| August 20, 2007 | Monday | Sha’aban 6, 1428 |
Dreaming of Karachi
IT happened again last week in the name of Independence Day celebrations, and every time the casualties are more than the last time. Hundreds of motorcyclists were injured and at least five died during reckless racing and pulling wheelies on roads in Rawalpindi and Lahore.
Whether it is kite flying or motorbike riding, we seem to have a knack for irresponsible merry-making that inevitably results in deaths and injuries at the same time giving a bad name to otherwise pleasurable recreational activities.
The morning after August 14, newspapers informed us that 40 motorbikers had landed up in hospitals in Rawalpindi, and five had died and 180 injured in Lahore on the eve of Independence Day.
In Rawalpindi, stunt bikers continued with their ‘fun’ for the next two nights, with over 70 of them reported to have landed up in one hospital alone on the second night.
There were no reports of motorbike casualties in the Capital but the Islamabad Traffic Police said that they had fined 191 motorcyclists and impounded five on Independence Day for wheeling and overspeeding. In Lahore, the city police reportedly arrested more than 350 people on August 14.
If these statistics are correct, they are alarming. Close to a thousand youngsters in the three cities had thought it exhilarating fun to commemorate national day by risking life and limb through testing the limits of their ‘metal beasts’ and their own ability and capability to control and manoeuvre them on roads, terrorising other motorists and pedestrians.
A report in Dawn in June 2006 had revealed that more than 120 youngsters had lost their lives while motorbike racing or performing a wheelie during the past two-and-a-half years in Lahore.
Why do so many of our youngsters like to stunt-ride despite the risks involved when their 100-150km per hour wheelie goes horribly wrong, changing their and their families’ lives forever?
Many bikers claim they do it for fun and enjoyment; others for fame and glory; while some others do it for money (betting). Still others simply do it for the adrenaline.
But why have recent laws against wheeling — up to six months imprisonment or fine of Rs5,000 or both with possible seizure of motorbikes, and even greater penalties for repeated convictions — not helped to curb this dangerous activity?
Poor enforcement of the law, the lack of more healthy entertainment and sports facilities for youths as well as irresponsible parents who fail to keep a check on their children’s behaviour and hobbies have been blamed for the growing trend of motorbike-stunt riding.
Another popular but equally dangerous activity on Independence Day in Islamabad this year was teenagers and even adults sitting on the windows of their moving cars with the upper half of their bodies outside and their legs inside. Many cars had people hanging out precariously in this way from all four windows as traffic police watched on speechless!
Similarly, many parents here also allow their small children as young as two years old to stand unaided on the seats of their moving car, instead of seating and belting them up properly.
It is not surprising that children who have not been brought up and trained to consider such manner of riding in cars as bad, dangerous and inappropriate, will later on in life take on to more dangerous activity on the roads, like motorbike stunts.
In addition to this lack of training of children, the proliferation of websites, videos, DVDs and footage originating from abroad, popularising and glorifying wheelies and other dare-devil motorcycle stunts, have only worsened the situation.
This is particularly true of those videos which show the motorcycle rider clearly violating the law and risking the lives of himself and others for a quick thrill by performing wheelies, burnouts, smashups and full throttle stunts on city streets and open highways.
Fans are not only encouraged to watch the motorcycle stunt ‘masters’ at work on videos and DVDs, they are also encouraged to ‘learn by doing’. One of these websites actually encourages fans to ‘stunt like a pro’ by ‘simply outfitting yourself with the proper instructions and resources before you helmet up’.
Instructional videos that teach people to speed up on everything from aerial stunts like flying in the air on motorcycles while doing backflips, taking their hands off the handlebars and other death-defying stunts to cornering like a pro, are also readily available in the market.
What these websites, videos and DVDs fail to make clear to their young viewers is that, motorcycle stunts, as with any kind of stunts, should only be done by professionals or riders who are considered experts in their fields. Novices in motorcycle riding and racing should not be doing stunts at all that endanger their safety and lives as well as the safety and lives of other motorists and pedestrians.
There is a big difference between riding like a mad man and riding responsibly with caution, attired in the appropriate protective paraphernalia to ensure maximum safety of the rider.
Motorcycle riding can be a responsible activity, equally enjoyable and fun, if done without reckless racing and outrageous stunting, which are rightly considered as acts of terror on the streets by both the public and law enforcement agencies.
Public streets are not the personal racetracks of motorcyclists. If they want to test the speed of their motorcycles or perform stunts, they should do it at designated racetracks or on empty, unused land areas.
But will this stop our youngsters from playing Russian Roulette with their own lives?
Hopefully, the National Youth Policy, which is in the final stages of drafting, will better enable us to steer our youths in the right direction.
This time when I was in Mumbai – after 15 years – I came across two people who remember Karachi fondly and for different reasons. The gentleman who will be named first on the basis of seniority is Mr Roshan Lal Bhatia, who left his native city after he had just completed his intermediate at the D.J. Science College, whose impressive building he can describe in great detail, even though he never got a chance to see it again for he never returned to Karachi.
His son Sidharth Bhatia, a distinguished Indian journalist, was here a few years ago, when he went looking for Lakshmi Building, which once enjoyed a pride of place in the city.
I remember in the fifties, until a non-descript Qamar House erupted (if I may take liberty with the word), Lakshmi Building was literally head and shoulders above all buildings in the neighbourhood. It was well maintained but unfortunately, not so today.
The senior Mr Bhatia’s father owned and managed a restaurant called Dhanno Mal Restaurant, popularly known as Shankar Hindu Hotel. The Bhatias lived quite close by.
“My family didn’t want to leave Karachi, because unlike Punjab the city was quite peaceful. Barring once there were no communal riots and that one riot was engineered by some people who had left behind everything in India. The disturbances ended as suddenly as they started,” recalls Mr Bhatia.
But as tension prevailed his father and siblings went to India. His mother stayed behind as she didn’t want to sell the hotel at a throwaway price.
“We were worried that the cash that she’d get would be looted. But the man who bought the property was a saintly person. He told my mother not to worry at all. He handed her the cash on board the steamer that was to sail from Karachi to Bombay and kept vigil until the ship drew the anchor.”
The lady joined her family a year later, in 1948.
Unfortunately, I could only have a telephone conversation with Roshan Lal Bhatia for he lived far from where I was staying. But I did meet the other gentleman who dreams of Karachi. He is none other than seasoned broadcaster Ameen Sayani.
Ameen Bhai, as he is called by one and all, has enjoyed a great fan following in Pakistan from his Radio Ceylon days, but somehow he never came to this country. He was invited by his ardent admirer and film music buff Sultan Arshad on behalf of Hum TV. His fans, who are still in the thousands if not the millions, gave him a truly rousing reception.
Also interviewed for CITY FM89, Ameen Bhai was still in a daze when I met him a month after his return. “How warm and hospitable are your people and what lovely houses you have!” he enthused.
“There is a lot of space in Karachi and you are lucky not to have vertical slums,” said Mr Sayani, who incidentally was not invited by anyone living in Gulistan-i-Jauhar or else he wouldn’t have said what he did. “Every day there were four or five interviews and there was, of course, a largely attended press conference,” he added.
“My first taste of Pakistan was on board your national airline. The cabin crew was very hospitable, both while I was flying to Karachi and on the return flight,” said Ameen Bhai, who has had more clones in the world of broadcasting than anyone else in the subcontinent.—Asif Noorani
Would-be doctors
Mayhem was let loose on Wednesday when two student groups clashed at the JPMC, resulting in the death of a final-year student of the Sindh Medical College hailing from Multan.
The clash took place between activists of two groups of would-be doctors. The victim, belonging to the IJT, was reportedly beaten to death by activists of the Punjabi Students’ Association. The killing triggered a wave of agitation, with the protesting young men going on a rampage, smashing everything that came their way on the hospital premises, around Hasan Square where the funeral procession of the victim took shape, and elsewhere. Traffic jams and roadblocks were the natural consequences.
Hundreds of patients suffered as the Jinnah Hospital’s OPD was closed the next day and even the peaceful residents of the SMC hostels faced hardships as the authorities ordered them to vacate the building.
It was highly deplorable that future doctors were at one another’s throats. This would probably have happened even if student unions were in place. The ban on the unions has, however, promoted more militancy rather than minimising it. Imposed in February 1984, when Gen Ziaul Haq was at the helm of the country’s affairs, the ban has repeatedly been flouted for negative ends. There are distinct groups taking in recruits and following their separate agendas. What they lack is a legal cover.
Benazir Bhutto revived the unions in her first tenure, but the Nawaz regime banned them again. And Ms Bhutto, too, did not lift it in her second term as prime minister.
But most people agree that the ban is a bane and not a boon for students. Unions are nurseries of sorts aimed at producing and grooming future leaders of the country. Many prominent political leaders had been members of the unions during their student days.
Union leaders could sit together to sort out the differences and defuse much of the tension before it explodes into an open conflict. No sane person wants to kill or be killed.—Naseer Ahmad
‘Emergency’ measures
A few days before Independence Day, there was an ‘emergency meeting’ at S.K. Shaikh’s home. His family was confronted with a seemingly rare problem — shifting three sick family members to a place close to a well-equipped hospital — for Independence Day. His father is a heart patient; mother is on dialysis and a sister has delivered an underweight baby.
The emergency was prompted by the gravity of the situation as all the three patients had to visit three different hospitals for a daily check-up for some days and there were possibilities that any of them might need to be rushed to a hospital on urgent notice.
Shaikh, an old Karachian, had experienced unendurable hardship caused to most people in this city by last week’s rains, flooding and complete traffic chaos. It was his experience that forced him to realise what could happen over the next few days. After efforts, he found an ideal place where he could keep his ailing family members until the worst was over. It was a bungalow in close vicinity of a major hospital.
All this came to my knowledge when I saw three ambulances standing outside Shaikh’s house and some people helping the family board the patients on stretchers on the night of Aug 12. Quite a good number of his friends, neighbours and, of course onlookers, had gathered around the ambulances.
Interesting was the fact revealed by Shaikh later. “Many of them contacted me to ask if I could make room for an extra patient at the bungalow,” he said. Shaikh, who also arranged three paramedics to look after the patients round the clock, said 10 patients were shifted to that bungalow by the next day.
Though he had acquired the bungalow only for three days nobody was ready to risk vacating it considering the persisting traffic jams in the city every now and then.
In a city like Karachi, having countless hospitals equipped with modern equipment and an adequate number of doctors and paramedical staff, one should not need to worry about whether he would be able to reach a hospital or a doctor in an emergency.
But every Karachian knows that this carefree approach may land him in trouble any time.—Awam
Compiled by Syed Hassan Ali
Email: karachian@dawn.com