Beset by problems, we can’t go on like this forever, lurching from one uncertainty to another. The time has come to cut through the nonsense and reach for the substance of things.

Why after 57 years of uncertain statehood are we still obsessed with sect, caste and creed? Being a Pakistani should be good enough for all of us. From all official documents the requirement of having to fix your faith, sect or caste should at once be erased. An immediate and total ban on that most hideous symbol of the modern age: the plastic shopping bags should be done at once considering how all things plastic are blighting the national landscape and clogging the republic’s water channels, big and small. Hydrogenated cooking oil is a bad enough thing in itself. If its use is allowed to go on unchecked we’ll soon have the highest rate of heart disease in the world.

On to other things. Reform of education, an end to the cocktail of education systems we have in Pakistan, must be the first priority of the republic. If we are seeking to forge a single nationhood then there must be one education system for all Pakistani students, one syllabus, a common examination system, and, in the fullness of time, when the Lord of the Worlds smiles on this country and its people, a glass of pure milk at state expense, at eleven in the morning, for every student. No O and A levels. India did away with O and A levels back in 1965. What blowback effect of retarded colonialism makes us stick to them? The great Abdus Salam, the only Pakistani winner of the Nobel Prize, was a product of the matriculation system. By all means wear what you want and have your hair cut the way you want but remember that to be educated in the real sense is to be cool. To be a top gun mathematician or physicist is to be cool. To hear a Beethoven or Mozart tune and be able to name it is to be cool.

The supremacy of science and reason, an end to the mumbo-jumbo of superstition, a proper reverence for the arts, excellence in music, achievement in sport, the liberation of Pakistani womanhood, an all-round refinement of culture: we could make room for these things by taking out all the useless lumber with which our national faculties are clogged. Our education should be on the Cuban lines: free, totally free, for everyone, based on solid foundations and aspiring for the stars. After education, healthcare, no shame leaving deeper scars on Pakistani pride than the state of our hospitals. Not fancy state-of-the-art facilities, just enough to provide basic, essential healthcare to every Pakistani in need. And, in all seriousness, we need to rethink prohibition. Not by opening a new theological debate and giving fresh ammunition to the mullah lobby to open another front against the rest of us but by honestly evaluating the good and ill flowing from this measure. Restoring the republic’s mental equilibrium will remain incomplete if General Zia-ul-Haq’s religious laws, the changes he brought about in the penal code and the Constitution, are not repealed altogether and in one go.

Ayaz, a columnist for Dawn, writes for THT from Islamabad