Marching Mayhem

THANKS DAILY TIMES.

Hopefully my alliterative title drew in more absorbed attention.

Anyways, my verbal wit aside, there's a political (I feel that word merits more emphasis than called for) situation that has entered my familial realm. A movement angled towards the establishment of an independent judiciary, the "Long March" broke ground in Pakistan today. Their 1,000 kilometer (the omniscient google acquainted me with the formula for kilometer --> mile conversion, so for all you imperial system aficionados, 1,000 kilometers = 621.371 miles) "hoof fest" began in Karachi and will wrap up in Islamabad. Lawyers participating in the protest are setting their sights on thwarting the government led by Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the late Benazir Bhutto (chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party), and reinstating former Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Chaudhry was defrocked by former (who knew one word could elicit so much satisfaction on my part?) President Pervez Musharraf in 2007. So now, to address how I'm bracketed with this uprising on a personal level: my uncle, the prestigious lawyer Muneer A. Malik (we Maliks have quite the gene pool), was the former (this usage doesn't have the same effect on me as the prior) president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. He, along with about 150 or so other activists, has been withheld in prison in Hyderabad. All we can hope for right now is that this republic restores its "Ittehad, Tanzim, Yaqeen-e-Muhkam" ("Unity, Discipline, and Faith"... wikipedia is pretty much God-sent).

By the way, I hope you all enjoyed my parenthetic, off-side discourse... :).

I would like to thank this guy for my wonderful photo.