LIFE is fast becoming an existence not worth living in Karachi. For citizens, everything is rising in this metropolis — from discomfort to disability, mercury to murders, prices to pollution. Terminally ill, Karachi has reached the critical stage on account of little or no spending on its well-being, now so poor in health that it has been declared brain dead, but still has a heartbeat left to be called alive.
Cities are known for their people and places. People make places. Places, old and news tell stories about the people. People and places make societies.
Metropolitan societies are famed for their technological trappings, facilitating modern city life geared for ease, pace and style. Karachi is a city of contrasts in the sense that despite having the fine international facilities of airport and seaport, it goes without the proper local amenities of housing and transportation. As always, the city has been an infrastructural disaster, which is plagued with the basic problems of unceasing water deficiency, uninterrupted power breakdowns and unending traffic snarls.
Apparently, Karachi has been prospering in rising commercial and industrial activities, but not proportionally in the pursuit of art and learning. Such lopsided growth, coupled with other strangulating factors, brought about this implosive casualty. Now, the urban decay is axiomatic in its social, physical and economic fabric bursting at the seams.
Cities shape the lifestyles of their citizens. But the dynamic environs of Karachi paradoxically make the citizens late, lethargic and lonely. Never bright and early, the sleeping habits of the city insomniacs are by choice, which makes them time-allergic, while an enervating climate further aggravates it by leaving people with dullness. Feeling loneliness, while besieged by the teeming millions around, Karachiites are intimately aloof and closely detached with a sheer disbelief in community spirit and self-help. This has made Karachi into something of a disruptive society with little prospects for progress. So, a city that is trying to beat speed and dynamism, ends up losing both the virtues that make a megalopolis brisk and buoyant. On the contrary, Karachi is becoming alarmingly chaotic.
Panic reflects on the faces of the citizens here, who have become insensitive and indifferent to their own plight. They are now impolite and brash, disregarding the fact that courtesy is a civic virtue, and intolerance is a public nuisance.
Social effects reveal in physical exterior. Accordingly, cleanliness comes next to courteousness in the metropolitan limits, and is usually taken up as a drive not duty by the city authorities. Rubbish dumps are mostly infested with filth and stink, and these trash deposits are seldom scavenged. Garbage is treated as heritage. Besides that, throwaway culture on public spots is a challenge for the solid waste system that is way behind in tackling the issue of industrial hygiene. Waste-water treatment is more of a municipal art than sanitary science.
Loadshedding is a crackdown on power consumers here. Breakdowns turn into showdowns with law-enforcement authorities. The city also has rough tracks rather than metalled roads. Every public agency feels free to embark on roadway engineering by means of road prodding. Uneven roads make lives uneven. Traffic on these roads is haphazard with haste-prone driving that is a day-in-day-out, nerve-racking experience, sometimes touching the brink of insanity.
Furthermore, the city’s pot-holed road network boasts of the most deadliest and dilapidated forms of vehicles for commuters, consisting of fleets of die-hard buses, roaring rickshaws, superannuated taxis and drones of motorbikes with stunt riders full of suicidal zeal, all battling to reach their destinations.
The City of Lights does not have enough power stability to withstand traffic signals. Traffic regulation is relied on human exertion by constables. Pedestrians, drivers and beggars are all ignorant of road sense. The bumper-to-bumper traffic on streets leaves the country with little fuel efficiency and high-maintenance costs for car owners. Furthermore, a flashy new car is always vulnerable to car-jackers. Greenbelts, along the roads, have long been razed by municipal authorities. Fresh plantation is confined to the installation of hoardings.
The whole city looks like an asymmetrical cemetery of billboards installed by designers short on ideas and long on size, devoid of any sense of aesthetics and proportion with unintelligible messages and moods. Like the monstrous carbuncles on the face of the city, these aerial encroachments speak of a tragedy in creativity.
The prosaic weather of Karachi further worsens when clouds hang over the smog-filled sky, making it noxiously hot and toxically humid.
Then come the open-air theatres of food harbouring disease. People increasingly tend to dine out at such places, not for gastronomic delights but to shake off tiring tedium. It is the only option they are left with because opportunities for cultural and literary activities are as rare as the attractions for amusement and entertainment in the city. The sarcophagus structures of high-rise buildings are a manifestation of the vertically wild urban sprawl, scraping the unkempt city skyline. These multi-family dwellings are models of uniformity in deformity by virtue of the unfettered architectural excellence. The slums, where the seeds of crime are being richly sown in the soil of squalor, grow equally untamed, sometimes with the blessings of land-grabbers.
With rains, the city gets as unplayable as a cricket field. Normal life draws stumps. Like Venice, thoroughfares turn to waterways, wanting precarious navigation. Rain-water runoff seeks storm sewers in vain.
If we can manage our cities well, we can govern our country in a better way. Nonetheless, for the various city managements, Karachi turned out to be an intractably ungovernable experience because they misconstrued the growth of the city for its development, and thus made the civic life an urban nightmare. City authorities, in the past, were functioning like an answering machine, which only gives a reply, never a response.
Factors such as poor vision, ill-planning and meagre funding have all left Karachi with rotten retardation. Only a surgical wonder can now help in the resuscitation of a city that never awakes. The subsequent rehabilitation might bring back standards of living that the metro-citizens deserve.
LIFE is fast becoming an existence not worth living in Karachi. For citizens, everything is rising in this metropolis — from discomfort to disability, mercury to murders, prices to pollution. Terminally ill, Karachi has reached the critical stage on account of little or no spending on its well-being, now so poor in health that it has been declared brain dead, but still has a heartbeat left to be called alive.
