Category: Etc

We are toads

ReallyVirtual1 Comment

ImagePaulo Coelho's book 'The Alchemist' has been the top favorite of the Pakistan Network on Facebook for a few months now. It is not surprising, as the story has a lot of things in common with the mystic/symbolic fairy tales that my generation (or at least a subset of my generation) was brought up on. This post, though is about Paulo's blog, which is usually filled with though-provoking positive content (and these days, we can surely use all the positivity we can get). A couple of days ago, I read an interesting observation on Paulo's blog about toads, that reminded me of this nation called Pakistan (and it had nothing to do with toads being green). He says:

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Can we bury the politicians?

Sohaib Athar1 Comment

<RANDOM_THOUGHT> 

I am neither a linguist, nor do I care much for politics, but when ever I think about the events scheduled for this nation in January, the term 'selection' rather than 'election' comes to my mind. Infact, I don't get democracy (as practiced in Pakistan) at all. Whoever devised the whole democracy/voting process probably wasn't an internet user (umm.. yea… hmmm).

As far as I'm concerned, if I am provided with a set of choices, and have to select the one I hate the least, I'd rather opt out of the whole fiasco by NOT voting for anyone. That's a 0 vote… for each such 0 vote, there will probably be two +1 votes. So if 90% of the nation doesn't like any of the candidates, the worst that they can do (besides turning into a candidate) is to NOT vote.

I wish the concept of 'democracy' had a negative vote, so I had the option of a +1 vote to 'dig' or a -1 vote to 'bury' whichever 'candidate' I disliked the least/most respectively. It would have been a big motivation for a lazy  person like me (and others as well, I hope) to go out and (un)vote the most likely winner. It would have been fun to learn that the MNA in my area was selected by getting -5 votes.

</RANDOM_THOUGHT>