow of traffic on Karachi's law breaking roads, with the only tools at their disposal being their flapping arms and their ability to fearlessly navigate a stream of fast paced cars that insist on hitting their breaks less than a few feet away from them. And yet they stand solid in front of cars with little regard to their own well being. If this was any other profession we'd consider this grounds for dismissal on the grounds of mental health.

Bare bones authority is their modus operand um: the police get overruled on a whim by everyone. Why? Because they have no desire to get fired for correctly fining a person for breaking the law, just because the violators are well connected. In fact all you have to do is throw a few big names (the term General Saahib works quite well) and then they'll usually let you go. Driving an expensive imported car helps too. The only people they actually really bother are the poor and middle class, who aren't exactly flush with cash.

Considering how little they get paid and food prices sky rocketing on a whim coupled with how dangerous their jobs are, I do to some degree sympathize with them, as much as I hate corruption on a personal level, it's difficult to imagine how else they would make their ends meet. After all, it's not like they live the Espresso Life. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Perpetually scared for your life. Naturally, Gangsters, mobsters, looters, Taliban and the other pillaging thugs of Pakistan like nothing better than to have the police butt out of their affairs. Which the police is largely happy to do via soft understandings which may or may not include exchanges of cash/services complete with the logic that it's better for the various Mafia's to wipe each other out. Add to the fact that the mafia is usually better armed than the cops are.

It isn't uncommon for the Police to be lynched by the very mob that they are trying to protect: The Common mob is particularly prone to target the police in their protests...and this is when they are trying to ensure everyone (well mostly everyone) gets out alive.

Let's face it, even at the most mundane level the police have some hazardous working conditions. The guys who work the street have it bad, they have the pleasure to stand in the sun all day directing traffic, kicking away beggars, or patrolling our trash infested streets, waiting for something bad to happen (well something bad enough for them to care about). I sure hope the traffic cops at least get free laundry service. Keeping those uniforms white after a day sweating in the sun or getting drenched by the rains must be an inevitable failure of an enterprise.

The guys in their offices have it even worse, if anyone has been inside a police station they'll be impressed by the ingenuity of the place. Termite riddled Desks are held together with super glue, cement bricks act as support for rickety furniture. Poor interior decoration coupled with a lack of good looking women leads to a poor work atmosphere. The criminals don't help much either. An inherent lack of attractive women lead to terrible morale. Look at all of the foreign banks, pretty women = terrific morale....pity the performances don't match.

We live in a country where a Pizza hut delivery guy gets to your house before the police. Now the number of brand new police Toyota Corollas and Suzuki Mehrans are highly misleading. Majority of our cops still travel in junk grade bikes and various antique pickups that are better suited for transporting livestock (the livestock don't complain).  

To Protect and Serve. Why should they even we can't find it in our hearts to treat them with a modicum of decency. They, police wallas deserve to be treated with atleast a modicum of decency, otherwise they'll continue to have have minimal professional pride and become more prone to corruption. After all, on a human level, being able to afford nice stuff makes them feel better. Maybe we'd treat them differently if we realized that they are not so different from the rest of us.

A version of this piece was published on Dawn.com

Court Decision: Banning The BookFace

The Lahore High Court in it's infinite wisdom made the unilateral decision to ban Facebook. No more poking, no more changing statuses every 30 minutes, No more fb events and no more Facebook Fan Pages....not to mention, no more Farmville. Needless to say, I and every other facebook user in Pakistan are probably still reeling from the shock of being cut off.  (The ban is temporary, and only till the 31st of May) Suddenly I have several few hours of the day free, in which I’ll constructively use to write hate mails to Facebook, the Lahore High Court, Mr. Faisal “I’m just an incompetent fool’ Shehzad and Shoaib Akhtar (he just seems to annoy me lately with his “I can bowl 6-7 overs’ whining"). Then a remembered what Proxy Servers were and my life went back to order. whew.

The reason for the outright ban was because of the controversy generated by a facebook page, created by a Seattle based  imbecile cartoonist, that proposed a cartoon drawing competition of the Prophet (PBUH), in response to the notoriously un-politically correct South Park decision to censor an episode that depicted the Prophet (PBUH). BTW: The Cartoonist withdrew from the campaign citing that her intention was to emotionally castrate South Park for their censored episode.  

So….if this cartoonist made a plain website and had pages across different communities such as Twitter, MySpace, Xuqa, Orkut etc, would we ban all of those too? Or just ban the evil internet? What is a measured response and why are we the only country in the world that’s decided to ban facebook……

I conjectured a meeting between two bored (as opposed to boring) sitting LHC judges.

Judge 1 ‘Dude, I’m bored’
Judge 2 ‘Me too….lets do something’
Judge 1 ‘Prosecute Musharruf?’
Judge 2 ‘Someone else is already doing that, we don’t want to be copy cats, besides he already has like 200 thousand Bookface friends.....’
Judge 1 ‘hmm…intense.....We need to ban bookface.’
Judge 2 ‘alright….why?”
Judge 1’because I only have like a dozen friends and all of these cute gori girls keep turning me down….Hilary Clinton didn’t even accept me, even though we shared a really nice moment when I moved to the side as she stomped past with her Punjabi heroine strut’
Judge 2 ‘what a bitch’
Judge 1 ‘indeed’
Judge 2 ‘well, constitutionally, we can’t ban bookface over your lack of friends’
Judge 1 ‘Can we ban it because it’s immoral and corrupts  the impressionable  youth?’

Judge 2 ‘Can’t, that’s why the Punjab Assembly tried banning those late night cell packages, if we ban it for that everyone will think we actually care what the politicians say….and we would look like a bunch of dim witted copy cats.
Judge 1 ‘What about safety, can’t we just claim that the terrorists use bookface to  communicate, incite violence and carry out attacks on politicians’
Judge 2 ’Can’t, that’s why the city governments banned Pillion riding’
Judge 1 ‘Shucks, can’t we frame it that the less we use facebook, the more we can bridge the energy deficit….by like 1000 megatrons?’
Judge 2’ I think you mean Mega Vats, and no, that wouldn’t work either….unless we banned computers…’
Judge 1’ We can’t do that, we just banned the import of foreign computers, Shit, we need to figure out something, I got wasted last Fashion Week and told this equally wasted  hot model  that I could kill bookface, if I don’t do it, she’ll laugh, not take me seriously and never go out with me and keep dating those political vederas’
Judge 2 ‘ I know how you feel, you’d think after we got rid of a freaking President, that we’d be like instant babe magnets…haha, it’s brilliant when we can join a protest and then pretend to be spear heading it!’
Judge 1 ‘By jove, I’ve got it, we ban bookface, ‘because some kid’, who is actually a high ranking ISI agent, creates an fan page where everyone can depict pictures of our Holy prophet’

Judge 2 ‘So you want to ban bookface because one of the four hundred million users, who is actually a proxy of one of our agents, creates a page that calls on people to draw pictures of the Prophet....would they fall for it?’
Judge 1 ‘Yes!, it would work fabulously, both the Jamaat Islami and ‘I’m a modern Islamist’ folk would all rush to the cause! They seem bored nowadays. And as we’ve seen, students don’t need a reason to congregate and protest (by protest, we mean loot shops and burn cars).
Judge 2 ‘They do seem bored and lifeless lately….. and that was before their pet Rottweiler Taliban students  started bombing their own rallies’

Judge 1: ‘Well, the bookface owners name is Zuckerberg….that’s Zionist I think’
Judge 2 ‘Zionist works, but we can just claim that Zuckerberg is related to Fasi Zaka…that chap ruins my drive home every week’
Judge 1: ‘Bugger, can we ban him too?’
Judge 2 ‘nah, we’re thinking about putting him on the payroll. Though we could add something about an American plot somehow….maybe squeeze a few more $ billion out of them’
Judge 1 ‘They still have our swiss bank account no.?’
Judge 2 ‘Yep, and our ‘just incase’ green cards’
Judge 1 ‘We are going to hell’
Judge 2 ‘Nah, God’s a judge too, he’ll help us out.’

Unfortunately, I think these gentlemen may not have realized that there are these nifty things called ‘Proxy sites’, from which you can access facebook by bouncing servers.

Dear LHC Judges,

You can deny us electricity, you can deny us justice and you can deny us effective honest government, but we’ll be damned if you try to take away our facebook. You already gave the creators of this ‘Draw Muhammad (PBUH)’ what they craved the most…publicity. 


Thanks a lot for giving a voice to an unknown cartoonist and showing the rest of the world how out of control we Pakistani Muslims really are....Bat Shit Fucking Insane Bunch of Retards You Are.  

We are the youth,  

we are smarter than you and we’ll show off just to prove to you how capable we are.

Welcome to our world.

With all of the scorn & lack of respect we can muster,

Pakistani Youth

PS: Don’t worry about the blasphemous cartoons, we can crash the Facebook servers and make that cartoonist life a living online hell....and when we are done with them, we'll come for you!

Besides....We All Know What Facebook Is Really Meant For.