Ban or confront?

The following column "Ban or confront?" by Harris Khalique , source "The News-Friday, May 21, 2010".

When we get angry, we start digging hard into the earth on which we stand until the time our toenails start bleeding profusely. When we are scared of thunder or lightning or a storm or a beast that scares us with his power to make us extinct, we hide our heads in the sand on which we stand. Neither would we prepare to fight to defend ourselves nor move away to avoid the imminent danger. We have become ostriches. We yell a lot but look away from the real challenges that face us. Small brains and large bodies.
Some of us ostriches have learnt to prevaricate by way of becoming suicidal instead of taking on the questions we are confronted with. Many of our youths are goaded to blow themselves up and kill scores of innocent people around them by self-conceited clerics and vested interest. No one who matters in the Muslim world belonging to the religious, political, cultural or academic elite has demonstrated a will or a drive to take the masses out of the abyss of darkness, ignorance and narrow-mindedness.

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=240315

 

 

 

Side-effect

The following column "Side-effect" by Harris Khalique , source "The News-Friday, May 14, 2010".

The song my niece Misaal likes the most these days is from this new Bollywood production, "3 Idiots". She has fed it as the ring tone in her grandmother's cell phone. Her three-year-old younger brother has learned to sing the refrain all the time, "Bolo (say) all is well."

Perhaps all is well now. There was a time when half of the children of school-going age in Pakistan did not go to school. Out of a hundred and sixty thousand public primary schools across the country, more than eighty thousand lacked clean drinking water, toilet facilities and boundary walls. Our colleges and universities produced degree-holders who were terribly unequipped when it came to required knowledge and skills to perform an ordinary job to earn their living. Our teachers were shamefully low paid and lacked adequate training opportunities. Curriculum taught in both public and private schools was not only dated, and partly irrelevant, but also encouraged narrow-mindedness, myopic worldview and confusion in children and young people. In those times, a young girl would go blind due to a curable infection in some remote part of Balochistan because it would take her father one week to organise a few thousand rupees and another week to be able to take her to Karachi. Maternal mortality was so high that about 75 mothers died everyday in childbirth. Poverty was growing at an alarming pace and so was class difference. New factories were not being set up and existing shut down. Power-cuts were rampant and energy and electricity shortages had brought the indigenous economy to a grinding halt. The state was being run on lending from international financial institutions.

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/arc_news.asp?id=9&arc_date=5/14/2010

 

 

 

New Arrivals!

Dear All,

 

This is to inform you that followings Magazine/Journal are recently added Development Resource Centre (DRC).

 

·         The Economist

·         South Asia Journal

·         Newsheet (Shirkat Gah)

·         Jehd-e-Haq (HRCP)