I BELIEVE I manifested this getaway to Islamabad.

For the past three months, life in Karachi has been so frustrating that I have been saying out loud that I want to get out of here. It is difficult to take the state of the roads, people’s driving or the complete absence of any road etiquette, besides my own increasing road rage, any longer. And then of course, there is the mess that DHA has turned into. One does not even need to get into the daily life struggles that we all face.

I did not realise that by saying ‘I need a break’, someone would actually grant me one. So here I am, a suitcase filled with everything warm that I own, as well as things loaned by friends and family.

This is not my first time in the capital but it is my first time on my own. You see cities through a different lens when you’re a solo traveller. Previously, when planning this visit, everyone had an opinion about my neighbourhood, choice of commute, where to eat, etc, and a lot of it was based on their own experience, but there was also a lot of hearsay parading as fact. One had heard that the food in Islamabad was terrible. It is not. One heard the city was very clean. It is not.

The gap between perception and reality in media has widened.

A newcomer might come expecting a utopia and while anything is better than the many DHA Khayabans currently trying to pass off as roads in Karachi, the capital is not without its faults. This isn’t going to turn into an ‘us vs them’ debate. But it does make one think a lot about perception vs reality.

In the last six weeks or so, during Decemberistan, I met a lot of people in Karachi who visited Lahore. If you haven’t heard the word, Decemberistan, according to actor Adnan Malik, who coined the term almost a decade ago, denotes the time of year “when a false sense of mass euphoria and well-being affects the population of urban Pakistan”. Both overseas Pakistanis and friends who had to go to Lahore for weddings told us how well Lahore ‘worked’ as a city. These aren’t the expatriates who bemoan everything that is wrong with Pakistan. They are, admittedly wealthy, Pakistanis who tilt towards one party — they hate this Form 47 government — so to hear them begrudgingly praise Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz’s administration was a surprise in itself.

We’ve seen the ads about the projects launched by Maryam Nawaz’s administration and it all seems impressive, but how does that translate into real impact? Who is benefiting? I ask because outside this extended circle of mine is the other side that posts pictures of dirty roads, false advertising and what not.

Take the claim Maryam Nawaz made last month at a jalsa that crime was down by 80 per cent in the province. “Punjab is now a safe place,” she told the crowds. It echoed what my female friends said about feeling safer in the province and what uncles said about not hearing so much about crime in neighbourhoods. In other words, it sounded right. But a fact-check by a legacy news outlet found that based on the statistics from Punjab Police, crime was only down by 2pc. The most reduction reported was in cases of gang rape, which were down by 44pc from 2024. Yet Maryam Nawaz’s claims resonated with people on both sides of the divide. The roads are better, cleaner, they’re planning Basant, hurrah. Who cares about facts?

At the time of writing, no one had fact-checked Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari’s presentation on Sindh’s progress under his party’s rule. He did this to negate the naysayers who like to portray Sindh as “a glass half empty” province, he was quoted as saying. He spo­ke about his party’s performance in healthcare, ed-u­­cation, poverty alleviation, infrastructure, indust­­ry, agriculture and revenue generat­ion. It was all very impressive but I was struggling to believe it, having witnessed only a bleak picture.

Then there’s Imran Khan. We’ve not seen or heard from him; he’s not allowed to meet anyone. Yet entire campaigns are run under his name. And they damage his case and create fissures within the party. I’m convinced his social media team doesn’t want him out.

Who do we believe?

The gap between perception and reality in mainstream media has widened so much that I don’t know if it can be fixed. Maybe it needs a complete overhaul. It begins with rebuilding trust and that can only happen once we accept that we were deployed to manufacture consent and build narratives — for seths or someone else. We must promise not to do that again. It sounds as naive as the idea that I will not miss Karachi’s chaos. But we simply can’t afford to live in our own versions of reality far removed from the most glaring one — facts cannot be altered for your comfort.

The writer was an instructor of journalism.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2026