20000101

Does the millennium

end today?

MEHMUD AHMED

ISLAMABAD: Did a millennium end on Friday and a new one started today (Saturday) or today is the beginning of the end of second millennium that started with the second coming of Jesus Christ 1999 years ago. If he were alive today would he be 2,000 years old or one short of it?

This is a question that baffles people in the third world while the Americans and Europeans so proud of their skill at arithematics, have been trumpeting the 1999 to be the last year of the 20th century as well as the second millennium since Christ.

All over the European and American continents, the computer scientists have been holding their breath what their incompetence in their field to foresee will result into. They spoke of the millennium bug and the consequences if it was not rubbed out: the airliners will not fly, the banks will collapse, science laboratories and what not that depended on their invention, would backfire.

The Japanese Airlines and a few others suspended their operations for the last day of 1999 and the New Year day.

Like several other countries, the Pakistani banks stayed closed for a longer-than-long-weekend from Friday to Sunday and the bankers said they would reopen their dealings with prayers in their hearts and fingers crossed.

The tour operators in Europe and Americas minutes heaps of money by flying the simpletons out to the farthest corners of the world to watch the rising or setting sun of the last day of the millennium.

Even the United Nations too, like the gullible public relations men in Pakistan, seem to have been taken in. A World Food Programme news release circulated on late Friday night spoke of "rising demand for food aid as the new century begins" while a press releases issued in Islamabad recounted the achievements of various government corporations as record breaking.

A certain service oriented corporation claimed to have broken previous records at the advent of a new millennium while another similar organisation promised its new tariff becoming effective from new year, was a step forward "projecting Pakistan as an aggressive player as it enters the new millennium".

Questions have been e-mailed to European and American newspapers and the networks asking them whether what they meant by a millennium. They seem to be confused or slaved to their own innovation as no one seems to have attempted a reply. The CNN that runs a quiz often on such matters was also mum.

The American and British dictionaries, OCD and Chambers are quite specific about the meaning of a millennium: A thousand years: a thousandth anniversary.

But they did not anticipate that tour operators after a "quick buck" as the Americans say, will make two thousand years end a year earlier and the language scientists will watch them do so quietly.

To us in Pakistan and so in China, two millenniums will mean two thousand years and the year dawned today will complete after 366 days - 2000 is a leap year.