Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!
tsk tsk, no need to cry boy, resorting to personal attacks and changing the topic. Be a man, and post credible links or admit you are just a jiyala who posts whatever filth comes to ‘her’ mind. And kindly state where I said, “the previous Government made billions”? If you find it, I will back anything I said with proof. Lying isnt gonna do you any good. Plus, only a moosehead would think Zardari was an shareef honest hardworking cub.
Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!!!
Alcohol is being sold anyway in Pakistan. By regulising the sales at least there will be some revenue coming to the government.
Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!
Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!!!
By banning the “minor evil” of alcohol, the government had given the “major evil” of drugs to flourish in the country, he added.
whether alcohol is safer than some other drugs(like hashish) is debatable, and about alcohol, alcohol was at one time completly legal in pakistan, as far as i know nothing really bad happened, its a person's own choice whther or not to injest a substance
Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!!!
Whether Musharraf is a drinker or a womanizer is neither here nor there. No one is disputing that many people in Pakistan (mostly very rich) drink liquor or have extra-marital affairs. Question is should we be legalizing all that?
Interestingly there are at least two people in our national assembly who have publicly supported this suggestion (that liquor be legalized). It will be interesting how many MNA's will vote in favor if it were a secret balloting. I doubt the measure will pass in the Assembly, though, but definitely more than 2 people will support it.
This also demonstrates the uber stupid logic shown on the assembly floor by the honorable MNA. It would be one thing if he had said, lets legalize it because enforcing the law is a big waste of money, all ppl who want to drink already drink and we should be focusing our energies on some thing better. But to ask for legalizing liquor to help eradicate the problem of illegal drugs is beyond stupidity. What a moron!
Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!
on a side note it was not the assembly that banned alcohol it was done through executive power. Ayaz Amir made some interesting points in his recent article
http://dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm
Two things above all others choke our national gutters: one, the plastic shopping bag; two, false morality. The effect of greenhouse gases will come to Pakistan later. The havoc wrought by plastic ‘shoppers’ is all around us.
No less visible are the effects of hypocrisy. It was not always like this. But today, thanks largely to General Zia’s legacy, this nation finds itself strangled by false piety.
Hence the necessity of first appending a long preface and mumbling a few pieties of your own, as I am doing, before being even remotely candid about anything considered ‘sensitive’ in this country. Now if I may come to the subject matter of my column.
Ask the good and the great, one of the most sought after commodities in Pakistan today is an honest bootlegger. Why is this? Because we have succeeded in turning an ordinary sin — according to the Islamic canon — into one of the biggest con activities of our times (next only I think in scope to the property business and dealings on the stock exchange). More spiritual water on an average is consumed in Pakistan today than it even was in General Yahya Khan’s time, in our historical mythology the highpoint of national decadence.
Drinking among certain classes of people, especially the upper strata, was fairly common then but, and this may shock young readers, few people stocked drink at home as the good and the great are reduced to doing today. Thus a sin — although to go by the testimony of aficionados (how would I know myself?) a wickedly pleasant one (talk of the devil and his ways) — instead of being controlled, which as an Islamic obligation it should be, allowed to spin out of control.
Is it not time to rend the veil asunder and stop being coy on this score? More moonshine and contraband and things noxious are consumed today than ever before, to the advantage not of the exchequer, as in more squeamish societies, but in our robust environment to the advantage of bootleggers, both honest and dishonest.
But mostly dishonest because an honest bootlegger is rare, therefore all the more to be sought after and cherished when discovered. An army of federal ministers infests Islamabad, close to a hundred if wags are to be believed. How many honest bootleggers? Not more than half a dozen. So for devotees dedicated to the rites of Dionysus, who is the more prized commodity?
But we should be concerned about larger matters. Prohibition in the United States --1920-1933 — did nothing to curtail drinking. Rather it whetted the national gullet and spawned an entire crime industry because fabulous money was to be made from the liquor trade. Just as fabulous money is to be made from the drug trade today.
Al Capone’s criminal empire was liquor-based as was the Kennedy fortune, Joe Kennedy, the clan’s patriarch and later ambassador to the Court of St James, reportedly involved in liquor smuggling himself.
Our minorities may be disadvantaged in other ways but in one crucial respect they are empowered: exemption from prohibition giving them a privilege (do I hear pious voices saying, a curse?) denied other communities. The more enterprising spirits among them are doing well as a result, catering to a thirst which instead of being controlled and regulated, as it should be in any well-ordered society, is now well and truly out of control.
In Chakwal I am told (ah, the extent to which I have to rely on hearsay) it is standard practice for dabblers in the trade to turn one bottle of hooch from Murree Brewery into two or three, adding heaven alone knows what to make up the difference. A new alchemy: this is what it amounts to. Even Al Capone couldn’t have done better.
This is how restrictive laws based on false assumptions, and bearing no relation to reality, end up begetting crime. The law of unintended consequences: you aim for one thing and get another, especially when your motives are false or mixed.
Bhutto introduced prohibition in 1977 (or rather tightened it because prohibition in one form or the other had always existed in Pakistan) as a ploy to disarm the religious right which was out in the streets trying to topple him. It didn’t work. Far from being placated, the battalions of the right were more emboldened by the perception that they had Bhutto on the run. In the end he was toppled.
General Zia added a few more screws to prohibition because he wanted to appear as a champion of Islam. That was about the one card he knew how to play. Did Pakistan become more religious under him? It only became more hypocritical.
Is anyone concerned about national health? Are doctors of the faith, professors of divinity, willing to debate this matter with any degree of honesty? It’s a strange land we live in. Drinking in public can get you into a great deal of trouble, as perhaps it should. But a shrug is all you are likely to elicit if you light up a cigarette and those around you know there is heroin in it.
It’s like our attitude to things gay. Holding a girl’s hand in public is not the done thing in Pakistan. Our honour is pricked (or someone’s honour is) if we do that. In the Frontier and Balochistan, indeed in much of rural Pakistan, it can even become a killing matter. But holding a boy’s hand (and you know what I mean) is all right. Liberation in this sphere arrived in San Francisco much later. An indulgent and often amusing form of tolerance for the same thing has been present in our society — in fact in all Muslim societies — from time immemorial.
Do I advocate permissiveness? Far from it. I have grown-up daughters myself and when my youngest who is in high school dresses up adventurously, although what I think provocative she considers quite normal, I feel outraged and say angry things to her. Coming from where I do this is a normal reaction. Our societies are conservative, and a good thing they are, ruling out the kind of permissiveness which is the norm in other societies. To each his/her own.
Even so, if permissiveness represents one end of the spectrum, excessive restrictiveness, leading invariably to hypocrisy or disguise (doing things surreptitiously and, therefore, guiltily), represents the other. For health and balance both extremes are best avoided.
Politically the Musharraf era may be a disaster but on the social front things have eased up a bit. Every period takes its colour from the top. In Yahya Khan’s time hard drinking was considered a virtue. Bhutto’s was a relaxed time in which people did what came naturally to them. With Zia’s coming, officialdom and the governing class went native and put on a mantle of piety.
With Musharraf there has been a loosening up at the top, with ministers and even generals investing in designer suits (wonder how they can afford them) and the phrase “enlightened moderation” — the mantra of the ruling set-up — triggering sly expressions and funny remarks, usually when a comely face or an attractive figure, of which there are not a few in the corridors of political relevance, passes by or is seen on one of the many TV channels which have sprouted up.
But this loosening up has meaning only for the affluent classes. ‘Temptation’, ‘entertainment’ or ‘relaxation’ (take your choice) are priced out of the range of most Pakistanis, available but not coming cheap. And you have to look for them hard. Apart from their other woes, in this respect too the people of Pakistan remain disenfranchised.
Re: MNA wants alcohol ban lifted - WAY TO GO GUYS!!!!!
^Very interesting article.