A pretty shocking incident I heard about recently was of how a young lad in a certain upscale A levels institute went to a party at said school with his sister and his sister's boyfriend. Apparently, some lowlife attempted to force himself onto the young lad's sister, and boyfriend and lad intervened. As would be expected, violence broke out almost instantly and lowlife's friends arrived on the scene to back him up. At this point the brother and boyfriend of the girl whipped out their firearms and shot one of the opposing lads dead on the spot and seriously wounded another. In horror, the two lads tried to grab cash and their passports and flee the country as soon as possible, but were apprehended at the airport due to an FIR being filed almost immediately by the parents of the deceased and wounded students. I know this is all true, since I know the parents of the lad brandishing a pistol. What surprised me is that nobody else seems to have heard about this at all. I mean, look around, there isn't a whisper of the incident in the media at all. What disturbs me most about the incident is not that it happened amongst children of about 17 years, nor that its happening every other week somewhere or the other, although usually not to the extent that someone is killed, but that we've gotten so good at covering up our dirty little secrets to preserve this facade of respectability that we would shove something like the death of a young man at the hands of his peers under the rug and whistle and go about our business like nothing happened. Why is nobody angry about all this? Why does nobody even know about this?

I commented to a friend recently that if Pakistan managed to implement faster Internet connectivity, I would be happy to live here all my life. Unfortunately, thanks to the recent (past decade) increase in violence amongst teenagers, I'm drastically rethinking this statement. We all wonder what kid of hooligans are involved in incidents at local colleges where fights break out over girls and weapons (steel pipes, if we're lucky and guns if we're not so lucky) are whipped out and utilized to the point of having half the participants locked up and half sitting in the ICU wards at hospitals. Sure, we all wonder, until someone we know is caught and thrown into jail as his parents weep and try to get the money together for bail. Would you want that for your kid?