I never thought I would waste ten thirty minutes of my life praising our new president, but I just have to write this one. This post on Karachi Metblogs is criticizing Zardari’s comments in the visitors’ log of Jinnah’s tomb on his death anniversary. Though I secretly hope for a day when discussing the Pakistani President’s language skills becomes our only concern, but we have to solve a lot of more fundamental problems before we can focus on developing the desi version of Bushism.

The blog also shared this scanned image of his comments, which says something like:

May Good give us the strut to save Pakistan. Asif Ali Zardari, President, Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

I think there are many possible reasons for this ‘writo’ and I believe that we should forgive Zardari for this writing “Good” instead of “God”. You see…

1. He was not typing it, and hence, did not have a spell checker handy. When was the last time you wrote a complete sentence using a pen? (for me it was many years ago). This shows that he may be a l33t geek in disguise who relies on the underlined red lines too much.
2. He has written either ‘Gaad’ or ‘Good’ – if it is ‘Gaad’, he was either in his l33t mindset, or he wanted to emphasize the word but lacked the tools (bold/italics) to do so, and used the long ‘aa’ as a last resort. If he used ‘Good’, then he was probably trying to translate one of Allah’s 99 names to English. I’m pretty sure one of those names means ‘Good’. This shows that he does care about Islam.
3. He did not use Allah, as these days, the word has negative connotations, thanks to our terrorist brethren. God is a more neutral and ‘enlightened’ word. After all, the American Army top guys are visiting Pakistan these days, what if the next visitor signing the visitor book is one of them, and what if he gets the wrong impression? We must appericate his foresight and attention to detail.
4. Good, God or Allah, the important point is that he capitalized the G, and that, my friends, is the line that separates a believer from a non-believer, or so I have been told many times. So Zardari strives to be politically and religiously correct.

Even though the above is enough to start respecting Zardari, we are not done yet. The second word that he used, and one that has been misquoted as “strength” by many people, is actually “strut“. Let us check wikipedia for the various meanings of ‘strut’.

A strut can be

• A structural component designed to keep two other components apart. Struts provide outwards-facing support in their lengthwise direction, which can be used to keep two other components separate, performing the opposite function of a tie. That is a beautiful analogy! It doesn’t take an engineer to see what Zardari is trying to say. Not only that, but a strut can also mean
• to walk proudly and with a bounce. and pride is one thing that we need, if we want to save Pakistan.

The above is conclusive proof that Zardari picks his words carefully and has a good command over the English language – good enough to make puns and say a lot in a few words. On top of that, I am assuming he can speak Urdu and perhaps Sindhi equally well, which makes him a trilingual. Now you tell me – how many languages can the US, Chinese or the British leaders speak?

Oh yea, one last thing, he loves his deceased wife so much that he still carries her picture everywhere he goes, even when he is on TV. Brings tears to my eyes really.