Last But Not Least

It begins with the money and ends with it, says a self-proclaimed intellectual while he is trying to make something out of the love-hate relationship between poverty and economic well-being of a person or a country. Do not look the other way. Our lives revolve around the newly printed notes of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP). So, instead of brushing aside this fact we should confront the reality and not try to go skirting around it. Those who fail to take the bitter pill often find space in a one-column news item, "Mr or Ms so and so committed suicide due to financial hardships". Yes, there may come a time in one's life when politics, religion, economics, the din and noise of life and even one's near and dear ones lose their significance like a moment gone by. That moment has to be dreaded because that is when one is ready to take one's own life.

Why is that? The more one thinks about it the more one ends up puzzled, sad, even disillusioned. Closing the chapter of one's life for a cause or in reaction to an emotional disaster makes some sense – a phenomenon that can be explained in the light of many a social, economic and political factor. But what it is like to lose all hope simply because one does not have a morsel to feed to one's children? Does poverty eat into man's capacity to stand firm in the face of adversity? Our once economic managers would certainly doubt that.

Poverty may be more than a silent killer. This sentence cannot be ignored as emotional rhetoric since, sadly, it has become a hair-raising reality after a woman took her life along with her two children in front of a moving, roaring train in Lahore. What might have been on her mind as she prepared to jump in front of the approaching train along with her two children? Perhaps nothing. But poverty remains a term to be explained to the economists, especially in Pakistan. The World Bank's website on Pakistan's poverty alleviation programme says that: "Poverty is losing a child to illness…" Perhaps this definition has to be updated something like this: "Poverty is being desperate enough to lose one's children to a moving train along with oneself." The woman, according to newspaper reports, was the life partner of a person who did not earn enough to provide a two-time meal to his family.

But when it comes to stories of death and destruction our print media sharpens its knives to butcher our right to entertainment. Newspapers seem to be in the habit of playing up stories that perhaps do not deserve even a single column. For example, if the genie of poverty has taken a couple of more lives what has it got to do with the teeming millionaires in Pakistan who must have continued sipping the coffee while skipping the page hurriedly that contained the news and the horrid picture of the event. This is shocking not because the mother could actually make her do the otherwise unthinkable but because that story served to take our eyes from the true picture – our economic indicators during the last eight years or so.

Why do we not believe in ourselves? We were on the verge of becoming an economic miracle of South Asia only a few months back. If you do not believe it ask our former banker-Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. You may ask him to return to Pakistan to make you believe in what others are disputing – the figures they say he fudged to throw dust in the eyes of the nation and the rest of the world. You see one has to first understand the basics. An economy is characterised by certain economic activity that is explained through various economic terms such as inflation, current account deficit, fiscal deficit, bank borrowing and so on and so forth. Each of these terms is linked with the other in some way. For example, if there is fiscal deficit the government relies on bank borrowing to keep the wheel of economy going. But economic jugglery is beyond the reach of the common man.

While every government keeps a minutely-prepared track of the positive economic indicators, it should also make a list of how many poverty-struck opted out of the difficult race of life due to a government's wrong economic policies. Here arises the question that to what extent a government can intrude into a free market economy? Where does the role of a welfare state come in? Elsewhere in the world we have the free market economy and welfare coexisting without clashing with each other. In such situations, the state takes the responsibility of the basic necessities of a society such as food, shelter, health and education. Ours is a rather unrefined concept of free market economy while the word 'welfare' seems to carry no meaning for us.

Still, humans have the unique ability to make others' pains theirs, to empathise in other words. But there are certain experiences that do not give us the room to even say a word or two of comfort to the one who have had enough with this world. One such person was the woman who took her own and her children's life. We surely want all this to change for the better. How will this come about? Start thinking, this is going to be the first major step in that direction. Hers should be the last such act.