Its night time. You are talking on your cell phone right outside your house. Would you expect some biker to come out of nowhere and ask you to hand him your cell phone else he would kill you? I would expect such a thing! We live in Lahore and we are not safe!

The option we are left to make is to be ready for such events and know what to do. And the only thing you can do is to do what you are told to. For just a small span of time, you become a prisoner. The question is: Whose prisoner?

Prisoner of the guy pointing a gun at you? or prisoner of his dependants? A prisoner of powers who dealt him in an unjust way through his life? A prisoner of a dysfunctional society? Do we actually become our own prisoners?

Such unfortunate event happened with one of my neighbours last night at 10 p.m. He made the right choice and handed over his phone. Hundreds of such events take place in Lahore everyday. People do get killed everyday for resisting.

I am sorry to start my writing at this blog at such a painful note. I should have started it with an expression of joy. But quite frankly, joy these days is left to the immature, unrealistic or those who choose to turn their faces away from the face of reality.

Such events may seem small when compared to the headlines, but they might have more grave implications. Why would someone kill for something as small as a cell phone? As I said before, our social system is breaking down. There is an inbalance of economy. I don’t want to be poor, because I don’t want to step in the shoes of Robin Hood. Neither do I want to be rich, because I don’t want to live a frightened life. I want to be middleclass, the diminishing strata of our society. In this city, you can see extreme performance cars rolling the shiny streets and you can see overpopulated places with muddy pathways. I appreciate the engineering of such cars and exhileration they can provide, but I want everyone to know that only the cost of fuel for such single car might be many time more than another Lahori’s life long earning. I don’t want you to stop going to M. M. Alam road for some change of taste, but I want you to know that the amount you spend in one night might be equal to food cost of an entire faily for a whole month. Please have some courage to face the facts.

What are the correcting measures? People can say a lot about that. But we must also think who is going to take those measures? Government or the people? Or should we take any measure at all? According to Ashfaq Ahmed, its not a single human’s job to change the world. His job is to live the best in the situation he is in.

I’ll leave rest of the thinking to you. Maybe I’ll return with a better topic next time. Adios!