THE state of public transportation in Islamabad and Rawalpindi has deteriorated since the franchised bus company, Varan, ceased operations in the twin cities in February this year under a Supreme Court order in October 2004.

For one thing, the spectacle of commuters travelling on the rooftops of the wagons and small coaches has become an increasingly common sight on the roads.

No doubt the view from the rooftop must be much more panoramic than from inside the crowded coaches. The travelogues of some adventurous backpack Western tourists describe rooftop travelling on buses in countries such as Nepal and Laos as the best way to sink in the rural scenic beauty.

But there is certainly a big difference between a one-time, adventurous, wind-beating-on-the-face travel on the roof of a bus in the rural areas of an exotic country, and the everyday commuting to and from school or office on the roof of a bus in the scorching heat of summer in the city. The latter is not only hazardous to life, but dangerous for health too because of the pollution and direct scorching rays of the sun.

At certain places in the capital, e.g., at Zero Point and Aabpara, the traffic police try to flag down these coaches with passengers on the rooftops, who scramble down reluctantly. But this police action has not been able to deter what appears to be a growing but dangerous trend.

The main reason for commuters — many of them students, casual labourers and even office workers — to resort to this practice risking death everyday is obviously the crowded coaches and the inadequacy of the existing public transport system to cater to the demand of commuters in the twin cities.

Apart from rooftop travel, two irritating nuisances which commuters in the twin cities have had to face increasingly in recent months are the non-completion of assigned routes by coaches/wagons and the arbitrary fare charges.

Instead of a single coach completing a particular assigned route and the commuter paying a one-time fare for the whole journey, some routes are being divided into as many as three sections run by three different coaches. In this manner, commuters have to pay more in terms of fare, apart from suffering the nuisance of waiting and boarding three coaches to reach their destination.

Last month, the capital’s transport authority in conjunction with the traffic police launched a campaign of “completing routes” in which the owners and drivers of coaches and wagons were warned that those found not completing their assigned routes would have their licences cancelled and those found plying coaches/wagons without permit would be dealt with severely.

The “completing routes” campaign notwithstanding, complaints by commuters persist, as evident in an official news agency report datelined 30 May in which it was reported that scuffles between transporters and passengers over this issue had become a daily occurrence.

Another problem of the existing transport service, comprising of wagons and coaches with cramped sitting arrangements, is that women and families would not want to travel on them, if they can help it at all.

The transport authorities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi have failed to deliver as far as public transport management in the twin cities is concerned. Non-completion of routes, arbitrary fare charges and rooftop travelling are certainly not the characteristics of a modern public transport system. And it is a shame that people working and living in the planned metropolitan of Islamabad have to make do with such a transport system in this modern day and age.

Despite the hyped controversy over the franchised bus company there was no doubt that the latter was providing the only semblance of a modern public transport service in the twin cities with its fleet of big white comfortable buses. If franchise per se was really the issue, the transport authorities should have made the necessary amends quickly, and then encourage and facilitate other similar modern bus companies to operate and run in the twin cities, thus providing a healthy competition to Varan.

Instead, however, the franchise controversy was allowed to deteriorate until the Supreme Court intervened in the matter. And when Varan ceased operations, neither any other private transporter or the transport authorities jumped at the opportunity to buy over Varan’s buses and run them in the twin cities.

Ever since Varan was forced to close down, the authorities have been claiming that a “new” transport system will be introduced “soon”. It has been over three months now, and the commuters — exasperated with the service provided by the wagons and small coaches — are becoming impatient.

IT WOULD be for Mr Gohar Ayub to decide ultimately whether or not he may have done more harm than good to the memory of his late father with his ‘bombshell’ on the higher conduct and inconclusive outcome of the 1965 war.

Apart from certain glaring inaccuracies contained in his expose, two questions arise immediately about the field marshal’s own role as supreme commander and a high-powered head of state. Question one reflects on the judgmental calibre of the field marshal in setting store by the veracity of a top-secret plan bought for a song (Rs20,000, paid in London).

Question two, a more puzzling and disturbing one, concerns the field marshal’s and the army high command’s failure in taking little or no advantage at all even when armed well in advance with the enemy’s war plan in its entirety.

Observations like Ayub joining the Baghdad Pact to prepare Pakistan to fight a war with India “to get Kashmir liberated” and the army “secretly saving” ammunition to “dodge” the Americans are dangerously naive and fraught with far-reaching repercussions. These reflect adversely not only on the shape of the US-Pakistan relationship in the past but also impact on the present and future pattern of our mutual relations.

How could the US Military Advisory Group (USMAG) based at the GHQ and monitoring the storage and induction of US-supplied ordnance and hardware stay unaware, for a whole decade (1954-64), of the army allegedly stashing away arms and ammunition for a future war with India?

However, it should not be difficult to find a henpecked brigadier to sell a war plan for money to please his wife. Her hobby, rather business, is said to be ‘canning fruits and vegetables’. Such scams have not been unknown in the Indian defence services. A recent on-line expose by tehelka.com rocked the Indian defence establishment to the core. A number of senior officers were caught red-handed while making unauthorized arms deals against hefty commissions. However, taking bribes, no matter how grave an offence, is not the same as selling off a whole war plan.

The Pakistani officer named in the alleged transaction for contacting and paying off the Indian brigadier is said to be Brigadier Sayed Ghawas, then our military attache in London. Now should that be correct at all, the deal would have been made some time in his mid-50s. Promoted major-general, Sayed Ghawas was appointed GOC of the Lahore-based 10 Infantry Division in 1958. In October 1958, when martial law was imposed, Maj-Gen Sayed Ghawas was in Lahore as deputy martial law administrator in addition to his divisional command.

Therefore, by the time the 1965 war started, the rogue war plan would have been at least seven years’ old. Even if ‘rechecked’ under the orders of the field marshal and apparently to his sataisfaction, the plan would have had little operational value in 1965. Wouldn’t it be only fair to assume,therefore, that the field marshal and his high command were taken for a ride by an Indian agent?

Yet another glaring inaccuracy pertains to our messed-up tank thurst through Khemkaran onward to Amritsar. The bridge that collapsed lay across the Sutlej and not across the Beas as stated by Mr Gohar Ayub.

Built by the Corps of Engineers, the bridge spanned the Rohi Nullah and collapsed even as the first tank, an M-48 medium tank, drove through it. Whether the tank and the tank crew were drowned or rescued is not known.

However, yet another bridge was built by our field engineers strong enough for a tank regiment to pass through. After a brief tank engagement with the Indians at Valtoha, the Indians breached the canal to sink our tanks accounting for the bulk of a tank regiment. This terrible setback was the turning point in the war, wholly to our disadvantage. It was not due to the fault of a single tank driver that misfortune struck us.

The 1965 war made a dismal study in switching tactics and changing operational plans according to the vagaries of the situation, largely unforeseen, and at the whim of the high command. Starting from the Rann of Kutch, the war travelled up to the mountains ending in the plains of Punjab and the Sindh deserts.

Judging from its wayward course, the war appeared to have had no master plan. Operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam to the north and south of Jammu and Kashmir were launched on the assumption that India would not “go for” the international border. That turned out to be just a vain hope. On September 6, India attacked West Pakistan all along the border. That was when Grand Slam in Chamb-Jaurian had already lost much of its momentum.

What exactly is Mr Gohar Ayub trying to probe? Is it right to drag the name of his late father into a scam as implausible and cheap as the Rs20,000 transaction with an Indian army brigadier?

— The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.

THE wife of an Indian journalist, who has been in and out of Pakistan organizing popular jamborees for parliamentarians, confided to a friend recently that her husband’s role in the South Asian media dialogue was seminal in kick-starting the stalled peace process between the two governments.

We are not sure if the husband had put across this singularly Me Tarzan-like perspective of the peace process, or was it the wife’s fawning adulation that came into play with unbridled trust, but the fact is that there are many such claimants and many more versions than the naked eye can detect of how, when and where the peace process took off.

Only last week I was at farewell for an American diplomat friend who was dealing with Kashmir for three years for his embassy. It happened to be the day when the Kashmiri leaders had crossed the Line of Control in the landmark homecoming, as it were. The dominant version of the peace talks doing the rounds at the diplomat’s farewell was that the United States could take a large share of credit for the event. Even more emphatically, it was claimed that former US ambassador Robert Blackwill, not liked much in Pakistan, had, by supporting the results of assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, set the tone and the tenor for the latest India-Pakistan engagement.

Left to themselves the Indian and Pakistan governments are even more hopeless when it comes to offering a fair, agreeable account of the truth. They are known to proffer diverse versions even for a non-issue like who rang up who to break the ice between their leaders.

Did President Musharraf pick up the phone to talk to Prime Minister Vajpayee or was it the Indian leader who took the initiative to bury the 2002 military standoff? Even more curious is their ability to seek credit for not taking the initiative on such matters, quite the opposite of what most normal people would do. He-called-so-I-answered, otherwise he could go to hell. This was the preferred macho approach of both sides till recently, which makes it difficult to divine the chaff from the bran where truth is concerned.

Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq will give different accounts of the collapse of the Hurriyat group’s once unalloyed unity. Yasin Malik might chip in with a third opinion. Similarly, BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani has been giving a new twist to the way the Agra summit got derailed, which is at variance with what Gen Musharraf has since his return to Islamabad from Agra. Mr Advani now claims that President Musharraf was invited to Agra at his behest. Fortunately, Pakistan has chosen not to quarrel with the claim.

I know a few unsparing Pakistani journalists who would readily describe the claim of their Indian counterparts’ role in the peace talks as the dream of a “pakh”, the donkey’s baby who while running with the cart sees its shadow and begins to feel that in fact it is he who is pulling the cart.

There are more charitable ways (definitely more meaningful ways) of looking at the variety of opinions that visit the India-Pakistan peace process. To my mind in more ways than one the process has begun to resemble Akira Kurosawa’s great mystery classic Rashomon in which there are several versions, each more credible than the other, of how a crime was committed. The versions include that of the alleged perpetrator and the murdered man who appears in the form of a ghost of the victim.

The story told by Rashomon is both surprisingly simple and deceptively complex. The central tale, which tells of the rape of a woman and the murder of a man, possibly by a bandit, is presented entirely in flashbacks from the perspectives of four narrators. The framing portions of the movie transpire at Kyoto’s crumbling Rashomon gate, where several people seek shelter from a pelting rain storm and discuss the recent crime, which has shocked the region. One of the men, a woodcutter, was a witness to the events, and, with the help of a priest, he puzzles over what really happened, and what such a horrible occurrence says about human nature.

In each of the four versions of the story, the characters are the same, as are many of the details. But much is different, as well. In the first account, that of the bandit, the criminal accepts culpability for the murder but refutes the charge of rape, saying that it was an act of mutual consent. The woman’s story affirms that the bandit attacked her, but indicates that she may have been the murderess. The dead man’s tale told through a medium claims rape and suicide. The only “impartial” witness, the woodcutter, weaves a story that intertwines elements of the other three, leaving the viewer wondering if he truly saw anything at all.

Many people watch Rashomon with the intent of piecing together a picture of what really occurred. However, the accounts are so divergent that such an approach seems doomed to futility.

As cinema critic James Berardinelli once put put it, “Rashomon isn’t about determining a chronology of what happened in the woods. It’s not about culpability or innocence. Instead, it focuses on something far more profound and thought-provoking: the inability of any one man to know the truth, no matter how clearly he thinks he sees things. Perspective distorts reality and makes the absolute truth unknowable.”

All of the narrators in Rashomon tell compelling and believable stories, but, for a variety of reasons, each of them must be deemed unreliable. It’s impossible to determine to what degree their versions are fabrications, and how many discrepancies flow from legitimate differences in points-of-view. The film was released in 1950 three years after Akira Kurosawa began working on it in 1947, almost coinciding with the troubled history of Kashmir.

* * * * *

THERE are at least three sets of prominent people from this side of the border (or the Line of Control) doing the rounds of Pakistan in the name of homecoming. Lal Kishan Advani was born in Karachi and he is on an emotional tour of the city with his family. Petroleum Minister Man Shankar Aaiyar, a Tamil Brahmin and a former consul-general in Karachi, was born in Lahore. If I remember right, his wife Suneet was born in Quetta. Let us not forget the contingent of Kashmiris from Srinagar who are on a kind of homecoming too. It must be noted that they took different routes and means to reach their destination. Advani flew in with his family. Aiyar took the train to Amrtisar and then crossed the Wagah border on foot. The Kashmiris completely ignored the fanfare about the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus, choosing instead to drive their own cars all the way to the LOC.

One has always known that the Karachi nazim, Naimatullah Khan, harbours a strong dislike for things cultural. Under his puritanical leadership, the city government has withdrawn support from musical programmes, introduced gender discrimination in libraries and renamed roads in a bid to consign to oblivion the city’s secular and cosmopolitan past.

The Arts Council has been holding Koocha-i-Saqafat for the past couple of weeks on Sunday on M.R. Kayani Road, and yet the nazim has not deemed it fit to pay a visit to the cultural precinct, let alone offer financial assistance that the fund-starved Arts Council badly needs.

What if Koocha-i-Saqafat received an initial fillip and sponsorship from the Sindh government run by a political party that is anathema to the Karachi nazim? Surely he can transcend political differences and see that Koocha-i-Saqafat requires support from all those who have the city’s interests close to their hearts.

Unsung heroes

One of our national characteristics is sycophancy. When some bigwig dies in the line of duty or even after his retirement, rich tributes are paid to him – whether he really deserved them or not. If he had the misfortune to have been killed at the hand of an assassin, he is at once promoted to the status of a ‘shaheed’. Look at the ads in the newspapers and you will know.

But a person who is a “nobody” in our social structure and dies when performing more than his duty – saving others’ lives – he just becomes a digit in the statistics released of casualties of accidents and violence. This is how we see the six or eight (the figure is disputed) people who were burned to death on Monday night in the food outlet near Nipa Chowrangi when Karachi became the scene of sectarian violence once again. The management, whose outlet was set ablaze within minutes of the suicide bombing in the Madinatul Ilm mosque, issued a press release describing these young men “as a part of our team and just like family members” and expressed shock at their death. But surprisingly no tributes were paid to their heroism and selflessness. With their eyes on its customers, the management said that the crew tried to ensure that the customers were evacuated and the crew members were in the forefront of this and for their efforts lost their lives.

Each of these young men was a human being and their death had a story to tell. Take the case of Mohammad Saleem, who is described as an air-conditioner technician. He died when he could have easily escaped. After coming out of the burning restaurant he reportedly went back looking for his supervisor in an attempt to save him. He could not come back alive. His face was burned beyond recognition and he was identified by his identity card and clothes. Saleem was 26 and the only breadwinner for his aged parents and younger brother, who is studying. He was engaged to be married. In spite of the danger of which he would have been fully aware, this young heroic man risked his life for his boss, who also died in the incident.

What was in Saleem’s mind when he breathed his last? We will never know. But we know that we need many more Saleems if Pakistan is to be saved. Such are the ways of the world that Saleem who had been working for seven years was being paid daily wages amounting to Rs6,000 a month. He had received his confirmation letter only four days before his untimely death. Now the management has said it is looking into the matter of compensating the family.

As for the government, the high-ups probably didn’t feel they will get any political mileage from paying tributes to Saleem and his colleagues and condoling with their families.

Footnote: Saleem’s brother disclosed that Saleem had promised to come home early that fateful day. It was at eight o’clock when his brother called him on his cell phone and found it was dead. If the mob had already set the restaurant on fire by eight, then the time span between the start of prayers in the mosque, the blast and the arson was just a few minutes. Are the police investigating who lighted the fire? Who were the so called angry mobs which set Karachi on fire last Monday and Tuesday?

No gifts, please

The Karachi city government brought out an advertisement supplement on the Institute of Heart Diseases on June 3. The supplement had a line running on top, saying “The city government’s gift for the citizens of Karachi.”

This is not the first time that any thing done for Karachi by the city nazim is described as a “gift” for the people. The smallest culvert built in the city by the indefatigable Mr Naimatullah Khan is described as a gift, and so proclaimed in placards or signboards. The provision of civic facilities is the obligation of the city government and to expect provision of these facilities, the right of the citizens. The people don’t want charity and gifts; they have the right to demand good schools, hospitals, roads and civic amenities. If the city government is trying to meet these demands, then it is meeting an obligation imposed on it by the people who elected it. No question of giving any gifts is involved.

The approach of the religious parties to social welfare is based on the concept of charity, meant more for one’s own salvation rather than for the uplift of the people. Mr Naimatullah Khan belongs to the Jamaat-i-Islami, and perhaps he owes his “gift” terminology to that. But it is not charity that Karachi wants, but due attention as the country’s largest city.

Being choosy

They are either too young or too old, some want to work half a day, some want to be live-ins. Some are too smart with cellphones, short shirts and tight pants and others who can’t even take a message on the phone right or distinguish one shalwar kurta from the other. You can’t live without them, and yet they drive you crazy because they just can’t be trusted.

For a better part of your life you wait for an ideal one, and just when you feel comfortable, you are forced back to reality – either the money is missing or your undergarments. There is a boyfriend in the background or the inflated phone bill shows an unfamiliar mobile number.

But what never ceases to amaze a friend who cannot do without female domestic help is that considering the rising inflation rate, when everything is so expensive and the fact that those you are interviewing are unemployed, most have a very big attitude problem and are extremely choosy. Some will just want to do ayah-work (which means taking care of the baby alone – that too, one baby only), others refuse to do ironing, for they are scared of electric shocks. There will be some who will not eat ‘bara gosht’ (beef) or fish and some who like to tuck in a fried egg every morning.

This friend, in a span of a week, interviewed three women. All of them were unemployed, for varying lengths of period. The husbands were either too unwell to work or unemployed. Yet they were not willing to work for even Rs2,500 for half a day.

Even interviewing domestic help needs a certain professionalism, says our friend. But soon you’d realize you’re totally stumped, she says. Ask them for a reference/telephone number of their previous employers and pat comes the reply that they have either immigrated to Canada or are dead. List them the various tasks expected of them and most will frown and say they were never made to do so much for so little, making you look like a monstrous slave driver.

— By Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com