| October 31, 2007 | Wednesday | Shawwal 18, 1428 |
We are all sad it happened
IT keeps getting worse. Life in the concrete jungle is a trial at the best of times and the last thing we need are brand-new hazards to keep us on our toes and glancing hither and thither like paranoid schizophrenics. Or, as is the case with the latest peril doing the rounds, looking askance at the very ground beneath our feet.
Getting pigeon or crow poop in your hair minutes before the job interview is kids’ stuff now, scoffed at by the cognoscenti who have lived to tell tales far more harrowing. People can be horribly hurt in this city by a variety of unnatural causes. Hesitating while handing over the car or cellphone to someone who wants things asap like the ‘dynamic’ corporate types, getting hit by a bus first thing in the morning, leaning against electricity poles, catching a bullet in the course of a traffic altercation, telling a mullah that he’s wrong, begging to differ with the terrorists of Karachi, being torn limb from limb by a drooling pack of half-wits who think that loot and plunder ought to be rewarded… The list goes on.
Add to it Sudden Road Malfunction, or SRM for short. Forget the elevated bypasses and flyovers that could succumb to the laws of gravity without provocation. Let’s talk city-centre roads here, the kind we walk or drive along, as B. Wooster put it, with a song on the lips and our hair in a braid. Maybe it’s not that jovial for you but that’s beside the point. Here’s the nub: knowing that the road could cave in under you at any given time imparts an altogether new and keen edge to life in the city.
The worst-case scenario, short of death, doesn’t bear contemplation. Late again, the better half will sneer as is her wont and, it seems, mission in life. And why is there blood and shit all over your clothes? Don’t tell me you were attacked by a flock of pigeons again; I’m not buying that any more.
Fell into the gutter, love of my life. There I was tooling along Ziauddin Road, homeward bound if you will, at a decent hour no less, when all of a sudden I was swallowed up by what seemed like the wrath of the Almighty. Remember what happened to “all the men that appertained unto Korah”? Well, it was a bit like that and I wasn’t even challenging anyone’s authority. The car’s a write-off, by the way, swimming in a sea of sewage. If you don’t believe me, see tomorrow’s papers. Good night.
What’s happening, more accurately and with less embellishment, is that the sewerage lines in the city centre are sinking. They’ve also developed holes here and there over the last fifty years, through which the earth between them and the road is apparently being sucked into the pipes and transported either to the Lyari river or towards Mehmoodabad, depending on the pumping station. What we’ve got now in various places are sewerage pipes without earth or rock between them and a thin slab of road. This can cave in easily, even under the weight of a motorcycle, as happened recently near the PIDC signal.
On Sunday, another hole opened up near what used to be Hotel Metropole. There’s no stopping this phenomenon, apparently, and the next person to take the plunge could easily be you and the missus. Never a dull moment in the concrete jungle. What’s more, what we are seeing is wholesomely egalitarian for a change. The next person to go under, so to speak, could just as easily be the chief minister in his Merc as a beggar with scabies and one leg. We don’t often see fair play like this in the land of the pure. It’s no laughing matter though. People can get hurt, badly, courtesy these sinkholes that are appearing at random on key thoroughfares. Like the two people on a motorcycle who found themselves in a hole at least 20 feet deep near PIDC while they were simply going about their business. Or so they thought. The problem is that there is no real solution short of digging up downtown Karachi in its entirety and replacing all the old lines.
In that case, might as well announce a public holiday for eight months. Or three years.
Enough said, for now.
imalik@dawn.com
Not the blazing light that he used to be though, yet not dim for his years, Prof Khwaja Masud is the twilight on the horizon of our darkening city. In over fifty years of his teaching career he must have kindled the flame of awareness in tens of thousands of minds and if today we have any men amongst us who put their brains to use and can think rationally it is because of intellectual guides like him. Age has not deterred him and when most people twenty years his juniors would be woolly amnesiacs it is no small mercy he is around and graces every social, cultural and literary gathering with his voice of sanity and progress. And when most old men would be harking back to memories of their good old days he beckons the young to explore new worlds and come out of the past.
Yet even if he had not been a teacher, a scholar and a learned man, had he just been a plain old man, our culture would give him respect for his years. In all civilised countries senior citizens are shown consideration. In all public places and transport there are seats reserved for old people. In buses, in Karachi particularly, I have seen young men get up and give their seats to the old. It is a sign of good breeding. Even the very lowly who have had no advantage of education or grooming in our poor neighbourhoods can be seen holding back their own temper in the face of grouchy seniors venting their ire. In fact we are forbidden to talk back to our seniors. Politeness and regard towards the elderly has religious sanction. It was shocking therefore to learn how Prof Khwaja Masud, still serving the community at 86, with his writings, lectures and talks was subjected to insults at a ‘literary’ function and was asked to get out by the very gentleman whose book launching he had gone to attend. A boorish affair entirely, and unheard of in this city with its supposedly highest literacy figure.
I may be forgiven for not trusting the function as being purely literary since I reckon literary events which government ministers are asked to chair are more than purely literary and serve many more functions than just the literary which is merely used as a gimmick to cause the occasion. If the chair is a non- literary person one can be sure the organisers have an axe to grind and the concerned writer has been used (or abused) to provide the occasion for the meeting that otherwise would not be possible in a minister’s busy office. This is happening all the time in a place like Islamabad where quite a few learned and literary bodies are in business for this reason. The arrangement is mutually advantageous also. Public figures themselves are not loath to picture opportunities of this kind. The weakest link in the bargain, the literary person, also gains something in terms of the large retinue of factotums who tail the minister and provide him with a sizable audience, even though of bored babus, that probably his book alone could not muster.
Now the supposed provocation that caused the ugly scene can in no way be construed as an incitement equal to the rash behaviour and immoderate language it caused in a person who is supposed to have read and understood poetry sufficiently to enable him to embark on the difficult task of transforming it into another language. Khwaja Sahib invited to speak as the fifth or sixth speaker at the function was talking about Josh Malihabadi’s revolutionary verse and mentioned his (Josh’s) aversion to dissembling and hypocrisy. He had perhaps Benjamin Disraeli’s dictum in mind who had described governments as ‘organised hypocrisies’. It was like he had uttered a blasphemy. All hell broke loose. The author whose book was being launched, launched a tirade against the speaker and asked him to leave the hall. Poor Khwaja Sahib was at a loss. He didn’t know what to do. He is accustomed to criticism and argument but not such utterly atrocious rebuke. He stood his ground and sat through the event though, but I feel he should have left the scene after registering his protest. It was not a company fit for intellectual exchange. It was odd that no one except a lady protested against the misbehaviour and requested the chair to allow the speaker to continue his speech. But that was all. The organisers (not PAL) had no contrition to show. There was a willy-nilly ‘say sorry’ kind of a rapprochement at the end. Well. But did that go far as a mitigation. We are all sad this happened to Khwaja Sahib, a distinguished citizen, a scholar, a teacher and an old man. He loses nothing by our disrespectful behaviour but we diminish ourselves by denying him his right to respect.