October 5, 2010

Don’t I Just Love being an Ostrich!

Welcome to Ostrichistan.
(Photo: Procureinsights.wordpress.com)
The world moves in a circle, on a fixed path and rotates around a central axis. This causes us to experience day and night, and summer and winter. And all the seasons in between. But, this circular movement of our planet also gives a spin to the thinking ability of some of us who are then unable to call a spade, a spade.

This purely philosophical take on our ineptness is directly linked to the existential pattern of one particular animal. No, it is not a lion and no it is not a hyena. It is an ostrich which when faced with danger pretends the danger doesn’t exist by burying its head into the ground. Hmm. Now I think instead of calling people hypocrites, I should call them ostriches. That way, they get a cool nick name and I still get to poke fun at them.

So what has the ostrich approach got to do hypocrisy? Well like the ostrich, we have refused to believe the facts that we can see with our own two eyes. Yes the two eyes with which you are reading this post. Also, this approach helps us in getting across points to the other party which in all sensibility, are utterly pointless. Let me give you a localized example. When you talk about the injustices being meted out to the minorities, people give you a shut up call and tell you that because the majority is suffering from such a colossal pain in their unwashed bottoms, you really have no right to talk about the minorities and their issues. So I said ok, I shall talk about the majority then and try and put forth the problems and solutions which I see fit, forward. The result was that the same people then decided I was being too much of an ass, and the weather was much more interesting and then they played a game of guess-the-clouds’-shape; so ostrichey.

But then, let’s even forget that part. Let’s talk about the US. Now I know you just went ‘ooooo’ and ‘aaaaaa’ because I said US; the country that we all hate so much but will absolutely love to go to and settle in and then make babies and teach them how Pakistanis are the best and that they ought to take over the US and turn it into an Islamic Republic and rid the world of the evil that the US and its citizens aka themselves, are spreading. I just got an idea. Instead of calling citizens of Pakistan Pakistanis, we should start calling ourselves ostriches. Wouldn’t that be just brilliant? The world will give us free aid to conduct experiments and research on ourselves from a totally scientific point of view and let’s face it, how many terrorist ostriches have you come across anyway? Oh and let’s not forget that in the process, we will turn ostriches halal. Brilliant.

Like true ostriches we demand aid from the US as if it’s our birthright, but then in typical fashion we throw a tantrum and demand that the aid be provided on our own ostrichey terms. When the US calls for taxing the rich and the elite we again throw up our wings, and pretend we can fly, but then look down and see we really never left the ground, and then say who is the US to lecture us on tax reforms? When the US says improve your water management system, we say it is saying that because it has teamed up with India (the sly vixen; don’t you just want to shoot it in the head and sell its skin in the black market?) to gang up on us poor hapless creatures. We pretend the Pak Army is a lion whose body is made up of Mard-e-Momineen, and that it keeps roaring and soaring and telling the world to not rattle us because we’re more deadly than the African Mamba. But then NATO attacks us, kills our soldiers and our guardian lion tries to roar only to find itself restricted by the fact that it has a beak instead of a jaw full of razor sharp teeth and an esophagus slightly taller than the Eiffel Tower.  

So really, what do we want? Then answer of course lies in the fact that we are confused creatures but hey, that’s not our fault because we were born confused and we will die confused. It’s an ostrich law that requires us to maintain that level of confusion so that nobody knows what is happening, and those who understand it are drowned out in the sea of this confusion penetrating all our pores.

Typically, we make lots of noises, and some of them are downright scary, but that’s all we ever do. We want aid, but we want it on our terms. We want F – 16s but we’re not interested in the Taliban and Al Qaeda making the world insecure. We want investment but we’re not willing to fix our corruption because it’s our country and we’ll ruin it in the way we see fit. We will let the King Ostriches have field days minting money off of us but when the US will tell us to broaden our tax base, we love to tell it to take a hike. So really, now we know we’re absolutely perfect at being one thing; an ostrich.

This article wasn’t written to degrade anyone’s feelings. It is a satirical piece on our plight. If you feel your feelings have been hurt, then please shove it, because I don’t give a damn. Period.