Saturday, June 13, 2015

PEC Elections

PEC elections are due to be held on 14th June, 2015.
In the past when postal balloting was held, I was often approached by engineers affiliated to political parties to hand over the unmarked ballot papers to them so that they might mark all the candidates affiliated with their parties and get credit from their leaders. I never obliged, although many others did.
Since last time, polling booths are being set up for direct balloting and various allegations of rigging have been made.
This year in Karachi with about 40,000 voters in a population of about 20 million 10 polling stations have been set up, of which two are located in the Sindh Assembly Building which is not accessible to general public. Apparently these polling stations are for the few privileged engineers who are also members of the provincial assembly, which seems to be a deplorable abuse of privilege.
There are also murmurs being heard that the polling stations in the Sindh assembly will be used to round up ballot papers from interior Sindh and have them marked and and cast under the direct supervision of ruling party bosses.
It will be interesting to see the detailed balloting results assuming that they will not be rigged.
Why can't the Engineering Council be left out of state politics. Does the Engineering profession have to be brought to the same level of corruption as mainstream politics?

Monday, June 01, 2015

Myanmar Massacre – 2


Nearly two years ago in April, 2013 I wrote a short blog on the massacre of Muslims in Myanmar. Unfortunately, nobody took notice of it. Recent reports indicate that the scale of atrocities has increased and the situation can be rightly termed as genocide and ethnic cleansing. The following are the latest images circulating on the social media:


One would have thought that not only compassionate Muslims but also conscientious Buddhists from  countries with substantial Buddhist populations would have come forward to mitigate the sufferings of the innocent human beings being subjected to abject baseness in Myanmar. Now there are tens of thousands of people meandering in the seas being turned away from every port of refuge.

However, there is another angle to the situation. How do you think the survivors of this genuine holocaust are going to feel towards humanity? With utter hatred and obsession to revenge? Aren’t we breeding a new creed of terrorists?