Musings

The Flip side of Life

Shahnoor Wahid

Pigs are finally taking revenge on the human race for eating them up and also for using their name in a derogatory manner to abuse other humans. You pig! Or, bloody swine! are two favourite gaalis used by the civilised and the rustic alike in all the continents of the world. Imagine you paying high price for the best of ham and then call a thief or a swindler a pig! So, pigs could not take it anymore and decided to do something about it. They got the opportunity after a billion years. Meanwhile, they have read Orwell's 'Animal Farm' and got inspired by the courage of their great cousins like Old Major, Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer. Then of course there were those rebel pigs.

Following the examples of the pigs in the novel, some pigs organised a congregation of pigs, boars and swine and decided to spread swine flu to teach the humans a lesson. In fact, they learned the trick after reading articles on 'bird flu' that had scared the life out of humans. The trick worked fine and humans began to run home closing schools and work places. And as usual, finding no solution, and cruel as they are, humans began to kill pigs by the thousands. Instead of improving the environment where they lived or for that matter where pigs lived, they went for the easy solution - kill the pigs.

Well, humans don't always kill fowls, chickens or pigs. They also kill their sisters for no reason at all. Yes, it's true. A famous singer at some place in Peshwar, Pakistan was shot dead by her two brothers. What did she do? Did she commit a crime? Was she accused of blasphemy? No, sire. Nothing of the kind. She died for singing. Yep, you heard me right. She was a good singer so she sang a few songs on the local TV channel. Her brothers thought a Muslim girl should not sing or take part in any programme on TV. They told her to stop going to the TV station. But she tried to make them see reason. When she continued singing the two brothers went to her flat and shot her dead. They walked out of the house with no qualms at all.

The horrendous part of the story is that many of our Bangladeshi brothers would get motivated by the "great justice" delivered by the Pakistani brothers and treat their sisters the same way. Some years ago, a young man had actually slit open his sister's throat at the Botanical Garden, Mirpur, accusing her of leading an immoral life. So, you see, men are always ready to deliver justice to their sinful sisters. But who is there to question men's religious or moral standing?

I grade the following comment the very best of the century. A minister of the Bangladesh government recently said, "Secretariat is the biggest cold storage in the country." By God! What a hilarious concept one can come up with! Could anything describe the secretariat any better? Not at all. How true it is! So many hopes, so many dreams, so many sighs and so many tears have gone into that cold storage never to be retrieved ever. People have died of old age or disease waiting for that million dollar signature of a secretary or a minister, which never came. While many worthless projects got through the labyrinth, worthy ones were sent to the cold storage though those were beneficial for the people. Well, they perhaps had no benefit for the big bosses.

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