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