Pakistan, Sir Ian Botham, Mothers-in-Law, and Dried Milk

By Ibn-e Eusuf

The political scenario in Pakistan is so surreal that only a seemingly far-fetched analogy can highlight its unreal realities.

Imagine the MI5 in the UK, fed up with the incompetence of Conservative and Labour politicians over Brexit, conspiring to install Sir Ian Botham as Prime Minister and selling him as the Great White Hope because he had been a hugely successful and popular cricketer. Now imagine a lady, from deep in the Yorkshire moors, emerging to declare Sir Ian Botham not only great and popular but specially sent by the Almighty to save the British nation from itself and lead it from hell to heaven. Sir Ian Botham weds the miracle-bearing lady, the union accompanied by a huge resurgence of otherwise agnostic people praying in churches for the health of the couple and the nation. A delighted Archbishop of Canterbury declares it the Event of the Millennium and Sir Ian Botham is both anointed a Saint and appointed Chancellor of Durham University to signal the blessed marriage of the sacred and the secular.

What would we in Pakistan make of above scenario?

Before we could make anything of it, in the twinkling of a nystagmus eye, a coalition of wily old foxes, sharpshooters, and eternal optimists would immediately spot the silver lining recalling that Ian Botham (then unknighted) had, during England’s 1983-84 tour of Pakistan, declared the host country “a place where every mother-in-law should be sent for a month.” Anticipating the speedy issuance of one-way tickets to Pakistan for all British mothers-in-law, since Great Men not only never forget but get more messianic with age, the coalition rubber-stamped post-haste the revolutionary visa-on-arrival scheme to signal their ever readiness for manna, or in this case mamma, from heaven which would yield an immense boost to our tourism industry flailing because of all the vituperative and fake news spread by our enemies regarding various ailing but virtuous Maulanas and their doings. Visionary images of dried milk flowing in Pakistan, accompanied, of course, by the obligatory honey given that it is an Islamic country, were plastered all over the crumbling walls and the drooling mealy mouths of TV anchors while an immensely grateful populace, including public servants on duty, redoubled their attendance at mosques to thank the Almighty for sending such wonderful sporting heroes with equally wonderful albeit mysterious spouses along with their divinely mandated handlers to our wretched world to entertain as well as to dispense justice and fair play sometimes from the tops of very mundane containers.

Allah be praised — truly no one can ever know His unknowable ways.

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Tags: Ian Botham, Mother-in-law, Pakistan, Politics