Penalty

The government has made it mandatory for providing CNIC numbers or
National Tax numbers of purchasers who are not registered with the
Sales Tax department. Unfortunately this will contribute greatly in
unregistered consumers turning to smugglers to provide the goods they
need to run their businesses. A few years ago, unregistered persons
had to pay 3% extra. This law should be enforced again, and the extra
payment by unregistered consumers raised to 5%. At least the
government will get much needed revenue, rather than losing it to the
smugglers’ mafia.

SHAKIR LAKHANI
The Friday Times, July 3-9, 2009

In India, they don’t use buckets to fetch water. They use pipes, as illustrated in the photo above. Maybe the people of Karachi can learn something from them.

According to a news item in DAWN (30th June), someone named Aslam Jinnah claiming to be Mr. Jinnah’s great grandson said that he is satisfied with the facilities and help provided to him by the government. I wonder why the government employs nincompoops who don’t even know the meaning of “great grandson” (leave alone “grandson”). The Quaid had only one child (Dina Wadia) whose son Nusli Wadia (the only grandson of Mr. Jinnah) lives in India. So the Quaid’s great grandson would be Mr. Wadia’s son and would bear the surname “Wadia” instead of “Jinnah”. Yet without asking the so-called great grandson (Aslam Jinnah) to prove his credentials, the government has provided him with a house, a car and Rs. 50,000 per month of public money. The bureaucrats who approved these payments and facilities should be made to pay for them from their own pockets. This is the only way they will learn to be careful if in future someone with the surname “Jinnah” turns up in Islamabad and asks for financial help.

SHAKIR LAKHANI
DAWN, 2 July 2009

According to a news item in DAWN (28th June, 2009), Sheikh Ala-ud-Din of PML-Q Forward Bloc on Saturday must have made history in the Punjab Assembly when he walked
out of the house in protest against something that was never said. The
offended MPA thought that his fellow parliamentarian Mohsin Leghari
had insulted Lahore when he quoted from Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser.
After that, Dr Asad Ashraf, another member of the assembly criticized
Mr. Leghari for calling himself Caeser (which he hadn’t). Apparently
the good doctor knew that the word caesarian (as in “caesarian
section”) was derived from Caeser (who had been “ripped” from his
mother’s womb). It’s good to know that there are politicians in this
country who have heard of Shakespeare, leave alone quoting from his
works. But then, Mr. Leghari apparently thought that all members of
the Punjab Assembly are graduates in English Literature.

The recent case of the forced marriage of an eight year old girl in Karachi (and the ones reported earlier) indicate that this custom is very common in the country, particularly in the rural areas. In the cities too, unless someone reports the incident to the police, the culprits are not punished. I remember the case of a thirty year old maid in my house whose husband was a drug addict and used to beat her up daily if she failed to give him money. Finally, she asked my wife for help, and we hired a female lawyer to help her get a divorce.
As soon as her husband received the divorce notice, he came with six armed persons to my house demanding that we hand the maid’s female children over to him. I asked him why he only wanted the female children, not the boys or the woman herself. He explained that he would get good money by giving the girls away in marriage (even though they were minors). When I told him that child marriage was against the laws of the country as well as un-Islamic, he shrugged and said that in his community it was very common. Apparently the mullahs in backward areas also don’t know anything about Islam.
Shakir Lakhani
www.chowrangi.com