Moving back to Pakistan bag and baggage is often an eye-opener of sorts. Ironically, power or water shortages do not provide as rude a shock to the returning family as does the general attitude of the public, the spiralling cost of living, and, indeed, the VIP culture which remains on blatant display anytime, anywhere

GENERALLY speaking, acclimatization is believed to be a tricky affair for people moving from one place to another. But when it comes to re-settling back in one’s home country, it should not be that big an issue ... or so I thought.

Migration, for me, is probably a genetic phenomenon. I come from a family that has always been on the move. In my entire life I have not remained in any one place for more than five years, give or take a couple of months. First it was inter-city moves in Pakistan with each transfer of my father from one cantonment to another, then it became international for education, and later for work.

We finally settled in Canada hoping for it to be the final destination, but family circumstances in Pakistan made us rethink our priorities in life, and we decided to head back home.

Coming home from abroad on vacations was always something we looked forward to and enjoyed immensely. Weddings, birthdays, visiting old friends and family members and, to top it all off, the very eagerly awaited dinners at all the famous restaurants of the city. The food was something we dreamed of the whole time and kept a shortlist of must-have-dinner-there restaurants as part of the vacation plan.

Moving back bag and baggage, however, has been an eye-opener of sorts. I considered myself to be pretty much in tune with the realities of life in Karachi, but it turned out that I still had a lot to learn. Water and power shortages and outages, garbage and unruly traffic, we were mentally prepared for, but it was the general attitude of the public and the spiralling cost of living that took us by surprise.

Our society seems to be enslaved to the West, whatever is in vogue there seems to become the law here, except when it comes to basic human values, law and order and the overall civic sense. We have become a society of lopsided moral and ethical values. We want to be known as an Islamic society, but don’t want the restraints that go with being one.

We, along with the rest of the Islamic world, are lost between the past and the present. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots is becoming brutally obvious by the day. The former flaunt their money and influence, with total disregard for the laws of the land, which can, and are, bent to accommodate the people with the right connections and appropriate bank balances.

We don’t find instances in Pakistan similar to the West where the premier of Alberta, Canada, was pulled over in Hawaii for over-speeding and he paid the fine once he returned to Canada, or the daughter of President Bush being taken to the police station for drinking while she was underage.

Since my arrival in Pakistan, I have already come across two news items offering amnesty to loan defaulters and to electricity bill payment defaulters. What should be strikingly obvious to all is that how on earth were these persons allowed to continue with the overdraft facility and why were the power connections not disconnected right away once they were in default; but of course loans are only advanced to influential people and they can default to their heart’s content. The public and the media alike have alas become immune to these things as they are everyday happenings and nobody is making any noise about this.

What of the people who pay their bills and their loan instalments without fail? They are the ones who look stupid at the end of the day. Why are they being penalized with full payments? Shouldn’t they be given some discounts too for paying their bills on time, or should they also start defaulting to make use of the government sponsored Defaulters’ Package?

I have yet to hear our politicians complaining about this and to see them come up with legislation ensuring that the habitual loan and utility bill defaulting is halted.

Fast food joints are cropping up fast and furious, credit cards are aplenty, everything is available on instalments; the life of the average person on the street should be improving, but is it?

The cost of living is rising exponentially, with two kids going to school and the third one waiting in the wings to start next year, education has become the biggest monthly expense.

As a new arrival in the system with no current source of income and being used to free education along with monthly allowance for the children, schooling expense is something that hits the pocket the hardest. With the schools raising tuition fees arbitrarily ever year, it will remain an ongoing concern.

The nation seems to have embraced the credit lifestyle with fervour, but has left the human aspect of it for the West. Vehicles can be leased through a multitude of banks and leasing companies, but the manufacturers are in no hurry to make them any faster. Since the demand is so huge, they require and can get away with cent per cent deposit at the time of booking and no guarantee of a fixed delivery date. There is no regard for the hardship faced by the consumer, as most people looking to finance a car do not have the means of relying on alternative transport while making instalment payments for a vehicle they will not see for months.

If something like this would happen in Canada or the US, the consumers would sue the pants off the manufacturers, but not so in Pakistan.

Trying to buy a used car is even worse. Reversing the meters of used cars seems to be the norm, if that is not the case then probably people in Pakistan buy cars for the sole purpose of selling them later and not using them in the meanwhile. Most of the cars I looked at were in the 2-3-year-old range, but none seem to have crossed the 30,000-km mark. Working out averages, it seemed like people don’t drive more than 700-800km per month, or less than 25km per day. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t digest the fact that in a city like Karachi an average vehicle does just that much.

Vehicles advertised to be in ‘genuine’ condition mean that the owner has never bothered to perform any repair of dings and scratches over the years, and the body is rusting all around. A car in ‘excellent’ condition means that the body maybe okay, but mechanically the car needs help, and so on and so forth. Finally, any dents on the vehicle ‘just happened the other night’ when either the wife or the kids were parking the car.

There seems to be abundant financial liquidity in the market as evident from the scorching hot real estate sector. How on earth an honest, hard-working family supposed to look forward to having a home of its own is beyond imagination. The government seems to be in cahoots with the influentials, so no laws are passed that would bring this spiral of cost increases down to manageable levels.

The government is doing its best to get its share of the real estate dollars by advertising schemes for the Overseas Pakistanis through the august offices of the OPF. I was one of the unfortunate Overseas Pakistanis who fell for this scam and booked a plot in one of the OPF schemes. I paid up all the instalments for the plot by 1999, but to date, no news of the plot. I was recently informed by one of the officers of the OPF Housing Department that my money is in safe hands, but it will probably take another five years or so to see any development work being done.

Anywhere else in the world, once you buy a residential plot it has to be developed in a certain timeframe, but not here in Pakistan. Mature neighbourhoods all over Karachi still have vacant plots with weeds growing and collecting garbage, people with piles of money to spare own the land with no incentive to do something with it. If only there was a time limit for people to start construction on the plot after getting ownership of it, the cost of property would come crashing down and investors would probably put that money in industrial units which would create employment and a genuine improvement in the quality of life for the population. Maybe there are laws, but they don’t get executed, which is as good as not having the laws at all.

The VIP culture is so set in our roots that it is hard to visualize Pakistan without it. It starts from the minute the flight lands at a Pakistani airport. Customs people, FIA people, IB people and people from God knows how many different agencies are usually at hand to facilitate the smooth sailing of their arriving family and friends through Immigration and Customs, bypassing the hapless passengers who either do not have any contacts in the appropriate departments, or choose not to use them. This results in many altercations at the Immigration queue between the tired passengers and the extremely slow FIA staff.

The biggest thing that leaps at you as soon as you land in Pakistan after being absent for a while is that people lack basic human courtesy and common civic sense. Everybody seems to be in a hurry and everybody’s time is more valuable than the next person’s. This is witnessed every moment out there on the streets; not that it is any better away from the streets.

People here have no sense or concept of time. Weddings, social gatherings, dinners, all seem to start around midnight, irrespective of the next day being a working day or not. We have actually attended weddings where dinner was served at 1am. People actually showing up on time and wanting to depart at a reasonable hour are considered spoilsports.

The concept of forming a queue is lost on our population. This goes for the uneducated masses and also for the educated elite. I went to the post office to get my driving license renewed, ten hands were thrust in the face of the counter-person simultaneously, and he was serving the one that made the most noise. Some people complained to him about why was he entertaining people not standing in the queue, to which he replied that it was the problem of the people in the queue, if they were letting other people come to the front then why should he care about whose turn it is!

Trying to get information from receptionists and customer service departments over the phone of the many mushrooming banks and service providers can give a sane person high blood pressure for life. People answering the phones at local and multinational companies are neither taught nor encouraged to answer the phone in a professional and polite manner. In most cases the call gets cut off or transferred to the wrong person without the first contact fully listening to the query. In all instances where I asked for driving direction to the office, the directions provided were totally wrong.

Street and traffic signs are appallingly, inadequate and placed without any apparent planning. High volume intersections have no traffic signals, while some residential-area crossings sport new traffic lights. None of the newly installed signals are sensor-controlled. Instead, they countdown seconds to changing of the lights, thus ensuring that the strapped-for-time drivers will be running the red lights for sure.

Most of the driving woes are blamed on the multitude of uneducated drivers of mini-buses, trucks, taxis etc., but take a drive to the posh Defence area hangouts over the weekend where the owners are driving themselves, and the real impolite and arrogant colours of society shine brightly. It is surprising that the same people behave in entirely opposite ways once they land in Europe, the US or even Dubai. It is probably the contaminated water supply of Pakistan that brings out the worst in people.

It is fashionable to berate the system of the country, but nobody wants to be the one to make the change at his or her personal level. Nobody wants to take ownership of the problems of society, yet expect it to have a miraculous change somehow.

The list goes on and on. Everyday brings new experiences, highlighting our lopsided value system to life. The only saving grace of the whole scenario is the proximity to family and old friends. This is one luxury we were not able to enjoy abroad and, in retrospect, it is the most important aspect of a satiated lifestyle. So no matter what goes on around us, with family and friends available and willing to lend their support, we are very much here to stay.

I am pretty sure most readers will not find anything wrong or astonishing about all this. I am equally sure that by the next year when I may read someone else’s account of his or her experiences in Pakistan when returning from abroad, I would have gotten used to the life here and not find anything unusual in it either. I would be wearing my true Pakistani colours by then, hopefully. Wish me luck!