Harris Khalique's Dreams

Ayub Malik and Asad Sayeed believe in the same ideals. All three of us share the same dream, the dream which I keep writing about in this space as well and the two of them keep sharing with their readers or listeners. That there will be a Pakistan where a five-year old girl, Jannat, will not beg for alms at a traffic junction; where wheelchair-bound Nasreen gets a decent job and her mobility is made easier by the government; where the son of Ilam Din Kumhiar, a potter from Gujrat, will get the same opportunity for schooling as the son of Chaudhry Pervez Elahi; where Mehrab Baloch, a young man from Kech, would take pride and ownership of the state in which he lives; where ten-year old Qudrat Khan is neither sodomised nor made to get up at 4:30 in the morning to serve tea and parathas to truckers along the national highway; where a booking clerk called Ram Prakash and a receptionist called Jacob Masih are not pestered by their self-righteous Muslim colleagues.