I READ history, but it is not often that I think of my own past. The other day I went to see Professor K.K. Aziz, a friend since we were kids in high school. We reminisced a bit and, among other things, we talked about the Lahore Coffee House where we met almost every evening between 1948 and 1952.

I have been thinking of writing a short recollection of this experience, and now is probably as good a time to do it as any. Having grown up in the villages of Punjab (most of them now on the Indian side), I was a lot more used to drinking milk than the beverages to which the city folks were accustomed. My family and I stayed with this custom for the most part even when we moved to towns, even though we did have tea on special occasions, especially when guests arrived, whom it was deemed important to impress with our “modernization”. When I was at college in Lahore, friends and I got to drinking tea more often, usually at the college canteen (“tuck shop”).

Once in a while we had the adventure of going to a restaurant for a “cuppa.” I had read in novels that back in their own country the English consumed enormous amounts of the brew, and any time of day could be tea time. During my years in college I learned that tea drinking had as much become a part of the Indian urban culture. Coffee was beginning to surface about this time, but in my experience it was still a few years away.

Large coffee plantations developed in some of Inda’s southern provinces in the late 1920s and 1930s, and an India Coffee Board was establish to popularise and market the product in the country’s eastern and northern urban centres. It set up and managed coffee houses in the larger cities, one of the earliest of them in Lahore, which opened for business in 1941, first in the YMCA building and then in a facility in a block of restaurants and stores across from the Commercial Building on The Mall, next to the Cheney’s Lunch Home and a few hundred feet away from the Pak Tea House, an alternative place where professionals and the more intellectually inclined persons gathered.

Lawyers, journalists, poets, writers, artists, professors, advanced university students, and occasionally even some politicians, visited the Lahore Coffee House. Khushwant Singh, the celebrated Indian journalist and historian, who frequented this establishment before independence (then called the India Coffee House) and later the one in Delhi, recalls that “everyone who was anyone or expected to be somebody” came here. I have heard that some of the celebrities among lawyers and writers — Manzur Qadir, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, Charagh Hasan Hasrat, Hamid Nizami, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ijaz Batalvi, Abdullah Malik — visited. That was before my time, but I remember that Khurshid Ahmad Khan (a distinguished lawyer and later law minister in Ayub Khan’s government), Nasir Kazmi and Habib Jalib (both of whom were already getting to be famous) came.

Men with different interests, belonging to a variety of professions and age groups, could be found in the same place. They did not always sit exclusively with their cohorts. An older statistician might be seen sharing a table with a young poet and the two of them chatting. Gaps were thus bridged and an inclusive cosmopolitan environment created.

The Coffee House in Lahore was essentially a “men’s club”. It was rare for a couple, a single woman, or a group of women to come in, sit down, sip coffee and chat away. Apparently, it was not the same way in post-independence coffee houses in India. I have read that women came to the one in Delhi and spent the time of day without any of the male patrons raising an eyebrow. In any case, that was then and now is now. It seems that things are changing in Pakistan also. During my current visit I have eaten at the Gymkhana and other clubs in Lahore and Islamabad and seen a great many women, unaccompanied by male relatives, coming in.

It should be emphasised that the Lahore Coffee House, like those elsewhere in the subcontinent, was pre-eminently a meeting place, not an eating place. If food was what one wanted, one went to an eatery. Folks came to the Coffee House to meet friends and others with whom they expected to enjoy talking. They did drink coffee while they were there, but that was incidental to their main interest, which was conversation. There was never a pre-planned agenda for a typical meeting.

Subjects came up at random, and everything under the sun from politics to literary criticism, from the price of tea in China to Marx’s theory of surplus value, could be discussed. It was much like the pubs in England. Big persons engaged in small talk (and at times small people talked big). Recall Dr Samuel Johnson, the great English linguist, and his friend, James Boswell, in 18th century London, nibbling on a leg of lamb and drinking ale (both of them overweight as a result of excessive indulgence) in their favourite tavern and exchanging “thoughts” on the contours of their barmaid’s figure.

Radicals and ideologues in the Coffee House were especially vibrant and vocal, and much of their talk was meant to denounce the current establishment and the status quo. But most people came to chat, not to debate and settle serious issues. In fact, a conclusion that all might accept was neither expected nor even desired. It was preferable to leave matters unfinished so that the participants might, at their next meeting, pick up the thread where they had left it last time.

The Coffee House was a relatively inexpensive place. Moreover, its managers understood that their patrons came to converse with one another more than to drink coffee and eat chicken sandwiches. It seems to me that they were even approving of their patron’s priorities. A bunch of persons might occupy a table, order coffee, and sit there for an hour or more without ordering anything else, and the waiters would not ask them to make room for other customers or hassle them in other ways.

As I said earlier, a few of my friends and I met at the Lahore Coffee House every evening (approximately 6:00 to 8:30 p.m.) for some four years.

These friends included K.K. Aziz, Waheed-uz-Zaman, Shaukat Ali, Saeed Osman Malik, and Chaudhry Anwar Aziz. At this point, allow me to say that with the exception of Chaudhry Sahib, who later chose to practise the “noble” craft of politics, all of us went to distinguished British or American universities, earned doctoral degrees, wrote books and other scholarly work, eventually became professors and stayed with a life of the mind. As far as I know, none of us ever had a day of regret about the career we had chosen.

What did we talk about? I imagine we discussed politics but I don’t now remember the specifics of how and where each one of us stood. That like much of the crowd in the place we were dissatisfied with the contemporary state of affairs might be taken for granted. We talked about the erudition or otherwise of the professors who taught us at the university, their classroom styles and skills, biases, and idiosyncrasies. We didn’t talk much about religion, but we did discuss issues in political philosophy and ethics. We recited and discussed some of the poetry being written at the time, notably that of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Abdul Hamid Adam, Syed Abid Ali, M.D. Taseer, Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, and Saifudddin Saif among others. We also liked Nasir Kazmi and Habib Jalib, whom we invited to our table whenever we could entice them away from their other admirers.

There was conversation but never noise at our table. We had learned the civil art of listening to one another. We argued back and forth, and our discussions might at times be serious and vigorous, but they were never vehement. None of us ever lost his cool and shouted at another. These discussions gave each of us, I suppose in varying degrees, a questioning and analytical frame of mind, inclination to ask for evidence in support of propositions being asserted, and the ability to discern whether the conclusions being announced did indeed follow from the given premises, and whether the premises themselves were plausible.

I have no doubt that these conversations contributed to my own intellectual development more than any formal educational experience I had in my formative years in Pakistan. It also gave me abiding friendships that have been God’s gift to me ever since.

The Lahore Coffee House closed its doors many years ago and houses of its kind in India have reportedly fallen on evil days. Disappearance of the interaction and possibly fusion of various streams of thought and professions they provided is surely a loss. There may be several reasons why the successors to the intellectuals of yesteryear do not go to the Coffee House any more. Television, videos, cell phones and the e-mail exchanges one can have and the games one can play on the computer screen have isolated persons from one another. Allied to this development is the fact that the art of conversation has declined in our own as well as the western world.

In a book entitled Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller writes that conversation is not about striking a deal or agreeing on a strategy to achieve certain goals. Nor is it an intersection of monologues. It is, as the British philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, had once noted, an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. Real conversation is not guided by a desire to impress others or establish one’s superiority. It is a good-natured exchange between civilised people. Flatterers, no less than bigots, are its enemies.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics for the spring semester.
E-mail: anwarhs@lahoreschool.edu.pk

POLITICAL critics and some independent economists often question the government’s claim that during its tenure, poverty in the country has come down by 10 per cent. Their contention, based on empirical evidence, is that even if the average economic growth rate of seven per cent over the last four years is conceded, the benefits of this have not reached the poor, who, in fact, have become poorer.

In support of the poverty reduction argument, President Musharraf quotes a four-fold increase in the sale of motorcycles and cars, and the sale of a million cell phones every month. By relying on the rising sales of these three items, Gen Musharraf is unwittingly supporting the contention of his political opponents and the criticism of his policies by economists.

The poor of the country, whether their number stubbornly stays at 33 per cent of the population or has come down to 23 per cent as the government contends, do not buy cars or motorcycles. Many among them carry cell phones because these are cheaper to use than a public call office. Some low-grade employees and journeymen are also provided phones by their masters for their own convenience in being able to reach them whenever they need their services. If the increasing sale of cars is the litmus test, Musharraf loses the poverty battle when it comes to public vehicles: the sale of buses has been going down, touching rock bottom in the last financial year.

What we all know but refuse to acknowledge is that the policies and actions of all our governments — this one is no exception — have been heavily influenced by the affluent, privileged classes that are the chief beneficiaries. In the scheme of planning and spending there is little for the poor although rhetoric is aplenty. If cars are not readily and cheaply available, the people’s representatives in the assemblies create a racket, but the daily sight of workers going to factories precariously perched on the roofs of derelict buses evokes no protest.

Since economic growth is now led by the private sector there is not much that the government can do to reduce poverty. But it can certainly reduce the agony and distress that poverty causes by improving the environment in which the poor struggle to survive. This government is much better placed to improve public amenities and services than any previous one because its revenues are augmented by privatisation proceeds and external assistance. The governments of the unstable 1990s were starved of both.

Gen Musharraf cites the sale of cars and motorcycles as evidence of prosperity that, according to him, has pulled 13 million people out of at least degrading poverty. By the same token, the deterioration in public transport services provides more telling evidence of the growing agony of the masses. Reduction in poverty is a hypothesis, the agony of commuters is there for everyone to see. Leaving the railways, the airlines and the inter-city road transport out of this discussion, Pakistan, perhaps, is one of the few countries of the world whose cities do not have a mass transport system.

Even in the bastions of free enterprise like London and New York at one end and Delhi and Colombo at the other, city buses are run by the government or by the municipal authority. If run by private companies they are subsidised by the state. Pakistan does neither. Resultantly, the inhabitants of all its cities — big and small — are left to be served by individual operators of little means.

Almost every bus plying in Karachi is mechanically unfit and unsafe to ride, although people can and do travel clambering on the sides or sitting on the roofs. Passengers can board or get down wherever they like for there are no designated bus stops, the routes and time schedules are not fixed, fares are fixed but seldom followed, tickets are not issued and injury and death are common and go unpunished and uncompensated.

The state of the bus service in Lahore is somewhat better, in Multan and Faisalabad it is rudimentary but non-existent in Peshawar, Quetta and Hyderabad. The pity and shame of it all is that an organised but modest bus fleet introduced by a private operator in Islamabad/ Rawalpindi some 10 years ago has since withered away. Now even between the nation’s capital and the army headquarters the people travel in wagons or smaller vans meant to transport goods but rigged up to carry passengers.

It would be safe to assume that if our cities had a reasonably comfortable and predictable bus service, half the people who now commute to work by car would travel by bus. The late Rafiq Inayat Mirza, who was commissioner of Rawalpindi and later the central government’s secretary in Islamabad, would always ride a bus between the two cities. Now even a section officer goes by car. A safe and cheap bus journey to work and back would reduce the number of private cars and thus make the construction of underpasses and flyovers unnecessary — an expenditure that the civic bodies and contractors relish.

For decades, city planners prompted by politicians have talked of overhead and underground rails and elevated road corridors but no project is yet in sight nor does the country seem to have the financial or technical resources to implement and manage such systems. Meanwhile, we have let our simple but workable rail and road transport services decay and now even the national airline is teetering on the brink — all because of ambition, incompetence, corruption and, above all, cronyism.

In the midst of all the blabber about bullet trains and fast transitways, the scheme to encourage the introduction of CNG buses represents a practicable and economical approach to the improvement of transport services in our cities, particularly Karachi which is facing the worst crisis in this regard. Starting with 5,000 buses distributed over five or six cities in three years, however, would take decades to make a noticeable difference. The need is for 50,000 buses.

The reaction of transporters to the incentives offered by the central government is so sceptical that even this modest start looks doubtful. The urban transport scheme conceived by Shahbaz Sharif in the 1990s offered bigger incentives for less costly diesel buses but the fleet of a thousand that came to operate then has been withering away since.

The ivory-tower planners of Islamabad should consider consulting field operators to make the scheme workable. Besides increasing incentives for CNG buses, it would be necessary to replace the old and dangerous buses with new ones run on diesel through, perhaps, fewer incentives but sterner regulations.

It is a bizarre paradox of our public life that a government which is hesitant and stingy in providing transport service for its urban commuters has the will and also finds the money to build an extravagant and ruinous Geneva-like fountain and the tallest building in the region.