Jokes which still make me sad – the French Colony of Islamabad
Pandit Jawaher Lal Nehru used to make two remarks in select company. First, “I am the last Englishman to govern India.” Second, “Muslims introduced Purdah in India”.
To my knowledge, none has so far replied what India introduced in Islam. It introduced in Islam status of human beings as per profession they follow. As Colonization officer Haveli project whenever I planned a habitation, I had to select a detached portion of the land for housing kamins (menials) lowest grade of domestic workers. As a judge of the High Court, my senior told me that an ambitious youngster questioned repeatedly his father when a lambardar (village headman) dies who will be appointed lambardar. The father ultimately replied that even if everyone in the village dies you will never be appointed a lambardar because you are a kamin.
The counterpart of Brahmins abounds in our culture, providing self-serving short, shorter and shortest route for the living to reach paradise, of our own making, of our own imagination, as our best reward. I have been looking for an answer but found it nowhere. In what condition, at what age shall we be raised in paradise, as newly born, as we left this world, as in health and beauty never experienced or imagined on earth. I have found no answer so far.
I had no participation in planning and establishing Islamabad. Only on visiting the USA I imagined what was planned, and what followed. An insignificant small town, away from commercial centres, confined to a small group of elites, governing population, a truly evolutionary and diverse federal system hard to understand, harder to teach, hardest to replicate. Its population was supposed not to exceed half a million, narrow roads, as compared to Karachi of those days, but extensive area reserved for its development, which seldom took place according to need or the Master Plan if any, but mostly to make money and more money, at all tiers. The first thing to emerge in Islamabad was given the prestigious name of French Colony located in between two more prestigious sectors of Islamabad. Surprisingly, none took notice of it, none thought of replacing, or improving it, providing or giving it an identity of its own. Neglect and more neglect of it.
Its population comprised of those graded as lower than kamins whose work or neighbourhood nobody tolerates unless he were himself to go abroad. They had to be kept as far away from their houses as far as possible but required to show their face early in the morning, to do their work till noon and then disappear from the scene.
The American experiment is so varied, so evolutionary and at times such appealing that
following it you can be always right and you can also be always wrong. Ask any child or adolescent in America what is your family. The answer from every quarter will be “parents, my siblings and my dog.’’ No place for anyone else. Ask anyone what is a single-family home in America they will tell you two bed one den 2 and ½ bath.
“Most parents get worried when their children on attaining age of eighteen years do not leave their house and want to live without sharing the expenses.” Taxpayers earning annually dollars one hundred thousand get worried when tax rate of those earning over dollars five hundred thousand a year is increased. Ask them why so, all will tell you that “you do not know tomorrow I may be in five hundred thousand brackets”. So is the expectation, so is the hope, so is the reality, but only in America.
One of the seasoned high placed doctors returning from America told me on a plane that seeing the life in America he will never send his any other daughter to America. His daughter who happens to be in America continues to live here even thirty years after his commitment.
The End
Experiences of a Lifetime 