Power, water crisis knocks Pakistan socks off?

Even as Delhi’s chief minister urged officials of the Capital’s power and water utilities to pull up their socks to meet the peak demand of a sweltering summer, Pakistan has ordered all its civil servants to take off their pairs of this aforementioned bit of hosiery.

The parlous state of Pakistan’s power generation would imply that officials there have not been pulling up their socks for quite a while anyway, so dispensing with them altogether should not be too much of a sacrifice.

As Pakistan — and other parts of this subcontinent — has had hot summers long before socks were invented, there is no reason to mourn their prohibition either.

It is brave of the new dispensation, however, to forbid airconditioning in all government offices as Pakistan’s political class is not known to willingly abjure power per se.

But it is unclear how bare toes nestling in moccasins and sandals — and bodies clad in pale-coloured shirts, trousers or salwar-kameez, as the order further stipulates — will solve the country’s power generation shortage, though it may have a cooling effect.

Pakistan needs to be commended not only for taking this obvious short-term step to cut demand, but also for presciently realising that smelly socks would have been an added and unnecessary torture in offices that will definitely become unbearably stuffy.