City at the receiving end
The other day, enraged students of the Islamia College, Civil Lines, set three buses ablaze and damaged some 15 other vehicles after a rashly driven bus ran over a fellow student and killed him. Traffic on the Lower Mall remained suspended for several minutes for two consecutive days. Will the driver of the bus and its owner be brought to book, as promised by the police? Not a chance, and you can put any amount on it and win, if the past is any guide.
Then there was also a bank robbery in which three million rupees were looted from a branch located on the busy Jail Road in broad daylight. The robbers were allegedly let into the bank by a security guard a few minutes before the facility opened for business. When the staff arrived, they were held at gunpoint as robbers collected the spoils. The police, as usual, were late in arriving, ensuring that the robbers had made a safe escape instead of being nabbed. Words describing the robberies that seem to be the latest fad in the city have begun to sound like cliches. Apt as all cliches tend to be, they carry little meaning and have even not the slightest effect on those concerned.
The inquiry set up to probe into the Jail Road robbery will likely never see the light of day, for the same was the case with a bank on Lytton Road whose lockers were broken into over the Eid holidays. And that was the last time you heard about the losses suffered by those who had the misfortune of renting a locker at that damned branch. But robberies alone are not the bane of Lahorites, there are other afflictions too.
Take the traffic mess, for instance. Name any major artery that does not choke with polluting vehicles all day long. There just seems to be no order to the madness; granted that it is the sheer volume of traffic at many places that defies regulation. But more often, it is chaotic driving and the insatiable urge to take a short cut on the part of the motorists that causes snarls. On other occasions, the civic administration, rather the lack of it, adds to the confusion prevailing on our roads. Lahore, in that sense, has the highest number of freeways that crisscross the entire city. Who says this is not a free country?
For one thing, it is just mind boggling as to why the traffic signals on Gulberg’s Main Boulevard — now the rival of The Mall’s commercial stretch — most abruptly go blinking when traffic lines up the boulevard’s wide stretch for metres on end. By the time a constable arrives on the scene and starts fiddling with the signals or even tries to regulate traffic, all hell has already broken loose. At times it takes several hours to restore some sense of normality to traffic. Whether the daily trauma endured by motorists on this road is due to the VIP movement to and from Zahoor Elahi Road is open to question. But if that indeed were the case than that road itself would see a bigger traffic mess as would the canal road at the other end. So that’s not very likely to be the case in this particular instance; it’s just bad traffic engineering.
TAKING their cue from the lack of interest and contempt reserved for civic issues by the city managers, utilities, too, have decided to add to citizens’ woes. The latest in the long list of grievances is the issuance of gas bills to DHA residents by the Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited. There has been a gradual but a pinching moving up of the ‘due date’ by the utility over the last two months, complain aggrieved consumers.
The bills usually listed the due date as being in the first week of the month, and the notice of disconnection was served on those consumers only who had defaulted on two consecutive payments. Not anymore. The latest bills list November 30, the last day of the month, as the due date by which you are either required pay your dues or face disconnection, even though a hefty surcharge may still be collected by the utility for making a late payment.
The previous bill, the residents say, had listed November 1 as the due date. Why the utility, in its unchallengeable wisdom, has issued two bills in the same month is beyond comprehension. Surely, this is a case of a bad oversight on the part of some new maverick at the utility’s collection department and it should be corrected without further delay.
On the other hand, some consumers have alleged that the gas company has recently raised the reconnection charges by a huge margin, and it now wishes to collect extra spoils by pushing as many consumers to a forced default as possible. If true, nothing could be more cruel, because we all know that as winter sets in, the demand for gas will rise manifolds. The SNGPL should not be allowed to make a killing on these dubious grounds. Are the regulators listening?
THE faithful, in their teeming numbers, did converge on Raiwind this year too. There were thousands and thousands of tents set up near the town, and almost everyone putting up in these facilities had a sleeping bag to keep him warm through the three-day prayer session that those who can and can’t afford must attend, come rain or shine, or a devastating earthquake. The government, too, spent a hefty amount on making arrangements for the pious congregation, what with deputing attending officials, the police and running special trains to and from Raiwind.
What’s more, among those who partook in the ‘soul-nourishing’ or, as it is called in Urdu, the ‘rooh-parvar’ Ijtima, was a large contingent of ministers, MPs, high-ranking government servants and many a district nazim; the last ones were practically a dime a dozen, as one participant put it.
It must have been the soul-nourishing atmosphere of the moot that compelled our own city district nazim to do some soul-searching of his own, and ban next February’s Basant festivities on account of the suffering endured by the earthquake victims up north. This, after the entire officialdom, save practically the president and the PM only — God bless them for staying away in their enlightened moderation — chose to patronize the Raiwind reunion of those who spent millions on the get-together but offered only their prayers to the quake victims.
Some twisted logic must be at work behind the scenes to justify wasteful expenditure on a moot that is not a religious compulsion, yet it must take precedence over all human needs, particularly of those fellow Mussalmans who are at the mercy of the freezing clime in Azad Kashmir and parts of the Frontier. The same logic dictates that Basant be banned because it is not a mullah-blessed event. —OBSERVER