Message from a Pakistani on India’s moonlanding: Well done neighbour | Naeem Sadiq

.[The following message from a Pakistani Citizen has circulated on WhatsApp groups in the past 24 hours. It is being reproduced here in public interest]

India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft making a soft landing close to the South Pole region of moon, is a momentous event for which India deserves heartfelt felicitations and compliments. As a neighbor, I am happy and proud of India’s achievement and join the Indian people in their moment of joy and celebration.

I hope that we can begin to look beyond our differences and use this historic event as a platform not just for building better neighborly relations but also for rising above the self-constructed narratives that have weighed us down for 76 years. Hopefully, there will be no “Two Moon” theory bogging down our next generation.

Pakistan can learn much from its neighbor. A space program is a powerful engine for igniting interest in science, research, indigenous thinking, industrial growth and technology startups. It can inspire and reorient our youth from petty local politics to larger cosmic ideas. We are a wonderful and rich nation. Only if we withdraw and sell all our 200,000 or so government cars being used for the luxury of our blood-sucking, progress-blocking elite, we can collect Rs.40,000 crore, an amount three times more than the entire annual space budget of our neighbor. The rest of the amount could be used to make “Bhalai” machines so that no Pakistani ever enters a gutter again and the sanitation workers and security guards are extracted out of a life of cruelty, exploitation and illegal wages.

Naeem Sadiq