Let me begin by saying something I never thought I’d need to when I first started out in journalism: these notes are not generated by artificial intelligence. I personally have hammered away at a computer keyboard to generate these notes. Any intelligence behind them (not that I claim there is any) is purely natural, not artificial. True, a computer is involved, but only to faithfully record my thoughts, to which the book title of Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow, apply. (Jerome K. Jerome, for those who might remember, was the author of ‘The Man Who Was A Hospital’, an essay in the Intermediate English course of a bygone age, an extract from his classic Three Men In A Boat.).
The reason I’ve tried to make this clear is Imran Khan’s piece in The Economist. That article summarizes the various iniquities visited upon his head. There was the problem of how he had written it, being in jail. Of course, he could have written it in a mixture of candle-soot and his own blood on his bedsheet, and then smuggled it out to The Economist. (Scraping it out on his cell wall with a rusty nail would have met two obstacles: getting the rusty nail, and getting the wall to The Economist.)
Imran himself solved the mystery by saying that the article was AI-generated. This is the same Imran who addressed a (virtual) rally, even though in jail. It was an AI-generated address. With the AI-generated symbol, we are entering a new area even for a tech-savvy party. Why bother with elections at all? Why not have AI-generated results, and an AI-generated government?
Imran can address the UN through AI, and meet foreign leaders that way. Maybe AI could fix the economy, by generating positive news about prices and so on. Maybe the PTI could fulfill all its promises by AI. That way PTI supporters could spend the next five years at their keyboards secure in the knowledge that they had won the election, that Imran was PM, and all was right with the world.
In that perfect world, nobody would have resigned from the Supreme Court. The resignation of Mr Justice Mazahir Ali Naqvi was not as surprising as that of Mr Justice Ijazul Ahsan. Mr Justice Naqvi had got as far as he was going to go, but Mr Justice Ijaz was going to become Chief Justice, barring a series of events that would be very complicated. As aged mothers and village elders were wont to repeat, “Beta, Sarkari naukri na chhorheen.” (Never give up a government job). Of course, one of benefits of a government job is a pension, and if Mr Justice Naqvi had resigned soon enough, his would have been secure. Mr Ejaz has, by the way, secured his, for he resigned before the Supreme Judicial Council could take any action against him.
Mr Justice Naqvi was one of the Lahore High Court judges who had overturned the Special Court’s conviction of Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf for high treason. Just before he resigned, that overturning was overturned, and I assume the original order restored.
That not only convicted General Musharraf and sentenced him to hanging, but also sentenced his corpse to be hung at D Chowk, Islamabad. That extreme order recalled how the English treated the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, in 1660, when the monarchy was restored. He had died in 1658, but his corpse was dug up and strung on a gibbet at Tyburn when Charles II came back to England.
He wasn’t hanged for imposing England’s only Martial Law, known as the ‘Rule of the Major-generals’ (because Britain was divided into 11 ‘districts’ each under a major general), but for having killed Charles I. I wonder if the reversal means Musharraf’s body s to be disturbed in his eternal rest and the punishment carried out upon him?
I wouldn’t like to say how much was the judicial earthquake on the Richter scale, but the one that rocked Lahore was 6.3, which is less than the 7.6 earthquake in 2005, which shattered Kashmir. That one was also felt over here, and this time I was afraid for upcountry.
And while we wait for our elections, Bangladesh has had its. The BNP had boycotted because there weren’t any caretakers. So naturally, the Awami League won. The US State Department has said the elections weren’t fair, so the government has said it won’t tolerate interference in its internal affairs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the government here said the same thing. Even at AI-generated results.
