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June 22, 2006
The urban jungle
I don’t know how people manage it, but I certainly am facing unexpected and unnecessary hurdles at every step in the small project I am trying to run. As soon as I cope with one problem, another one crops up. Let me tell you the latest incident.
Since my project is in a side lane away from the main road, I put up a large signboard on the roof of our building to inform visitors about its location. Our visitors were happy as with the board’s help they could find our office without having to go round and round.
Street names and addresses as you well know are of no help at all. Stop and ask a chowkidar, a pedestrian or a policeman and they will look confused and shake their heads, or, what is worse, send you racing in the opposite direction. Our signboard, therefore, proved very helpful to our clients.
As we all are conversant with the ways of the country, one must have guessed what happened next. A man showed up and demanded that we pay duty on the sign on our roof. He claimed to quote some rule from the excise department. The fact that it was our roof and our sign did not impress him at all. If we didn’t pay up his men would come and forcibly remove the sign.
I agreed to pay whatever duty he wanted. But the sum he quoted was so outrageous that I had no choice but to get the board removed. Of course, the man offered us a choice: we could come to an ‘arrangement’ with him and pay him a reduced sum. In return we would be allowed to put up all the signboards we wanted.
Partly because I am new to the business and partly because I have qualms, ours is the only enterprise in that neighbourhood that doesn’t have signboards. I might add that the small signs we had put on the relevant street corners to guide visitors were also knocked down by you know who.
As expected, the number of our clients has dwindled and many refuse to even attempt to reach us, being discouraged by the maze of streets and alleys in our not at all fashionable area. May I respectfully submit to the concerned department that if they have to levy a duty on signboards sited in our own premises, could they please make the amount reasonable, such that a new project like ours could pay without breaking its back.
Why is it that our city and town planners are unable to plan well and we end up with a hotchpotch of neighbourhoods where visitors have to resort to hit or miss tactics to find the address they want.
That white elephant of a Civic Centre where offices that deal with land and planning are located, needs to be brought up to date. It is supposed to be staffed with experts and highly qualified personnel but their minds are covered with fungus and their degrees, if they have any, are fossilised, at least where city planning is concerned. Of course, they are sharp as a rapier in the matter of their personal benefits.
When I wanted to visit a friend in Gulshan I couldn’t follow her directions next to a bakery and a host of other landmarks with which I was not familiar. Our august Defence Housing experts also think it below their dignity to import planning experts from abroad. I refuse to visit a dear friend in a Karachi Defence area, having once spent close to two hours in a determined effort to find her place.
Last year, I was staying with a family in the US Capital and wanted to visit relatives in the city of New Jersey. To my surprise my son-in-law who was unfamiliar with New Jersey, asked only for the address. With the help of a mapping device in his car he drove me straight to my relatives’ home; without stopping or asking directions even once.
Why we cannot install such useful devices here in Pakistan, I’m told, is because we don’t have detailed maps listing every street and alley, not forgetting logical house numbering. Half our roads don’t have names anyway, and house numbering is such a mishmash that if you ask a person the number of his neighbour’s houses he wouldn’t be able to come up with the right answer.
As for place names, can you think of a less inviting name for a very pleasant shopping area than ‘Khadda Market.’ And would you believe it, there’s a road in Karachi called 8000 Road. What about the fact that there’s a Lal Kothi bus stop on Shahrah-e-Faisal, and people give directions referring to that colourful building, but alas, the Lal Kothi was demolished long ago. The same goes for the Cheel waali kothi, once a famous landmark in PECHS. My favourite name, of course, is the Islamabad bus drivers’ cry of their next destination: ‘Bum factory, Bum factory, Bum factory.’
Now, if our city fathers had any sense, our neighbourhoods would be well designed and addresses easy to find. I wouldn’t have needed to put up signboards in the first place, giving some corrupt official the opportunity to try and extract a cut from me. But alas! Why blame that minor functionary when our top leadership has always set a fine example of how to thrive on ill-gotten gains.
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