‘Defected’
or ‘Defective’?
JULY 3, 2019
I am a great admirer of
that lady doctor, you know the one, the special assistant to the Dear Leader
for information and broadcasting. She replaced that popular chap who was made
minister of science and technology, even though he is a lawyer who I doubt
would be able to explain the Theory of Relativity to anyone.
As I said, I was, in fact,
I always am deeply impressed by the lady, as she is a bundle of energy who can
talk for hours without getting tired. I can’t talk for ten minutes without my
blood pressure shooting up, especially when my driver asks me to explain to him
the Theory of Relativity, and why we can’t drop atom bombs on the houses of
people we don’t like. So when she recently said that “there is one political
leader who was born with birth-defects”, I gasped with admiration. I don’t know
whom she meant, because there are many such leaders in the country. No, I can’t
name them because I don’t want to be faced with lawsuits. But when she was
asked to elaborate, following an outcry on social media, she didn’t give the
standard answer that politicians with birth defects usually offer: “My
statement was taken out of context.”
No, the fearless lady boldly said she had meant ‘defected’;
thank God, she didn’t say ‘defecated’. She remarked, “Defected are the ones who
contradict between their words and actions.” Elaborating further, the lady
said, “Every person who contradicts his words with his actions is born with a
birth defect, it can also be a political person who might have physical,
medical, and psychological defects by birth.”
Well, you could have fooled me. I’m sure she didn’t use the term
defected in the sense of someone defecting from one party to another, as she
herself is such a one, and among her colleagues, there are many others as well.
Again, when she said, “Defected are the ones who contradict between their words
and actions”, I know many such people, one of them lives in Islamabad whose
name I’ve forgotten but he’s the one who loves taking U-turns every now and
then. Obviously, she wasn’t referring to him, or to some of her colleagues who
have the same habit of making U-turns and contradicting themselves every other
day.
So that leaves me wondering what word she meant to use instead
of defected. Perhaps she meant ‘defective’, particularly ‘mentally defective’.
That bit about being born with birth defects explains a lot. What she probably
meant was that there are several politicians who are not defected but
defective. Being a doctor, she should know that the country is full of such
people. No, no, I’m not referring to those millions who voted for the PTI, I
mean those politicians who have the habit of ‘defecting’ before every election.
The Great Khan would do the nation a big favour if he forms
another commission, headed by the lady doctor, to determine what to do to those
who are defected or defective.
The writer is an engineer, a former visiting
lecturer at NED Engineering College, an industrialist, and has been associated
with the petroleum, chemical industries for many years.
Post a Comment