A conference on energy that starts with a power outage: stage management or poetic justice?
This week, I’m taking a break from my regular rants against my former, sensationalising employers to bring you a spot of regularly scheduled programming. To be clear, this segment will be brought to you by the makers of energy drinks, the renters of rental power, the now-unemployed dancers at our many DISCOs and the past-their-half-lives engineers that run our non-existent nuclear power reactors.
It started as a joke. First the Noon League summoned a moot of technocrats to help them hammer out a coherent energy policy that could reconcile the party’s manifesto promises with growing public demand for some (not much, mind you, but some) electricity. Then the Tsunami League came out with its own, ‘original’ plan of holding an energy conference, a month after the Noon’s. A simple chronological problem arose when the Tsunami-surfers accused the Nooners of ‘stealing’ their idea, which only bent the laws of physics in ways that would make pornstars blush.
Coming to why this circus was necessary, the plebeians are clamouring, for some unknown reason, that they should be able to enjoy the electricity they pay for. As if they are doing the state a favour by paying it for the generation of delicious, wholesome 220 volt DC current. Quite ludicrous, because if they didn’t pay, the state would refuse to acknowledge their existence and they would cease to be alive. Then, Skynet would hunt them down using cybernetic super soldiers that could survive everything but liquid nitrogen… Oh wait, wrong plot!
Back to the electrifying issues at hand and the Noon League’s conference on ‘Energy for Growth and Sustainable Development’. While there are many things wrong with that sentence, grammar being the least of my worries, what does ruffle my feathers is the fact that the opposition party is the one that has had this brainwave and actually set the ball rolling. In the civilised world, it is usually those in power who commit such unspeakable crimes against journalists and academics, who are subjected to the droning of political cronies harping endlessly about how good the government’s performance has been, in spite of their actual, dismal track records. However, one advantage of having an opposition party convene a conference on such a non-serious issue was that there was none of this. Instead, there was the incessant expression of gratitude from members of parliament, academics, technical experts and concerned citizens for being invited to a free lunch at the Serena in Islamabad.
As can be expected, this was an opportunity for the pot-bellied press corps to fill their stomachs with BBQ and their bags with the condiments on offer; a chance for parliamentarians and aspiring parliamentarians alike to heap praises upon those that supplied them the invitation, and an opportunity for mostly misunderstood ‘experts’ to try and convince these ignoramuses of that very far-fetched notion i.e., “E=mc2”, where ‘m’ stands for manpower and ‘c’ stands for commitment. While we here enjoy a surplus of willing manpower, anyone with even an iota’s worth of understanding of mathematics will know that squaring a zero will only yield yet another zero.
To be fair, the conference inspired some degree of hope in me. It was the first time that I saw genuinely intelligent people being allowed to do what they do best i.e., theorise. It was also refreshing to see some young blood at the moot and even more encouraging to see them actually being taken seriously. In addition, I got to meet some of the people behind the Noon League’s facelift and was pleasantly surprised to see my contemporaries taking the lead in trying to hammer out serious policy at the highest levels. This, in my flawed opinion, is what our country has been lacking for a long time now. The drive within our younger generation, for the longest time, seemed lost. And where it was evident, energies were being wasted and not channeled properly. This is now changing.
The energy conference highlighted a key factor in contemporary politics: that the orientation of political parties and the ruling elite, in general, has now shifted from a narcissistic, know-it-all view to a more inclusive, far more democratic outlook. This bodes well for the future of our fair backwater. If nothing else, this will help ensure that ideas are not lost in transmission and good intentions will not simply be used to pave the road to hell. We all may not be singing “Meray Gaon Mein Bijli Ayi Hai” just quite yet, but hey, it’s a start.
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