Olympian Indicators

Ah!! Olympics and Pakistan. A long road ahead.


It appears that nations of the sub-continent have neither developed an industrial base nor a modern culture. They have been unable to provide necessary services to their citizens as well. India, much touted as an emerging economic giant, has been totally exposed at the Olympics. It has been shown that Indian economic growth is spotty and lacks the vitality of an emerging economic power. It is neither here nor there: it has the ills of both Socialist and Capitalist systems and none of the benefits both types of society offer.

Pakistan’s situation is even worse. It is still stuck in the old feudalistic mode or at least it is still in the grip of feudal culture. A few girls in sleeveless clothes on TV and billboards are not reflective of the prevailing culture. The elites have ignored their own people and have kept all the goodies for themselves.

On top of it, general anarchy, ensuing commercialisation and absence of government writ have made the situation worse. Encroachment of public lands by the needy and the powerful has left no space for young and aspiring athletes to play any kind of game, for pleasure or for professional development. So there are no places for the runners to practice like the Africans. The Pakistani youth has the worst of all worlds. With this backdrop, it should not be surprising that we are nowhere in the world Olympics.

Getting Smarter and Happier

So, another world is possible. There is always a room for improvement. Excerpt from this article:

with the advance of brain scans and increased capability to measure neuron function down to a single cell, I have had to concede that not only can the brain get “smarter and better balanced,” but this process lasts a lifetime. And to put the new findings into greater relevance, the smarter you get the happier you get.

One of the principles of improved brain plasticity, as mentioned in my book entitled The IQ Answer, is that neurons (the brain cells) tend to gravitate toward high activity centers. Much like we develop motor skills to learn to ride a bicycle, the motor cells will accumulate as you build the coordination to keep yourself going. It takes trial-and-error for the brain to coordinate the neurons and accumulate enough for the practice to establish the high level of balancing and muscles to finally build the “package” of neuron connections for bicycling that seems to stay in place for decades.

Demystifying priorities

How setting the wrong priorities haunt/ed Pakistan.

After Kargil, Mr Sharif is a greatly embarrassed man, disenchanted as far as the army is concerned. So is the rest of Pakistan. And Kashmir, the source of all intellectual dislocation in Pakistan, is no longer the jugular vein of Pakistan. We have discovered rather late in the day that it is Karachi that is our jugular vein and that we have been living upside-down all our lives. And that we’d rather protect Karachi from terrorism and provincial sub-nationalism than try and grab Kashmir.