In light of all that is unrolling across the nation today, I thought it might be appropriate to repost something that I wrote back in 2006, following on from three days of rioting after firing at a political rally.
So why this piece, then? I guess it is to a large extent a damning indictment of myself and all other of the "comfortable classes", who are nicely bundled up in front of their computers, tablets and televisions right now, bemoaning the lack of cellular signals, thanking the Lord for BBM and Whatsapp and wondering whether Chairman Mao will be delivering tonight.
Shame on us all, just as much as there is shame on the idiots who tried to set fire to the Peshawar Chamber of Commerce building. We will continue to live our insignificant little lives as idiots burn this nation to the ground. And all this while, the one being heralded as the Messiah of the Day addresses a political rally flanked by flags of various right wing Islamist parties.
People keep saying that the life of the Prophet is an example for all of us on how to lead our lives. Well, as far as I am aware, he did not react with violence to offences being committed about his person while he was alive. neither should we. But react we must, for if we don't then it is inevitable that Karachi will turn into another Mogadishu. And we will adjust to that too.
Adjust. How I hate that word.
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Talk about being out of touch with the man
on the street.
The whole city was burning and here I was,
catching up on my beauty sleep – at least I was not playing the fiddle, or
whatever else Nero was alleged to have been up to, that misunderstood genius.
I have to admit though, that in theory I am
extremely well-placed to comment on the latest head-rearing of violence in this
fairly fair city, live as I do about 500 yards from the offices of a television
channel that was besieged by a baying mob in all their gun-wielding,
tyre-burning fury. But I have to admit that as I watched the drama unfold
literally down the road from my apartment, I felt a strange disconnect; it was
as if the pictures on television had nothing to do with the real world.
I have as much of a political conscience as
the next guy, provided that the next guy has less political conscience than a
newt. Actually, that my not necessarily be true. I don’t know how politically
aware newts are. I do, however, have my own opinions, and they may not
necessarily be based on what the talking heads on the many news channels, or
the editors of the literary-minded publications have to say. I have certainly
been living in this city for enough time to know exactly what event is going to
spark what kind of backlash and what spin the various parties involved will put
on the events.
So in one way I was not at all surprised at
the events of this Saturday past. If anything, I was relieved that the events
were not a lot uglier than they did get, and that the worst case scenario, of
pitched battles along ethnic, not political, lines that could easily have taken
place given the alarming amount of munitions floating around the city did not
materialize to the extent that they could have. Although in time my worst fears
do appear to be getting more and more likely; something I am praying subsides
as quickly as possible.
And I do take strong exception to
suggestions from some quarters that bemoan the inability of the residents of
this city, or nation, as the case may be, to protest peacefully. I was in England when the anti-globalisation protests
there got extremely ugly, and most of us remember the scenes from Seattle Northern Ireland Pakistan
And it must be said that some of the reporting
on view at the various channels was pretty farcical. A case in point: a correspondent
on one of the channels was reporting from the site of a recently-concluded gun
battle near a bridge, and all that the anchor seemed interested in was whether
the said correspondent was on top of the bridge, or underneath it! And on
another channel, a high-ranking government official was dragged over hot coals
– not for the content of his report to the press, but for the fact that a large
portion of it was in English! I can only assume that either his report had
nothing which could be held open to criticism, or that the correspondent found
himself unable to decipher his heathen code. Yet another anchor referred to the
9mm handguns and Soviet vintage AK-47s as “the latest weaponry”; I guess he has
not really kept up with the crime statistics of the city since about 1990, or
maybe this says more about the Karachi mindset – we have been through a lot in
the bad old days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the sight of a ‘TT’
does not even shock one when someone in the motorcycle next to you at a traffic
signal is carrying one casually in his hand much like a mobile phone (this
really happened to me a couple of weeks ago).
It is amazing though how the residents of
this city manage to find silver linings in the unlikeliest places. One of the
ways in which this manifested itself was that many people I have met remarked
that, due to the trouble causing many offices and factories to remain closed,
there was enough electricity for residential consumers to get by. Hence, in
this city that it seems faces a perpetual electricity shortage, there was a
spell of 72 hours in which most parts of town faced zero load shedding. A case
of being thankful for small mercies?
A more likely explanation, though, is that
the KESC staff responsible for switching off the power to various parts of the
city could not make it in to work, to operate the said controls. The picture in
my mind is a mixture of a console akin to that operated by Homer Simpson at the
Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and an elaborate command and control measures,
complete with a briefcase of localities and outage times and timings, referred
to by insiders as the ‘electrical football’.
The rumor mills, too, have been working
overtime this past week. If the fruit seller is to be believed, the military is
about to roll into town to take over proceedings. However, the same fruit
seller did tell me on the best authority the day before that the bridge I drove
across to work this morning had been blown up by miscreants, so I am not sure
if his source, the vegetable seller, is all that reliable.
Maybe it is true that watching fictional
violent images on television makes one immune to the real thing when broadcast
on the same media, or maybe it is that things in this city have been a lot
worse in the dark days of the 1980s/1990s. Either way, my abiding memory from
this past inglorious week was not a scene of murder or mayhem, but this: on
Friday night, at a local dessert joint that is normally the haunt of teens
which too much time and money on their hands, there was barely enough room to
stand as families packed in to take advantage of the impromptu extended weekend
to grab a scoop of late night ice cream.
Perhaps the residents of this former city
of lights, now a city of electricity shortages, are just increasingly
fatalistic. Perhaps they grab any slice of pleasure where they can. Or, more
worryingly, perhaps the gap between the two sides of the bridge is so great
that events on the wrong side of the tracks do not even register on the radar
of the blessed.
Originally published in The Friday Times, June 2007
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