Because girls won’t work…

So this really funny thing happened the other day while we were sitting watching TV. My mom told me that an earlier news report stated that open merit for government medical colleges was being finished in Pakistan. Now there was going to be a fifty percent gender quota. I obviously laughed because for a moment there I was dumb enough to hope that our country was not being run by kindergarteners.

But my mother convinced me that this was in fact being very seriously contemplated. I thought of two close friends, a cousin and the terrible time they were going through thinking about the horrors that merit list would bring along.

Now let me clarify something. We Pakistanis are a nation of responsibe people who understand the reality that anyone who does not spend 5 years doing their MBBS and the later years of their lives specializing is basically a waste of space. Hence, the amount of pressure put on students to get into a government medical college is such that students with an 87% on the merit list may have to repeat their MCAT (entry test)  to get into a college next year as they weren’t good enough. People go crazy in this race. Years of tuition and rote learning to get through one exam. Which obviously is very fairly designed with negative marking and no conceptual questions. Just MCQs. And then an aptitude test where you’re asked questions like if the landline phone rings, who picks it up first? You or your mother? Well, at least these people have blind faith in their teenage candidate’s honesty.

Now here’s how they justify it. More girls happen to secure seats in these colleges that the government is funding. This funding, by the way is a huge favor on their part and they are doing this as charity because the money is coming from their tight pockets and not from our taxes. And education is clearly not their responsibility. These girls just ‘happen’ to secure seats after doing some voodoo which only the female sex can do. It’s not like they are smart or anything.

The precious government money gets wasted. Men of our country who study here and go abroad are, I suppose, using these resources very well. Also, this disparity only exists in medicine fields. We will choose to disregard all those engineering and technology class rooms where the ratio of girls to boys is 4:50.

And the solution to this non existent problem wasn’t to make a few years of practice compulsory, it was to put a quota in place (probably so that some ministers son, who almost got in, could actually make it to college).

These stunts pulled by the government are becoming increasingly less frustrating and unbelievable. Now, they’re almost funny. Long live Pakistan!