With vendors and their carts having taken over the road, motorists have nowhere but the pavement to drive on
“City is the ideal image of a civilization”. I read the globally idealistic statement somewhere, which in our context (that of local Pakistanis) sounds quite covertly mocking and stimulating enough to let me take some notice.
The corporate sector might be promoting values of a better lifestyle to unfreeze the over-stuffed bank accounts of the metropolitan populace, yet this upgrading of “lifestyles” is doing nothing but stretching further the already existing rift between the communal image of our nation and the individual image we exude to other rivalling individuals in the nation itself.
We may be living in mansions copied from European magazines and catalogues or in a moderately finished flat-unit in the city suburbs. Yet the windows to our houses in both cases remain sealed to restrain the outside stench of the nearby nalla and the access of insects from getting inside!
We live our desired lifestyles in our homes, interrupted indefinitely by municipal-corporation/cantonment-board nightmare-blessings! We keep living; happily inside, ignorantly outside, while the Corporate/Banking sector keeps making us yearn for more!
Either we are travelling in a newly imported German engine or the highly ornate minibus; the routes which we take in any case give us the same amount of sympathy for the city which just speaks highly of itself in the past tense! We keep driving with our eyes wide-shut and the corporate sector keeps sponsoring the urban-nightmares of the ecstatically blind!
Nostalgia is the only hope left because we don’t accept the condition as it exists; we still believe Karachi is the “city of lights”, when half the time it is drenched in ill-forced darkness. We still believe Karachi to be a glamorous city, which it simply is NOT! When will our communal/national slogans and metaphors be updated, or will we keep on living in the little wonderland of cliches and make-belief forever?
With the passage of scientifically progressive time, apparently we keep getting specialized, yet our spaces and our designs keep getting muddled and confused. We are not reacting according to our social behaviour, the disparity between our individual/inside life and the communal/outside life has infused a kind of psychological instability and timidity in us which comes alive in our expressions, turning our life into living nightmares!
The roadsides of Karachi illustrate the phenomenon quite eloquently.
The main road of Gulistan-e-Jauhar epitomizes the eclectic mixture of multi-ethnic ill-behaviour in the transformation it lives through in a single day! Earliest in the morning the road gets cleaned ardently both mechanically as well as manually but the road glare only lasts for a few hours! The three-lane road turns into a lane and a half wide. Mobile-sabzimandi when it is encroached upon by rehri-wallas, the remaining half of the road gets occupied by housewife customers, lounging and laughing around having fun in the open! And what happens to the vehicular traffic? Half the cars in Gulistan-e-Jauhar are conditioned to driving on the pavements and sidewalks whenever housewives flock the roads, the nearby-gutters spill or a temporary shadi-hall gets installed on the main road. But the situation on this particular road is a bit tricky!
The rehri-wallas have some parking to do as well! The mid-isles, besides having the overflowing garbage dumps, also accommodate rehri-walla’s mules. They are placed at a perfect 60-degree angle against the trees, so that they leave respectable amount of space (behind the still existing stinking eucalyptus trees) for rehri-wallas to urinate after every few hours!
So picture this; if the commuter has to drive on the mid-isle, what kind of expertise he would require to dodge his way across well-seated urinaters, perfectly angled mules and efficiently overflowing garbage dumps? Solutions can be attained by providing shovels to give urinaters an opportunity to dig a hole and attend nature’s call; vertically-expanding-garbage-dumps to cater to vertically expanding houses and helical ramp parking for the mules (it’s hard to make a mule climb stairs to get parked on the ninth floor)!
We have learnt to construct vertically, yet failed to understand our multi-ethnic behavioural patterns! On the other roadsides where we don’t have rehri-wallas and their mules, we have the Traffic Police Superintendents and their assistants playing the perfect substitutes, only that they bribe and lie as much as they pee, their check-posts are sponsored and they can play the goalie with speeding cars better than Brazilian footballers!
However, this transformation from morning to late evening doesn’t complete the cycle of the local street life! I have told that Karachiites used to have a nightlife. But what I had seen in my childhood were all-night-long cricket-matches on every alternate street! Teams from different housing units, apartments and areas used to participate in these over-zealous night-matches. Yet this tradition lasted not longer than late 90’s, time of Internet/cable invasion! Alas, even cricket loosened its impact on street-life!
Now, all the Imran Khan-wannabes play romantic innings in virtual chatrooms till late nights merge into early mornings! Night match players have moved into Internet-cafes or bedrooms with the common-denominator being the all-in-one PC, a substitute for a typewriter, video game arena, postal service, CD player, VCD player, DVD player, Cable TV, and marriage/dating bureau!
What remains on the streets are stray dogs trying to take place of not too different human beings, hounding sporadic flow of late-night traffic and trying to wrap around the blown banner, advertising blondie-dark and red bakras with long legs and two-teeth! Nightlife lost its charm on the outside, inside it is still raining!
No matter how miserably our conscious efforts fail to understand and address the change that our social behaviour has gone through, all the technological/software implosion happening inside our computer hard drives is automatically coming outside to a little extent too. On the scale of interiors our spaces have lost their characteristics in the wake of functional implosion. Our rooms have become our lounges, studies and gyms also. Whatever spaces we used to allot to different utilities before, we allot just one multi-purpose ‘space’ to it now! A space is temporarily itself (a room, a study ... etc.) when needed, and temporarily everything else (when not needed). Spaces have lost their individuality to economical value of transformability and multiplicity of purpose! We want too much from too little!
Computers, cameras and cellular phones keep getting smaller, so does our interaction with life outside our personal interests!
On the scale of exteriors also, the story is not unusual! Not too long before the shopping day had to be planned because the shopping centres were far from home. Residential areas were planned away from commercial areas due to much different urban responsibilities and utilities attached to their purpose. Culturally the hierarchy of different zones on the city planning scale lent level of importance to different civic amenities or the vice versa.
Residential, commercial, communal, institutional, recreational and religious zones marked their significance according to activities that got generated around them due to their purposeful and autonomous setting on the city scale! Now an apartment block is residential, commercial, religious, recreational and institutional all at one time, at one place; the complex! The scale of the city gets reduced to the scale of a communal complex, further getting reduced to an individual studio apartment with the centre of attention not in a hearth or a lounge but a desktop PC!
Events have lost their significance in the implosion of zonal allocation on the city planning level! Going to shopping is no event when you live on top of a shopping mall. It doesn’t remain a family/group activity anymore, it’s reduced to necessity, an individual event! You want a shirt, you buy it from the departmental store downstairs; you want to admit your kid to a school, you go to the school upstairs, your sister wants her make-up done, she goes to the beauty parlour next door! Mommy doesn’t walk the kid upstairs everyday, brother doesn’t accompany you to help you do your shopping downstairs, and sister doesn’t need little brother to escort her to the beauty parlour next door! All the little events loose their significance due to over reliance on economy, efficiency and security.
Outsides keep getting secluded, insides crowded! And the corporate sector promotes tiny chain-stores in every other corner rather than one specialized outlet allocated to a wider area!
However, it is not only the commercial sector that is soaked in confusion; the groups of people running the institutional set up haven’t remained far from the influence of post-globalization commercial spectacle as well! Our primary schools as well as professional art and IT institutes (named after famous artists and scholars) have started aping the werewolves in puberty! They operate as institutions until early evenings when suddenly they transform into money-making shadi-halls for the later half of the day! Their money making censors are not turned off in the morning as well. Besides reducing and standardizing education to ready-to-swallow instant-short-courses, street sides are littered with brochures and fliers publicizing the institute’s high standards in very low-standard of proof-reading! The aamil fliers read better in standard and more appropriately poetic for the betterment of their own purpose!
These road-side-part-time institutes spread the interminable light of knowledge or not, do successfully consume stolen electricity to light up their shadi-halls and part-time business of education and should be held responsible for being elemental in the tax hikes on electricity and the never ending load-shedding routines!
Not only have our spaces and utilities submerged into agglomerate confusion but so has the image of our skylines lost their individuality to the overburdening of western emulation. We see imitation of buildings from around the world in the street-side buildings of Karachi, while the roundabout artistry and beautification has to date remained restricted to swans, boats, flying jets, and army equipment! Resulting in an ugly pastiche of mini-international urban-environment nightmare, better suited to a third-grade comic book! Not only is the problem visual, but pragmatically also these buildings are adhoc and stupidly constructed over residential plots with no provision for expected parking space.
Roads hugging these concrete drag-queens are in no condition of even catering to pedestrian load, yet are sponsored lavishly by the corporate sector! Even if luckily you find space for parking, on the sidewalks or over a manhole, you are not sympathized for being a victim to government’s inefficiency but charged for being the oppressed! Not only does the government send its representative to snatch your hard earned money from you, but private beggars do that as skillfully too!
There was this trend of freak shows on our roads getting blindly sponsored by the commuters before. Then it changed props with broke students dragged by fate to get money to pay the fee, finally giving stage to labourers with shovels on their backs unable to make ends meet!
Lately the whole urban drama has seen visual balance in the domination of colourful cross-dressers ironically praying for your well-being!
What does the government do to improve the condition of our roads with all the above mentioned problems in clear view? Chop off the eucalyptus (pay for the job), and transplant palm trees the same size (pay a lot more for the job again!). My mother had been telling me to clear the mess from my room, I did accordingly! I replaced the locally made lamp in my room with an imported lamp from Spain, which runs on 110 voltage! Would anyone want to call the sane now!
With vendors and their carts having taken over the road, motorists have nowhere but the pavement to drive on 
