Death Loiters Above
The act of loitering and death seem pretty contradictory in nature, but that is precisely what loitering drones are. Even now, a farmer in a field in Faisalabad could be right under one (one was in Attock, and died, in fact)
I do not really possess the vocabulary to articulate all my thoughts on existing, and I'm certainly not any good at philosophy, but this entry in my log is merely to capture a certain feeling.
Right now, life is a bit scarier than usual – not for me but for those in every other province but KP. Pakistan is no easy place to live in to begin with, the economy seems to be hellbent on eradicating us poor and now you have loitering drones from India wandering around different cities.
Recently, people in Bahawalapur watched a missile fly overhead, and hit a local area. There was news of a traveling missile, and so everyone had gotten their phones out. I think that the footage of that missile is probably the best statement we can have, as regards the fleeting nature of life.
Watching such footage, I find the very thought that there are rabid people on both side wanting a war horrifying, to say the least. The fat old men in the chair will do anything but fight the actual war, sending everyone else to die instead. It is so easy to say such things at a great distance, separated from the actual landscape, tapping on your phone, technology has made some of us so much more desensitized in so many ways. But I suppose that's how distance always factors in, I have no doubt that I could easily find people that have no idea where Pakistan is, or what even is happening but would wish me dead, thinking “Pakistanis are just terrorists” and so he must be one too. If you wish to experience that for yourself, set your Steam profile flag to Pakistan and play Dota 2, watch as your profile gets flooded with such comments.
Even more drastic than that, various cities were infiltrated by Harop drones, 25 of which have been taken down so far, one of them fell near my cousin's school in Pindi, a mere 2 kilometres or so away. Children in a school could've well had their last moment, unaware a loitering drone was right there, ready to rain death from above had they been there (luckily, they weren't)
I myself grew up in an era where terrorist bombings were common, one such example is when I was playing field hockey by myself (I would take the ball and run it around – just one of the many ways I would pass time) in Hayatabad and there was an explosion a few kilometers away, the sound was deafening and the quaint hotel I had just passed an hour ago was now a coffin of fire and broken windows. I doubt you can find anyone that hasn't lost someone to such events – those were the 2000s in a nutshell, someone dead in a blast in a CD store, someone else dead in a blast due to a car that had been parked with a bomb in it – such things were the norm. The situation stabilized around the mid 2010s, I would say, or got close to it for people in KP, Sindh and Punjab – poor Balochistan not withstanding.
Back in the 2000s, the people of Waziristan had to live in a constant sense of fear, innocent or no if, you were in an area painted for a drone strike, that is just about curtains. And many died due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, something about collateral damage and the Doctrine of Double Effect, or some such. Life for them was such that they grew skilled at shooting down drones with rocket launchers.
There is a beautiful article in The Atlantic that highlights some of their anguish link
Now, there are Harrop drones wandering through Pakistan, being shot down, and people are just carrying on, not giving a damn while the army engages them – some even got injured in an engagement with said drone.
We Peshawaris (I am from Nowshera myself but have lived here so much I am pretty much one too) have always been in the thick of it, terrorism, bombings, drones – all of this usually was confined to our province. And for the first time we are watching without being affected ourselves, and it feels very odd.
In Rawalpindi, one person — a resident of Lahore — lost his life and two were injured after a drone crashed near the Pindi Cricket Stadium on the Murree Road. Were the food street area of that stadium not closed at the time there could've been more casualties. And as mentioned earlier, a farmer died in Attock, and someone died in Gujranwala also.
Of the 25 drones, some crashed on roads, others on houses and many are being found in fields, thankfully the number of casualties remains low – yet it is not zero, and every so called casualty is somebody's entire world, but the man in the chair does not care, we might as well be numbers to the rest of the world, a fate I made peace with many years ago.
I would like to end this entry by dropping a question from that article in the Atlantic about drones in Waziristan.
Would you have nightmares if they flew over your house?