Japan plans to take renewable energy to new levels. Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency is working on a project that aims to harness, what is called, space solar energy. The concept is to send a satellite in space gilded with scintillating solar panels which will absorb energy from the sun and then use microwaves to transfer that energy to earth to a whole city. SpaceX and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is getting ready to incarnate a concept shown in Sci-Fi movies, connecting a computer chip to human brain. It aims to cure Parkinson’s disease and also to help people improve their memories. After electric vehicles and driverless cars, that can be seen buzzing on roads in West, the attention is being shifted to flying cars.

Given the developments and progress in technology (read about S-Curve) a Jetson-esque future doesn’t looks far-fetched. A German car maker Volkswagen plans to unveil its first flying car, E-Volvo, in the near offing. Scientists all around the world are working on Exo-skeletons that will make soldiers lift objects hundred times more than they can now, real life Iron-Mans. Europeans will, in the future, be travelling in pod-like vehicles that will travel at an eye-popping speed of 700 miles per hour. From London to Edinburgh, which takes 7 hours from a car, Hyper-loop promises to shrink this time to 50 minutes.

The advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is promising enough to raise concerns from scientists which recently wrote a letter highlighting the threats from AI. It was signed by 100 scientists including Stephan Hawking. Trump also got it wrong when he blamed Chinese for “taking their jobs”. The blame rather falls on Robots who have taken over most of the jobs. There are rising concerns and people are being prepared to how to cope in an environment where most of the work will be done by machines, about 40 percent of jobs by 2030. Jobs are under threat. But that is not the point of discussion here. However, it shows the extent of progress the world is making. Science fiction movies are going to have a tough time ahead. They need to exhaust that imagination in order to rapt and awe people of current and coming generations. As what was fiction then, is becoming reality now.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan we are still facing power-shortages, water scarcity issues and other ‘primeval’ problems. Above developments (only to name a few) and conditions in our country, when juxtaposed, make a preposterous case. We are, by relative standards, living in a stone-age. There are clips showing people and cows sipping water from the same pool. In the world of wind turbines, solar energy and bio-fuels we still are, preponderantly, dependent on the conventional ways of energy production. We still are fighting Polio while bionic arms become a reality and handicapped athletes now hurtle on the tracks with artificial limbs. The Saudi plans for building cities bigger than Belgium and Chinese Liuzhou Forest City with each building being covered by 1 million plants, gives us a glimpse of what and how the world is thinking: Concerns for growing population, global warming, for our future generations. But here the concerns are different.

And the contradictions in our society make matters more irritating and lamentable. Perambulating on the side-walks of MM Alam road in Lahore you will find the lanes on your left and right crammed with, almost, every famous international brand. Mercedes, BMW’s and Porsche are common sightings there. And shopping outlets are hardly found empty. So a question: If we can imitate all these brands and enjoy driving luxury cars then why, for what reason, can’t we tread on the same path of development and progress as the rest of the world? Isn’t it an incongruity to see such glaring boulevards and power-shortages both at the same time?

I remember visiting one of the hospitals here. Upon reaching the emergency of a government hospital we were told that the person coiling in my car with agony due to a fracture has to wait as there was only 3 stretchers available outside. Signal-free corridors, three stretchers, make sense, doesn’t it? With all the good luck in the world on our side we were lucky enough to find a stretcher and the patient was taken inside. I was told the patient now needs to be moved into another room, where he has to be shifted to another bed all this for an X-ray. Common sense pinched me in the head and the thought, of having a mobile X-ray machine so that instead taking the patient to the machine the machine can be taken to the patient, came into my mind. I think I am blessed with an uncanny mind otherwise the doctors, the administration or for that matter the government officials with decades of experience may have figured this out first. In South Punjab or other neglected areas the condition of hospitals are much worse. Compared to them this was an enviable treatment.

If we call development which is only centred on the art of road building, than let it be known that it was more appropriate a term when the British use to refer to it in the 19th century whilst making rail and road networks in British occupied Sub-continent. Distributing laptops is not progress. Neither the Bitumen-mania (road making). For how long will the masses be appeased by iterative political rhetoric? The same lines, the same promises. The very fact that it is nothing but negligence, work-shirking and indifference on our part that is stopping us from progressing as a whole nation is deplorable.

Let’s indulge in the act of collective introspection. We have had achievements yet we need not stop. There is the best time to migrate from the fool’s paradise to the kingdom of ground realities. Time to stop and stare and think. Think for how long a huge chunk of our population will continue to reside at the first level of Maslow’s hierarchy? It is time to move ahead, upward, forward.