My dear Muhammad Ali:
Today, you are 22-years old and far away from us, striving to become a graduate, which, Insha’Allah, you will. May God Almighty give you a long, happy, healthy and prosperous life; full of joy and success in whatever you do. Ameen. And may you live your life like a true Muslim; sensibly, moderately and tolerantly, helping humanity however you can.
More often than not, I am telling you about what we have gained as a nation, if you can call us one. It’s about time that you learned something about the flip side of our national coin. So on your birthday I want to tell you about what we have lost: half our beautiful country at the hands of people whom millions of our compatriots still dote on, as if some kind of a curse has descended upon us, a curse that we have brought upon ourselves and cannot blame anyone for. The Bengalis are a wonderful people who strived more for the creation of Pakistan than any province in what our ‘heroes’ have left of Pakistan today. And we deprived them and then massacred them for their pains, the last of which was to exercise their democratic right of vote in December 1970.
Those of us who are old enough to remember East Pakistan can never forget the people of Bengal. In our hearts they shall always be our compatriots, even though they have acquired a different travel document, thanks to our collective stupidity that manifests itself as arrogance combined with our suicidal perfidy that manifests itself as misplaced patriotism.
Something sometimes, triggers a memory that transports me back to the East Pakistan of my childhood – a person, a sound, some smell, a colour, kathal (that wonderful fruit known as Jackfruit in English and its smaller Malay variant called Durian), a painting of Zainul Abideen, someone saying Mr. Zinnah… It’s their phonetics that invariably brings a smile to my face. Many pronounce ‘J’ as ‘Z’ and ‘Z’ as ‘J’, so ‘Jinnah’ becomes ‘Zinnah’ and ‘Janaza’ becomes ‘Zanaja’. ‘Exact’ would be pronounced ‘exjact’. I once received a telex saying, “Please send us exjact, repeat exjact, quotes.” They do that with their names too, as you can see on the shirts of their cricketers. ‘Jahoorul’ for Zahoor ul Haq. Wonderful, loveable people that “gladden the heart with joy”.
One of them, your grandfather’s friend Mr. Zahoor (‘Jahoor Bhai’) Chaudhry, Editor of Sangbad, now gone to live with the stars, would exclaim “Zust imazine” when bemused by something. His arrival to our home was a great event for he always brought us Dhaka Cheese, which we sliced, fried and, of course, ate with great relish. A most loveable and very, very brave and principled man the likes of which we rarely make now. You would have loved to meet him.
“Zust Imagine,” I said to myself when I got a message from your Nasir Khalu and my hum zulf once removed, to wit Dr. Nasir Ahmed of Malaysia (which is why his in-laws call him ‘La’ – “No La”; “Yes La” which is the Malay way of saying things, the other being “How can?” “No can”). If you have a problem with your ear, nose or throat, go to Doc Nasir and he will put you right, or at least try his best to. Nasir had gone to Dhaka to study medicine long, long ago when most everything was almost right with Pakistan. Your won’t remember her Ali, but there he met and later married your mother’s beautiful cousin Anjum, another medical student, God bless her since she has now gone to be with Him. Your Anjum khala was the daughter of Mr. I. A. Khan I.C.S. and granddaughter of Nawab Ismail Khan of Meerut, one of the major leaders of our Freedom Movement. He is the one who invented the famous Jinnah Cap. The rest is history.
Nasir became a Pakistani and now belongs to Flint, Michigan, USA. So naturally Nasir too has deep affection for the Bengalis of late East Pakistan. “Read and Think About It Yourself,” says Doc Nasir’s message.
Okay Doc, will do. The message is about the mess our electricity is in. Not surprising, for all our people’s basic needs and fundamental rights are either non-existent or wanting (except, of course, for democracy, such as it is) because our rulers deliberately deprive them to create justifications for doing unnecessary projects to take huge kickbacks and commissions and buy flats abroad. Better and cheaper and to pay off the circular debt with the same money and get our idle power generation going almost immediately. This would occur to even the meanest intelligence, but our rulers don’t even have that. All they are genetically programmed to do is self-aggrandisement, like a Bloodhound is genetically programmed to track with his nose.
No point in sympathising with the people, though, for they have brought it upon themselves by electing such rulers – they just re-elected a certain Mr. Jamshed Dasti who had to resign his seat in the National Assembly because his degree was supposed to be fake but our great judiciary allowed him to contest the bye-elections, such is our democracy, and the people elected him again. Remember him? He is the man who knows even less about cricket than about Islam and as chairman of some parliamentary joke called a committee for sports, drove our cricket captain Younis Khan to resignation. Younis will be remembered for as long as cricket is played anywhere in the world. Mr. Dasti, if he is remembered at all, will be famous as the icon of… Words escape me and I begin to splutter. So, having ourselves brought our doom upon our collective head, it does not behoove us to lament too loudly. Lament, certainly, for it relieves pain and frustration, but softly, softly please lest others hear and say what a stupid, suicidal people we are, which we are. I can see Enoch Powell, the late racist but brilliant politician of Britain, smirking and saying, “I told you so. These people don’t deserve independence.”
Anyway, the message from Doc ‘La’ Nasir is that Pakistani electricity comes from three sources:
1. Hydro, through large, medium-sized and small dams that our people don’t have the sense to make enough of and the feudal robber barons and tribal warlords and chieftains, the bane of our lives and our primary cancer, don’t allow. Instead, they make political capital out of opposing dams by misinforming people. And impoverished country has an impoverished populace. Backward, poor and illiterate, they can’t raise their heads and question the feudal robber baron and tribal warlord chieftain’s iniquitous and un-Islamic way of life and ask what right they have to lord it over them.
2. Thermal (Gas/Steam/Furnace Oil).
3. Nuclear.
Sadly, solar and wind don’t figure anywhere. Hopefully they will one day, after our primary cancer has been obliterated.
Our electricity generating units are owned and operated by four major power producers:
1. WAPDA (Water & Power Development Authority, ‘Development’ being a misnomer if ever there was one).
2. KESC (Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation, run and part-owned by Abraaj of Dubai which, unlike Stone Age man cannot even light a fire with a flint).
3. IPPs (Independent Power Producers).
4. PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. No jokes about this one).
The break-up of the installed capacity of each of these power producers, as of June-2008, is:
WAPDA Hydro
1. Tarbela 3,478 MW
2. Mangla 1,000 MW
3. Ghazi-Brotha 1,450 MW
4. Warsak 243 MW
5. Chashma 184 MW
6. Dargai 20 MW
7. Rasul 22 MW
8. Shadi-Waal 18 MW
9. NandiPur 14 MW
10. Kurram Garhi 4 MW
11. Renala 1 MW
12. Chitral 1 MW
13. Jagran (Azad Kashmir) 30 MW
Total Hydro Electricity: 6,465 MW
WAPDA Thermal
1. Gas Turbine Power Station, Shadra 59 MW
2. Steam Power Station, Faisalabad 132 MW
3. Gas Turbine Power Station, Faisalabad 244 MW
4. Gas Power Station, Multan 195 MW
5. Thermal Power Station, Muzaffargarh 1,350 MW
6. Thermal Power Station, Guddu 1,655 MW
7. Gas Turbine Power Station, Kotri 174 MW
8. Thermal Power Station, Jamshoro 850 MW
9. Thermal Power Station, Larkana 150 MW
10. Thermal Power Station, Quetta 35 MW
11. Gas Turbine Power Station, Panjgur 39 MW
12. Thermal Power Station, Pasni 17 MW
Total Thermal 4,900 MW
WAPDA’s Total Hydro plus Thermal capacity is 11,365 MW.
KESC
1. Thermal Power Station, Korangi 316 MW
2. Gas Turbine Power Station, Korangi 80 MW
3. Gas Turbine Power Station, SITE 100 MW
4. Thermal Power Station, Bin Qasim 1,260 MW
Total KESC 1,756 MW
IPPs
1. Hub Power Project 1,292 MW
2. AES Lalpir Ltd, Mahmood Kot Muzaffargarh 362 MW
3. AES Pak Gen, Mahmood Kot Muzaffargarh 365 MW
4. Altern Energy Ltd, Attock 29 MW
5. Fauji Kabir Wala Power Company, Khanewal 157 MW
6. Gul Ahmad Energy Ltd, Korangi 136 MW
7. Habibullah Coastal Power Ltd 140 MW
8. Japan Power Generation, Lahore 120 MW
9. Koh-e-Noor Energy Ltd, Lahore 131 MW
10. Liberty Power Limited, Ghotki 232 MW
11. Rousch Power, Khanewal 412 MW
12. Saba Power Company, Sheikhupura 114 MW
13. Southern Electric Power Company Ltd, Raiwind 135 MW
14. Tapal Energy Limited, Karachi 26 MW
15. Uch Power Ltd, Dera Murad Jamali, Nasirabad 586 MW
16. Attock Gen Ltd, Morgah Rawalpindi 165 MW
17. Atlas Power, Sheikhupura 225 MW
18. Engro Energy Ltd, Karachi —– MW
19. Kot Addu Power Company Limited (Privatised) 1,638 MW
Total IPPs 6,365 MW
PAEC
KANUPP 137 MW
CHASNUPP-1 325 MW
Total Nuclear 462 MW
Hydro Electricity generated by WAPDA varies between two extremes –2,414 MW when the river flow is low and 6,761 MW when the river flow is high and the dams are full.
Total Power Generation Capacity of Pakistan (including all sources) is 19,948 MW while the electricity demand on April 20, 2010 was 14,500 MW but we have acute countrywide load shedding because we are generating only 10,000 MW.
Generating Capacity: 19,948 MW
Demand: 14,500 MW
Generation: 10,000 MW
Surplus: 5,448 MW
Shortfall: 4,500 MW
Doesn’t make sense, does it? But this is not the only thing in our beloved country that doesn’t make sense. How about the people repeatedly electing plundering, inept and illiterate or uneducated rulers? “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings” – hungry, destitute, mentally colonised, indebted to the gills and, seemingly, without a hope in hell. Don’t be fooled by their fancy degrees from fancy western universities, dear Ali. Our biggest problem is that our elite is uneducated.
So there you have it Mr. Muhammad Ali Gauhar. Have you ever seen something so stupid, so callous, so suicidal? When people come out on the streets, which they invariably will, like in Kyrgyzstan or Bangkok, our rulers will cry CONSPIRACY – Zionist conspiracy, Hindu conspiracy, CIA conspiracy, ISI conspiracy, Zulu conspiracy and God knows what else. The only conspiracy is their own, to deny the people and make money out of their woes. Gather money, gather power and the devil take the hindmost.
What’s there to think about? The answer is obvious: corruption ascended to loot and plunder unhindered by patriotism.
