Karachi's mayor and solar power

Published in Dawn on January 16, 2026

WRONG ESTIMATE: This is with reference to the report ‘Mayor inaugurates Rs900m solar-powered street light project on Sharea Faisal’ (Jan 5), which quoted the Karachi mayor (Murtaza Wahab) as saying that the project would “save Rs25m in electricity bills” every year. I do not know whether to laugh or cry. A simple calculation (900 divided by 25) shows that the payback period for this project is 36 years. Ask anyone who knows the subject, and you will be told that the payback period should be of five years. The city mayor either does not know what he is talking about or someone has minted a lot of money.

Shakir Lakhani

Karachi

https://www.dawn.com/news/1967290/wrong-estimate

Imran Khan fails to get support from the people of Karachi

Imran Khan's supporters, encouraged by the turmoil in Iran, thought they could persuade the Pakhtuns of Karachi to rise against the government. It was a miserable failure. Only a few people attended, the ground was practically empty, so his henchmen made speeches on the road. 

It's easy to understand why the Pakhtuns refused to fall for his latest gambit. Imran Khan's province (KP) is reeling due to the stoppage of smuggling from Afghanistan, and this is affecting Pakhtuns all over the country. They realized that by paralyzing Karachi, the whole country would be affected and they would be the ones to suffer the most. Besides that, inflation is under control, prices of commodities have decreased due to prevention of smuggling them to Afghanistan, so the people really support the present government. Also the failure of Imran's party to improve conditions in KP (the only province under its control) has made his party very unpopular. Let's hope Imran Khan realizes now that it's better for him to remain quiet and remain in jail for another three years at least.

Artificial intelligence: a future scenario

A future scenario

Published in DAWN, January 5th, 2026

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is speedily becoming very popular as more and more people use it to save time. However, it is now impossible to say with certainty whether a particular video clip is fake or real. We know that there are many people who go berserk when they see videos of their womenfolk dancing or even photos in which they are seen seated next to men who are not their close relatives. What if someone posts a fake video or obscene photo of a woman (who has rejected his advances) on social media and sends it to her relatives?

Things have got so bad that it is now impossible to even talk to others without getting into an argument. If, for example, I mention a video of a cult leader saying something controversial, the immediate response is, “It’s probably AI-generated”. Neither side is in a position to establish authority of the claim in such cases.

Of course, there is a positive side to it also. In school, we were taught that politics and religious topics should be avoided when talking to friends or strangers. So the only safe thing left is sports, like, say, cricket. I know for sure that I would not be lynched if I say that a particular cricketer should not be selected for the next tour.

Certainly, a more serious problem is likely to surface in a few decades from now, when, fortunately I have no chance of being alive. When robots become increasingly like humans in appearance, how will someone know if the man or woman talking to them is real?

Shakir Lakhani

Karachi

https://www.dawn.com/news/1965215/a-future-scenario

A week later on January 12, this was again printed in DAWN (https://www.dawn.com/news/1966445/ais-future).

Jungle rule: Trump's invasion of Venezuela

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For weeks, Donald Trump had been talking of invading Venezuela and arresting its president. Yesterday the unthinkable happened: US forces captured the Venezuelan president and his wife while they were asleep. This is pure jungle rule. Trump is behaving like the neighborhood bully. Last week he said that the US would bomb Iran if demonstrators in that country were killed by the government. Of course, if he does attack Iran again, the Iranians would become more united. But would he threaten the Saudis if they did the same thing?

What I don't understand is how the US could simply walk into Venezuela and arrest its sitting president. Obviously, there must have been agents on the ground who kept the US informed of the Venezuelan president's whereabouts. But why hasn't the same thing been done to Cuba, which is avowedly anti-US? Is it because the Cuban people support their leaders?

It seems that Trump wants to control all the oil left on earth. He doesn't realize how much fossil fuels are responsible for global climate change. 

Dealing with inflated utility bills

Living in a third-world country like Pakistan has its advantages, incredible as it sounds. For instance, you don't have to wait fifteen days before a doctor gives you an appointment. You can buy medicines without a doctor's prescription. You can get cheap smuggled auto parts and even car engines that have been stolen or taken from damaged vehicles. But the downside is that if you get an inflated electric or gas bill it's almost impossible to persuade the company that there is an error in the bill and it should be revised.

Of course this kind of thing was very common before the electric supply company and the telephone departments were privatized. I once got a bill from Karachi Electric (before privatization) for a phenomenal amount, which was revised only after I had paid a bribe equivalent to a quarter of the bill amount. As for telephone bills, almost every month I would be charged for calls made to Ireland or Australia, which I had to pay, otherwise the telephone would be disconnected. In some cases, I did manage to get refunds, as in the case of a "ghost phone" which was not in my use. But usually one had to suffer and wonder why one's father had to choose this country to live in when many had migrated to civilized countries like Uganda or Nigeria (in 1947).

So when I got an inflated gas bill the other day I lost no time in going to their office and got the bill rectified. This was due to the fact that the meter reading on the bill was much higher than in the photo of the meter on the day the reading was taken. It was only due to my education that I was able to do so. An illiterate Pakistani would have been shooed away and told to pay or do without gas for the rest of his life. 

The Taliban will never stop destabilizing Pakistan

Not a day passes by without a terrorist attack in the north of the country. It was Imran Khan who encouraged the Taliban by saying that they had broken the shackles of slavery when the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. Later he emboldened them further by allowing forty thousand Afghans to settle in KP. That's the main reason for our failure to rein in the terrorists.

Another reason is that the Afghan Pakhtuns believe that KP and Baluchistan belong to them. They have been aided by India since 1947 to destabilize Pakistan. The problem is, many Pakhtuns in Pakistan also want their province (KP) to be either independent or part of Afghanistan. The Taliban will never give up their claim on the two provinces, especially since they want to impose strict Islamic rule over the whole of Pakistan once they get the two provinces.

The rebels in Baluchistan want their province to be an independent country. Here too India has played a major role. Baluchistan is the most undeveloped province in the country despite its rich mineral wealth. The common people in Baluchistan did not get to share in the revenue the chieftains received for the natural gas they sold to the rest of the country. 

It's indeed a matter of shame that our governments have not been able to pacify the people of the two provinces.

The mysterious Mr. Jinnah

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Mr. Jinnah, the man widely credited with single-handedly creating a new country, has always remained a paradoxical figure. The original Jinnah was so different from the masses he led that it's unbelievable they loved him.

For instance, he couldn't speak Urdu. He was more fluent in English than in his native tongue (Gujrati). Yet he proclaimed that Urdu would be the national language of the new country. And he said it during a speech in English in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, the population of which was greater than that of West Pakistan. In fact, even in today’s Pakistan, Urdu is spoken by less than ten percent of the people, but because it is understood by the majority of the urban population, it continues to remain the national language.

Jinnah also didn’t know much about what Islam means to most Muslims. He didn’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam, as he joined the minority Shia sect when he married a Catholic/Parsi woman and had to leave the Ismaili sect (in which he was born). He also didn’t know that those belonging to the Ahmadi (Qadiani) religion are not Muslims, he said they are Muslims when asked why he had an Ahmadi advisor (Zafrullah Khan). Not only that, he even asked the Sikhs to join Pakistan, offering them to impose any conditions they wanted to become part of the new Muslim nation. If they had done so, more than a third of Pakistan’s population would have been non-Muslims. This disproves the widely propagated claim that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam. In fact, the first Pakistan Resolution explicitly stated that Pakistan would be a country where the minorities of India would be able to safely practice their religions.

Finally, there was his speech in which he said that all citizens of Pakistan are equal, that there is no difference between Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, that they are free to practice their religion in Pakistan. Evidently, he didn’t know that most Muslims in the subcontinent hated non-Muslims, particularly Hindus.

Despite all his foibles, I believe that by creating Pakistan, he saved the Muslims of the subcontinent from extinction.

 

 

Rape case decision proves our judges are still living in the Stone Age

It's been evident for a long time that the state of education in the country has been worsening and the latest case involving the apex court's decision in a rape case proves that the mindsets of our judges is like that of those who were living in the Stone Age. Recently the same court ruled that taking DNA of a woman violated her dignity, while in another case, even though an accused woman had agreed to her DNA being taken, the court didn't allow it.

In the latest rape case, the poor victim was not believed as she didn't provide torn clothes or other evidence to prove that she'd been raped. Her contention that the rapist forced her at gunpoint was not believed, and the judges held that it was not a case of rape but consensual sex. The poor woman will have to live the rest of her life as a shameless woman because she failed to pass the two-finger test (which has long been discarded as proof of women's promiscuity).

Perhaps the judges thought that it wasn't rape because she got pregnant. An American senator once said that a woman cannot get pregnant if she's been raped, and can get pregnant only if she's agreed to have sex. Perhaps our "honorable" judges also believe this, as the rape victim did get pregnant. Whatever the case, our judges should be selected only after being vetted thoroughly.

What it means to be married for 52 years

It's been fifty two years since I signed on the dotted line. Those were traumatic times, just two years after the country was sundered and half of it was lost. At times it seemed that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was doing his best to divide the country again, there was intense bitterness between the Urdu speakers and the original inhabitants of Sindh, and quite a few days were spent at home due to curfews. 

My friend, the late Abid Shaikh, never married and five years before his death he told me that he should have done so when he was 35. I have two relatives who have no children, and they've regretted it. 

When I married, some of my distant relatives felt the marriage wouldn't last for more than three years. In fact, during the early years I also doubted if it would last, as I was struggling most of the time to earn enough to feed my family. Fortunately I had taken up meditation in 1979 and it helped me a lot.

Looking back, I think I've been lucky in having had a successful marriage. 

Trump's million dollar gold and green card

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I'd never have guessed that the US economy is in such a bad state that it needs foreigners to get US citizenship for a million dollars (which is equivalent to 300 million Pakistani rupees. I know a few people among my near and distant relatives who have that kind of money, but I can't understand why anyone like that would like to live permanently in the US, now that we know how unstable that country is. But then, there are gangsters in Russia and Africa who would definitely love to settle there. In fact, as Trump said, there are about 40,000 who have applied for the gold card, some of whom may be Pakistanis.

Come to think of it, I've never wanted to live anywhere other than in Pakistan, even though I could have gone to the US in the 1960s, even though most of my life has been spent in struggling to survive. If I'd gone to the US and spent 50 years working in jobs I didn't like, I'd have gone crazy. So I suppose it's been a good decision to remain in the country I grew up in.