Short Essay: Frivolous Competition
It was the executive breakfast buffet that brought together guests residing in different parts of the four-star hotel on the Sheikh Zaid Road; among the crowd was everyone, the well-off (many) and the well-to-do (few), having a vacation (in the first case) or honeymoon (in the later) abroad. There were many white, some brown and a very few, almost negligible, black guests; there were flat-nosed and snub-nosed, wide-lipped and thin-lipped, heighted and petite, all dressed for the breakfast, effortlessly to exhibit their identity or efforting really hard to hide it – the part of the hotel and of the world from where they came.
The guised gave away their identity (obviously through their third-class-behaviour of their third-world origin) the moment they went to the serving platform: the whites restricted themselves to cereals (who eat oats in a complimentary breakfast?) and fruit cocktails and fresh juice (of their liking) while the brown (who are my area of interest at the moment) were found eating everything from porridge (porridge in four-star!) to mortadella slices to bacon; tasting and dumping the steamed fish, boiled beans and herb goat cheese as they have yet to develop taste for these God-knows-what things, and gulping large quantities of all fresh juices as they preferred all that was served there and then; and ending up with either the dishes placed under the title “Indian” (which were all Hindi in case of Pakistani honeymooners who had yet to digest the presence of non-veg food and the absence of Azan sound under a Muslim monarch) or with the overcooked omelette that is the specialty of the sub-continent.
The spree was to end at 11 sharp, and the browns were making mountains of the complementary food in their too-small-for-food-piles porridge bowls and salad plates. It was a race against time and against stomach (literally it was against the stomach!) that had its origin in a land where good appetite meant good (reproductive) health. What could be more bizarre then leaving behind the world on a complementary breakfast? Well, conquering the world in numbers!
There was a time, some three generations ago, when begetting a dozen or more children was child’s play for an Indian mother (it still is in some regions of the no-more-to-be-called sub-continent). The first-generation that came to Pakistan or that was already playing in the land which was to be called Pakistan, as children or in their adolescence, was too occupied (dealing with its parental or personal nostalgia of the India it left or haunted by the events it witnessed or bore during the partition of India) to change the ways of its parents, and continued begetting as many as Providence allowed children, keeping in mind the margin of few that would be taken back by the God!
However, their offsprings who definitely witnessed the struggle between too many hands and too few loaves, the second-generation of Pakistan, when became parents (the middle-class prodigy of the lower-middle-class parents) and were able to get some education, under the over-powering desire to change the way they used to live in their parents’ house, significantly reduced the number of issues they produced: five or less. Things definitely got a little better.
The third-middle-class generation (the one to which the writer belongs) opened its eyes in a time when raising children became so expensive that even “less is more”: three or less. Bringing them into the world is possible but keeping their heads above their shoulders very daunting, tiring.
No matter what the present preferences are, the first-, second- and third-generations have together led to the current population explosion – the one in which even there is no more enough water for all – that has gone far beyond the capacity of the state to handle. Interestingly, the excuse of overcrowding our homes and overpopulating our country is simple: increasing the number of Muslims in the world.
A video, devoid of any authentic source, recently got viral, propagating Muslims as becoming a majority in different parts of the world; the video did not say that the birth rate of Muslims who were living in those regions (that were not named at all) was obviously higher than the birth rate of other communities and/or natives living in the same area. It was an effort to “pretend” that more and more people were converting, proving Islam to be a popular religion abroad, with news clips of unknown media persons, with least known foreign channels, starting from the middle of the sentences.
The idea of ruling the world with “quantity” is savage, for it has always been a well-read, well-bread minority that has ruled the world – be it the Mughals who ruled over the majority of Hindus or British who governed the majority of Indians, Africans, Americans or others.
Cars were honking; vehicles getting mad on a road that was flooded with everything from a donkey-led cart to a harassingly driven heavy vehicle, from a free-moving motor cycle to an out-of-no-where crossing road woman, looking away from the traffic, playing pious. All knowing each other very well, and continuously trying to overtake each other on a road that barely has any place for even the pedestrians to pass. Even if they had crossed the car next to theirs, there would have been no room for further progress, or in the meanwhile they would have been taken over by another equally ambitious car, and the time each vehicle would take in reaching its destiny would remain the same, with varying degree of sensation – the joy of being in the driving seat, the knowledge of being in control of our vehicle-cum-life and of others, the fulfilment of competing to the best of our faculties in a hostile world.
On noticing that the car that just honked at him was driven by a she, he took offence and rode his bike so frantically that his thin, rough hair that sifted the dust from the air flew back so speedily that she feared they might part from his head. The zig-zag pattern that his bike made resembled the way fe/male animals leave behind their smell for their sexual partner to sniff and follow. Of course, she could not tell, but his far-sighted glasses must have gone oblivious of the speedily moving world around them; she, on her part, came to know of his existence, his aching manhood, only with the trail that he made right ahead of her car in a very narrow space, checking with a partially turned head if she was still there. She, however, ignored his existence and continued heading towards her destination, occasionally honking at the passing-by vehicles. He, expectantly, grew more savage, incessantly following her and even blocking her way to prove that even on a two-wheel he weighs heavier than her, getting the insane, orgasmic satisfaction of taking over a woman, a better woman!
Competition, if takes place between incompatible people in inappropriate places, could be very dangerous. It is healthy when heading over someone means actually reaching somewhere, not randomly driving between places that would later mean nothing. Our women waste their energies in begetting, for their men, progeny – preferably sons; these sons of the nation have only one achievement to their credit, being born a boy; becoming a man, however, is the milestone achieved by only a very few. What-is-referred-to-as-men, from biological point, exhaust their energies in taking over the women who, in an effort to overcome their biological deficit, mastered all that was given to them, from books to cookery, in an effort to please an otherwise offended parents. Our couples, if they bear to put up with each other or when they are forced to publically appear together, spend their energies in quaffing food that remains always short in their own houses – poverty is one thing, hunger another.
A nation can never succeed when its genders are at forks with each other. The race to produce the maximum number of sons, the race to leave behind a fellow, the race to eat more than the rest must end now, for the false sense of competition has only done us damage; it led us nowhere while we were deluded (the writer does not know by whom) into believing that we were just a mouthful away from our destination.
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