Your marriage certificate, please...
UP to a certain point it is taken for granted, and also taken in the stride, that police will take liberties with the normal rights of the citizen. This may take the form of plain discourteous behaviour. Or, one may encounter over- officiousness in contact with the citizen. Or, failure to perform a function that the citizen expects in the normal course. All of this has come to be integral to our culture. They do such things and most of us do not protest.
Now newspapers are reporting a kind of police excess that is absolutely unacceptable. The society, as a whole, ought to refuse to take it lying down. At recreation spots police on duty disturb couples in what is nothing short of criminal transgression. They would walk up to a couple and demand their marriage certificate. This kind of harassment of perfectly peaceful citizens is the most obnoxious form of blackmail.
In the first place no police officer, however lofty his position, can possibly have a right to presume anyone to be guilty of any form of violation of law unless there is reasonable evidence of it. A couple in the park or on the beach have every right to be there and stay as long as they wish, so long as they are not seen to be over-stepping the limits of the law.
As it is, we are an entertainment-starved society. Indeed, we are a society where avenues of mere relaxation and relief are all but completely absent. Entertainment is a tall order for most of the people. Even before the meddlesome cop, the overly pious mullah takes all possible delight out of the life of the common people. The censorious elders in the family do not take kindly to younger people sharing a joke. A smile is frowned upon.
We know to our sorrow, indeed shame, what the Taliban had been doing to their good people in Afghanistan in defence of ‘virtue’ and in the fight against ‘sin.’ Since when, or under what law in Pakistan, are couples forbidden from seeking recreation, fun and pleasure in parks and on the beaches?
So merciless enemies of joy our moralists are that they would not let Christians and their friends enjoy themselves on the New Year’s eve. In this kind of a ‘holy war’ environment, the unscrupulous cop joins merrily. Not to uphold any morals but to blackmail helpless citizen into parting with some money. That is what the unworthy cop is interested in. And so in making life only more miserable the moralist is joined by the immoral man in uniform — a sacred alliance against sin!
This kind of police interference with couples in parks, beaches and other places of recreation is a relatively new and rather ingenuous kind of invasion upon the privacy of citizens. If our people cannot feel safe from such outrage in parks and other places of enjoyment, what kind of society we are becoming? According to the reports that have appeared in newspapers, it is traffic policemen who commit this sort of excesses.
In the first place, it is no part of the duty or responsibility of the traffic police to initiate investigation into the marital status of people in open places of recreation. Or anywhere, for that matter. Besides why must a couple carry their marriage documents on their person all the time? A couple’s married life is their very, very personal affair and no policeman has any right or duty whatsoever to peep into, or even try to do so.
If the traffic police are really keen to perform their duties, they had better start checking the documents of six thousand buses plying the choked streets and roads of this city. According to a well-informed estimate, more than half of these buses would be found to be unable to produce the relevant documents regarding registration and payment of the normal taxes and other government dues.
Instead of checking the documents of public transport, notorious as it is for all manner of excesses and transgressions, the traffic police in Karachi appear to have undertaken checking the marital status of citizens. To call this an outrage is to put an unacceptably mild construction on what is unwarranted aggression on the privacy of decent citizens. There should be a popular protest and uproar against this atrocious tendency.
As it is, the people know the delight traffic policemen take in harassing young motorcyclists. The offending cops know that a boy on a motorcycle would belong to a middle-class family with not much of a clout. So he could be an easy prey, his elders being unable to pull strings in high places.
Now that we are on the subject of traffic police, by and large, let it be said that the performance of this arm of police in Karachi needs a lot of looking into. One can say that it is common knowledge that a nexus exists between men in white uniform and the road transport mafia. Without the protection from this agency, these transporters would not be able to get away with all their tricks.
If the traffic police must check, they had better start checking the route permits of the buses and the routes they so freely ply. Why the traffic police cannot ensure that all buses carry their route number in front as well as on the back? What prevents the traffic police from taking action against buses that stop at will and pick up passengers right in the middle of busy roads? That is what they should be doing instead of prying into personal relationship of people in parks and on the beaches.
What’s wrong with having fun?
The spontaneous outpouring of sheer exuberance that gripped the city on Independence Day took most people by surprise. Karachi was suddenly taken over by thousands of flag-waving young motorcyclists determined to have fun at all costs. Mainly males in their teens and early twenties, the boisterous revelers made a deafening racket as they zipped fearlessly through the traffic on bikes with their silencers removed. Each motorcycle carried at least two, and sometimes three, death-defying young men, who had clearly decided that all traffic rules stood abolished on August 14.
Groups would alight from their bikes at traffic signals and break into frenzied bouts of dancing and singing, much to the annoyance of those simply trying to get from A to B rather than being caught up in a roadside song and dance carnival.
Not surprisingly, their antics provoked an outpouring of criticism the morning after from people who obviously had little empathy for this generation’s idea of a good time. The din created by the absent silencers was the main target of their ire. There was also criticism of their choice of music, their civic and dress sense and their lack of all sense of decorum on what should be a day of dignified celebration. While some of the criticism was justified, one also wonders if we have become a society that is afraid to let itself go and just have fun. There seems to be a knee-jerk response against any spontaneous expression of joy, a moralistic belief that enjoying oneself is almost sinful. It is this kind of grim sense of propriety, so pervasive in our society, that these young people have to live with. It also explains why occasions such as Independence Day spark off such scenes of uninhibited frenzy.
This is a generation exposed to all kinds of images from the West and Bollywood of youthful lifestyles that centre around having fun. On August 14, it was this generation that decided to take a break from its joyless existence and take over the streets. Despite the loud and boisterous mode of their celebration, there were no outbreaks of violence or any damage to property.
The offence and inconvenience this behaviour caused to more upright citizens may be understandable. But the underlying causes of this behaviour were lost amidst the self-righteous moral condemnation. The youth of Karachi, speeding through the city and dancing on the streets till late at night, was trying, perhaps unconsciously, to register a noisy protest against the lack of opportunities for good, clean affordable fun in the city for young people like themselves.
Set up in Karachi in April 2002, the Care & Kindness Society has one objective and that is to serve the poor. So far, a former colleague writes, this non-governmental organization (NGO) has been holding eye camps, examining the eyes of the poor people who seek its assistance and carrying out cataract surgery.
In the past six weeks four eye camps have been held in low-income neighbourhoods like Machar Colony, Saudabad, Ghuzdar and most recently, in Thana Bula Khan, some 110 kilometres from Karachi. Around 550 people were screened in one day and 162 eye surgeries were performed over the next two days at the local tehsil hospital. The patients included three babies, all less than a year old. The society did this in coordination with the Al Ibrahim Eye Hospital, Malir.
The Care and Kindness Society focusses on eye treatment because its chairman, Prof Dr Saleh Memon, a former head of Jinnah’s eye department, and three other office-bearers are all eye surgeons.
The society also does eye screening at madressahs and schools. So far, its doctors have visited 12 madressahs in Malir, Saudabad, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and Saudabad. It’s chairman observed certain practices in the institutions were perhaps making the eyesight of students weaker. One was the way the children were made to sit, as in usually squatting on a duree and then bending low to read the Holy Quran placed on a low platform. At the same time, they move their bodies to and fro to read, and this probably doesn’t help either. Dr Memon says that the platform or table should be higher so that the children can sit up and read. This, he said, also improves blood circulation to the eyes.
The schools visited by the society include 20 branches of the Al-Hilal Public School in Manghopir and Beaconhouse.
Although the focus of the society has been on eye treatment up till now, it plans to extend its activities to screening blood once its blood bank opens at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.
The Care and Kindness Society accepts not only donations in cash but also in kind — even if the items are used, such as furniture, books and clothes. For the eye camp in Thana Bula Khan, one student from LUMS, Zulfiqar Bari, donated 84 pairs of slippers, and this was extremely useful since a number of people who were screened did not have any.
Those who would like further information can call the society at 4380175.
Karachi can be quite a hazardous place to live. In fact, a friend thinks that most Karachiites tend to live in a constant state of paranoia. It was this very paranoia, she says, that was triggered off by a one-off accident on the 14th of August. A ship laden with chemicals or oil collided off the coast with a smaller ship and the result was the release of an invisible cloud of foul-smelling chemical odour across various parts of the city.
On a day when the country was celebrating its independence some people living in the affected areas of Clifton and Defence wasted no time in convincing themselves and others that a terrorist attack had taken place and that Aug 14 was probably a most opportune date.
So once this foul smell began spreading all over southern parts of the city, a rumour, fuelled by mass hysteria, began doing the rounds: that a group of terrorists had launched a poisonous gas attack.
The friend says that no time was wasted by the city’s aunty brigade in spreading this rumour. In fact, some people became so convinced that things had indeed taken a turn for the worse that they started packing and booked rooms in five-star hotels, as if that would prevent them from inhaling the gas. Others resorted to shutting all doors and windows, without realizing that doing that would only make the threat to their health worse since closed windows confine the gas.
Some apartment blocks close to the oceanfront were vacated and this added to the panic. This state of affairs coupled with the uncertainty was further exacerbated by the fact that people did not generally know who to ask for credible information. Some mothers were understandably quite distraught because they needed to know what, if any, precautionary measures to take. As it turned out the whole scare was unnecessary with most of it being fuelled by fertile imaginations and paranoid minds. Not that one can blame the people of Karachi for being on edge, given the incidents of violence the streets of this metropolis have witnessed in recent times.
Picnicking at the French beach is considered quite an elitist pastime. But it seems that even within the so-called elite circles there are layers. Last weekend a Sindhi-speaking family was at the beach, and went about enjoying their day at the beach in an informal and relaxed manner: frolicking in the sand, with good homemade food, and lots of shrieking and screaming.
However, a bit later a family that seemed even more ‘elite’ arrived on the scene, a friend who was there says. They were using the hut next door and appeared visibly disgusted by the ‘locals’ next door. While the kids in the first group enjoyed the biryani with their hands and chattered in Sindhi the not-so-local family next door found it hard to conceal their disgust. In fact one of them was overheard complaining about the crowd as she sipped her iced tea in a tall elegant glass and flipped through a foreign glossy. When the children of the ‘local’ family called the camel and horse-wallahs for a ride they got disapproving looks from next door. After the rides, the camel and horse owners waited a bit for some food but while doing so they were told off by the more ‘elitist’ family.
It seems that being pretentious is really in, more so if you happen to be at the French beach.— By Karachian