Man cannot live by grievance alone. If you nurture a grudge for long enough, eventually it takes over and starts to nurture you. That’s what happened to North Korea and that is what the likes of Shireen Mazari and Zaid Hamid , and the entire loony brigade, will turn our country into if we give them a chance.There are a few basket case countries in this world that are built around the idea that everything that comes from the outside world is laced with sinister purpose, and Pakistan will join their ranks if we don’t get a handle on this growing schizophrenia in our national discourse. Hafiz Saeed threatens India to “release our water, or we will draw blood.” Somebody should tell him that this is not the language in which water disputes are usually resolved. I know we have a grudge over the damming of the Chenab. I know we have a grievance over the ‘flaws’ in the Indus Water Treaty. But seriously, if Israel and Syria, Turkey and Iraq can have water sharing agreements, there is no reason why India and Pakistan can’t, preferably without screaming about blood.Shireen Mazari thinks that America is trying to destabilise Pakistan . Yes, she thinks this is to create the pretext to invade our country and seize our nuclear assets. In Pyongyang they have very similar ideas, and look at where it got them! But really now, if America was indeed that determined to seize our nuclear assets my guess is they wouldn’t dilly-dally for all these years by sponsoring sporadic bombing campaigns and feeding a ragtag separatist movement in Balochistan. My guess is they’d just do it.When they were determined to attack and invade Iraq, it took less than one year to cut through the international formalities and get the US Army past the ‘line of departure.’ Of course, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in DC now who thinks it was a great idea to invade Iraq and even fewer who think it would be a great idea to repeat the experience with nuclear-armed Pakistan. In Islamabad though, I’m told people with these views are a dime a dozen, with Madam Mazari perched atop this silly choir.Zaid Hamid thinks the world is united against us, but we’ll give them a good trouncing when they come for us. Yes, with unity in our ranks we will overcome all world conspiracies to rob us off our manhood, he says. I believe Qaddafi said something very similar to his diminishing band of loyalists before he ordered the African mercenaries to open fire on his countrymen. I do believe Qaddafi and Zaid Hamid share the same mental condition. The colonel’s fiery speech a few days ago, denouncing Nescafe and bin Laden in the same breath, brought that home. We have mad men in our country who make speeches like that, don’t we?And the madness goes on and on. Every day some other lunatic is to be found on TV, talking about some variation of these themes. But where does this kind of talk take us? Hafiz Saeed wants that we should be like Somalia, armed to the teeth, but bereft of ideas. Shireen Mazari wants to take us to North Korea, with her radioactive brand of muscular paranoia. And Zaid Hamid wants to be a dangerously charismatic demagogue like Qaddafi.But my fear is that we’ll end up with a little bit of each and a whole lot of none. A lunacy all our own. Armed to the teeth and bereft of ideas we already are. All we need now is to surrender to our cruder instincts, roar with defiance at the slightest provocation, test fire a ballistic missile every week, oil a nuke or two in broad daylight in full view of the satellites from time to time, and leave everybody guessing about what the heck we’re going to do next. And sitting atop it all will be the bipolar madman, the demagogue with trademark headgear who gives nine-hour long speeches denouncing the West and the East, the North and the South, swears at the sun at dawn and howls at the moon at night. Let the good times roll!Published in The Express Tribune, March 3, 2011.