WHY is everybody so discontented these days? Whatever they have never seems to be enough for them. Everybody wants more, and hyperinflation is partly to blame. Prices have gone up by more than 500 per cent, if not more, in the last couple of years. The rupee has no value anymore because it is being devalued again and again to make exports cheaper, while we, as a society, are heavily dependent on imports. Those who can afford imported food are not price-sensitive, and constitute that 0.1 per cent segment of society which possesses the means to maintain the standard of living they have always enjoyed regardless of inflation.

The middle and lower-middle classes refuse to reduce the size of their families, but since they can no longer afford to feed their offspring, they enrol them into seminaries or put them to work from a very young age. Why can’t family planning be kept separate from religion? Where are the resources to feed all these children?

The fact is that family planning is not prohibited in religion. Each child born imposes more and more pressure on the economy which has already hit rock bottom, and is only surviving on debt. More and more loans have to be taken for debt servicing and so it becomes a vicious loop.

As we sink deeper and deeper into debt, the divide between the poor and the rich broadens, more and more taxes are imposed, and businesses can barely afford to keep their heads above the surface

Salaries just cannot keep pace with the rapidly rising prices and the salaried class is being squeezed as the noose gets tighter and tighter all the time. As a society, we are unable to link cause with effect, and keep on repeating the mistakes of the past, hoping that the end result will be different.

How to go about setting things right, then? Until the judiciary is streng-thened, the currency is stabilised, and the economy is pulled out of the vicious cycle it has fallen into, we cannot even imagine doing anything positive.

Besides, the brain drain is bound to continue and the fast-paced descent into a political, economic and structural quagmire will be hard to fight against.

Gaitee Ara Siddiqi
Lahore

Published in Dawn, April 11th, 2023