Life in a city like Islamabad can be difficult, thanks tothe VIPs and their whims and fancies
IT is universally acknowledged that with age and grey hair comes wisdom. And wisdom comes with understanding. Understanding the world as it goes about in its nine to five life, in its after five and before nine lives. I have to confess, however, that despite my advanced years and plentiful grey hairs, there is much about life I do not understand. More specifically, much about Pakistani life in Islamabad that I do not understand.
For starters, I do not understand, why, every year (barring just one or two) I have to be held up to and from work because the army is practising for the March 23 parade. Over the years, I have worked in different places. One unfortunate common factor has been that they have been located across the other side of Blue Area. So come March, apart from difficult and not interested students, apathetic administrations and mountains of corrections, I have had to deal with the Pak army as it marches up and down Islamabad’s main artery, leaving me to wait it out (patiently is out of the question at the end of most long days) and face the traffic snarl that ensues.
What I do not understand is this: why can’t our fauji jawans, the brave and stalwart beings that they are, practise at night? That is, if they are still hell bent on marching the streets of my city. There is enough light on this broad avenue for them to march for hours at night. After all, the brightly lit avenues and boulevards of Islamabad should be utilized for some purpose. Its citizens are asleep well before midnight, oblivious of the electricity being used up for their benefit. Of course, it has struck me that CDA, the ever-obliging organization that it is, could be asked to donate a ‘plot’, a ground. There, with all the spit, paint and polish that goes with the army, our soldiers can march every day of the year. They could perhaps even levy a charge so that commoners can come with their families to see them march while having a picnic on the side.
On second thoughts though, no charge. I doubt if many commoners would be willing to pay to watch. Is that perhaps why they hold us Islamabadis hostage every year? We have to watch, want it or not.
The next thing I don’t understand about Islamabad is the gilding it takes come every national day, official visit or mela. Multi-coloured banners are hung from the poles in the meridian dividing the two lanes of the main shahrah. Do we have to ‘doll up’ some select parts of the city at the cost of garbage and gutter water collecting in other areas? Hoardings blatantly praising a local leader are erected overnight. These hoardings confuse me. Quite often the picture and name of the sponsor is more prominent than the name of the honoured. Who is the beneficiary of these huge hoardings? And are our leaders so susceptible to flattery, I wonder, that they are pleased to see their names and pictures coupled with some aspiring leader-to-be?
Then there is the problem of VVIPs gracing our city. Certainly, Islamabad (10 miles outside Pakistan was it?) is the best place to live. I am honoured to believing where the top echelons of power live. If they didn’t, we might sink to the pathetic levels of Katchakuh and Kanakatcha in terms of public facilities. What bothers me, though, is the price I have to pay to get these basic amenities. That price is when these powers go from place A to place B — as they must for no man is an island. All roads are blocked, traffic suspended and curses muted hours before and after the VVIP visits. What I do not understand is this: our leaders are all Pakistani bred. Surely, when they were simple Pakistani citizens, they too must have been held up for hours and cursed openly with the rabble when stopped for VVIP movement. Have these leaders forgotten? They couldn’t have such short memories. When they whiz through the empty streets of Islamabad, don’t they know where the public is?
I do not also understand how the different civic bodies co-ordinate so perfectly. For instance, who decides that first a road will be built, then the gas wallahs will come to dig it up to place gas pipes, then it will subsequently be repaired, only to have the water supply guys comes to place their pipes and so on. All this, amazingly, happens in one non-stop continuous chain, resulting in a road that was better before it got repaired and, of course, the mandatory frustrated citizens.
Another peculiarity is that the main roads are repaired/painted at peak traffic hours. Do we really have labour laws so stringent that our workers can only work a nine-five shift? That they prefer the hot summer afternoons to the cooler nights? Do we actually have a law saying that all public work has to done over the weekdays, during peak traffic hours?
Parking. I know the CDA has qualified and competent officers, all Pakistanis to the best of my knowledge. Why, I wonder, do they let the property builders build multi-storey buildings with 40 offices but with parking for only 10 cars? Surely they know that first our shop owners will come in their private cars, which they will park right outside their shops. Next, shoppers will come in their cars. Why do planners go out of sync with reality when they plan? I can’t understand how a newly built city faces severe parking problems in under 50 years. Old cities I understand. They were planned and built when even tongas were a rarity. But new suburbs and a whole new city? Such a simple and basic thing as parking?
Similarly, new roads and bridges take years to be constructed. The day they are opened to the public, they are already outdated because the planners did not cater to the growing traffic. Do our engineers not know that a bridge will take a minimum of five years to be built? And in those five years, the traffic will continue to grow solely because our population is growing so fast and our banks, for the last few years, are laying everything on the line to have people utilize their money. Do the planners not read advertisements, hoardings and banners asking people to go for the financing scheme? Even if they were remotely in touch with reality, they would surely know that the car ratio per family will only grow. And that roads and bridges should be designed to take the ever increasing load.
Fuel prices. There was a time, not long ago, when I would scour every source available to find the international price of oil. I was puzzled because at a time when the world oil price was falling, fuel price in Pakistan was steadily going up. And the price here was supposed to be dependent on world prices. I never figured that one out. Coupled with this, there is loud concern about our fairly meagre transport system, which necessitates the use of personal cars. I don’t understand why, given these circumstances, the one solution provided by our planners was to shut down the only bus transport system in the city.
In Islamabad property prices are being quoted in crores. I do not understand who can honestly earn around a crore in Pakistan. How, without courting jail or robbing a bank, does anyone earn that kind of money? Even if you don’t pay your taxes (as most Pakistanis don’t), a crore? To top it, quite often prices are quoted in dollars. I thought the legal currency of this country was the rupee. Sure, we are allies with America in its Fight Against Terror, but that does not change our currency.
If you receive or pay rent in dollars, does that exempt you from taxes? How can you declare legally that you are accepting payment in a currency that is not legal tender? Perhaps the State Bank of Pakistan has quietly added the American dollar to the rupee? You know, like dual passports, which you have to have if you are pretending to be anybody at all.
So, so much that I do not understand. Am I naive or simply ‘soft’ in the head? I wonder...
IT is universally acknowledged that with age and grey hair comes wisdom. And wisdom comes with understanding. Understanding the world as it goes about in its nine to five life, in its after five and before nine lives. I have to confess, however, that despite my advanced years and plentiful grey hairs, there is much about life I do not understand. More specifically, much about Pakistani life in Islamabad that I do not understand.
