Drink less tea.

I LIVED in Karachi in my younger days and a pleasurable activity was to drive over to Tariq Road to a place called Havemore or Eatmore ice cream. I thought of it when asked to drink less tea.

That is a memory of the old Pakistan where you were asked to, and could have, more of things. Now we are living in the new Pakistan and constantly being told to have less of them or better still not have them at all. I mean, you seriously want to eat cheese?

So, if we are already living in the new Pakistan, what is the new new Pakistan going to be like? Would we be notified not to play golf and live in our SUVs?

The journey from the old to the new, from the sublime, relatively speaking, to the ridiculous was already captured quite vividly, albeit unintentionally, by the title of the 1980 book From Jinnah to Zia written, incidentally, by the very man who spurred the descent.

Why has the quality of human capital declined in Pakistan?

This story was reiterated by Intizar Husain in his 50-year retrospective of Pakistan's literary history (Charaghon Ka Dhuan). His most telling verdict pertained to observations of the changes in the culture of the Pak Tea House, the hangout of artists, in Lahore: In 1950, he wrote, the waiters had the sensibilities of poets; by 2000, the poets had the sensibilities of waiters.

Intizar Husain also attributed this decline to the quality of leadership in the country. In another of his memorable phrases, he lamented the absence of people of stature (qad wale log) and their replacement by pygmies (bauney).

This may be an oversimplification but there is no denying the decline in the quality of leadership. It could very well be because every leader who has muscled his way to power has picked someone of lesser ability as a deputy and a group of yes-persons as enforcers. Or, alternatively, the nod has gone to the most pliant individual likely to do the bidding of the power brokers without questioning. Humayun had the good sense to at least limit the reign of Nizam saqqa to two days.

This is a plausible dynamic in a country where leaders do not earn the right to office by any demonstration of competence; often their first real job is to be the chief or the prime minister under advisement that they be given a chance to prove themselves. That's how democracy works in Pakistan. I suppose I would be labelled undemocratic for not giving my bike for repair to a person who was in the process of proving his competence at my expense.

We are...