A Really Sad And Depressing Story
At least 14 women and children have been killed in a stampede to get free flour in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, officials say.
Dozens more were injured in the crush, reports say.
The flour was being handed out in a poor, congested neighbourhood of the city by a private group as part of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Pakistani TV showed distraught relatives arriving at a hospital where the injured had been taken.
Some of the victims suffocated in the stampede and others were trampled, officials said.
So note that first, there's not enough food to feed these families given their incomes, second that there is so little food that they literally run toward it when people are handing it out, and third, that people died as an unintended consequence of charitable contributions made trying to ward off hunger. What can you say?
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Pakistan
4 comments:
On the surface, incidents like these are "accidents"--they're no one's fault. But really, they're everyone's fault: from the people who don't make the electricity problems a priority to address thus resulting in constant load sheddings, the misdirected aid to the US that fails to put food in the mouths of the hungry but oils the rich's gears, to the guy who wanted to gain sawab by handing out rice to the poor, but failed to comprehend the obvious stampede it would create.
May God bless the souls of all those who died.
you're right. they are everyones fault.
part of the pain is how most pakistani blogs, including this one, will dedicate 90% of its articles to fringe and largely useless topics but when the searing poverty of the home-city of most of the authors (of this blog and many of its commentators anyway) is so sadly and glaringly laid bare, nobody will have a word to say.
a simple copy and paste blog and one comment will do.
compare that to the article a couple days back bemoaning western media's coverage of pakistan and its 19 comments. what a bunch of f'in hypocrites you lot are. you perpetually complain about western media's coverage of pakistan and yet your own (if existent) articles on the real pakistan are intellectually hollow and pathetically lazy.
the silence is deafening and the only conclusion one can draw is that pakistanis of the social and economic class of this and some other blogs simply don't give a damn.
go ahead, prove me wrong. i want you to. but sadly, that is the predicament of pakistan's so-called 'educated' class.
The event made me sad and angry. I know this sounds naive, but what can we do to change this situation?
ironically pakistan.
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