one of my most fav..

These class 7 children want Harry Potter to save the country

* President Musharraf = Lord Voldemort
* Benazir Bhutto = Umbridge
* Quaid-e-Azam = Dumbledore
* Shaukat Aziz = Thackneize
* The media = Order of the Phoenix

By Uroos Ahmed

KARACHI: A group of class seven students at a private school in Karachi, for whom the state of emergency is a completely alien and unprecedented concept, are comparing the current state of affairs to the adventures of Harry Potter and wondering if President Musharraf is impressed by Lord Voldemort, the villain in JK Rowling’s immensely popular Harry Potter series.

“My students might be young but it is heartening to see how well informed they are,” said Sehar Rizvi, who teaches the seventh graders at a local private school. She felt the students did a pretty good job on the analogies of characters that they had been assigned.

“What distresses them the most is the absence of [a character corresponding to] Dumbledore and they can’t quite mark anyone as accomplished as the greatest wizard of all,” said Sophiya, the teacher who had come up with the idea of the class discussion and assignment. She said she planned to now put it up on the main school board to make students understand the importance of what the emergency operation is.

When Daily Times asked the students for ideas, a lot of them came up with Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah for the simple reason that he and Dumbledore were both deceased.

Among other factors, 12-year-old Saad Zia felt that Dumbledore and Jinnah were similar in that their followers were in danger. “Quaid-e-Azam was a lawyer and his followers, the lawyers and the Supreme Court are now in danger and Dumbledore was the headmaster and his students and school were in danger.”

Twelve-year-old Hamza Niazi felt Voldemort and Musharraf were similar because they were both supporters of “militancy”. “Voldemort wanted to finish off defense against the dark arts and teach in the school of wizardry. In our situation, Musharraf wants to finish off the judiciary which would defend the weak, and turn the country into a dictatorship,” the 12-year-old opined.

The children compared General Musharraf and the military’s take over as the one conducted by Voldemort and his death eaters, while Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was likened to Harry Potter and the lawyers are Harry’s friends.

The students felt PTV was similar to ‘Daily Prophet’, the wizardry newspaper, while the other news channels that have been banned were compared to ‘The Quibbler’, which was the newspaper that went against Voldemort and was then shut down after the villain and his allies kidnapped the editor’s daughter.

They compared the code of conduct for the media (no negative comments about the president or government) to the ‘taboo law’ imposed in the last Harry Potter book. The army and other law enforcing agencies were said to be the ‘snatchers’ (Voldemort’s workers) who used to catch witches and wizards who dared to utter the dark lord’s name.

They also compared Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to Thackneize, who was the prime minister of the wizards appointed by Voldemort and had been put under the imperious curse.

The children’s most insightful observations were those regarding Benazir Bhutto. They felt she was similar to Umbridge, an evil ministry witch who had given Harry a hard time in his fifth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. However, others felt that Bhutto could be Voldemort’s faithful servant Bellatrix Lestrange as well.

The students did not forget those whose loved ones were arrested or killed. Their sorrow was likened to the presence of dementors, creatures that took away all hope and happiness but were invisible to ‘muggle’ (non-wizards) eyes.

The most creative comparison was that of the ‘Order of Phoenix’, a secret society working hard to bring down the death eaters and Voldemort independent of the ministry’s governance. The students felt the media was playing that role by ensuring that the whole world was aware of the dark times that were being faced by Pakistanis.

For 11-year-old Meena, the situation was similar to that in the books when Voldemort takes over the ministry of magic and starts hunting down Harry Potter. “We just hope there is a Harry Potter out there somewhere who will save us.”