Last week in Lahore was doubly revealing. I joined with a youthful group of entrepreneurs and highly successful forty something(s) over two days of golf in which I was duly thrashed. This would have been a given but what surprised me most was their worldview which was extremely well informed and nuanced and built on sound foundation from Pakistani-based institutions.
Having done their bit in initial career paths where each had excelled to the point of earning an early retirement, they were now running their respective businesses. And I could tell even there they were onto something big. You don’t become members at this golf course, at this age, unless you are rich, very rich. And they did not have famous fathers; each had reached the mantle of success on his own steam.
Outstanding golfers all, it was a treat to see a part of the youth bulge so roundly complete. Fitness, sports, business, world affairs and of course a deep, very deep concern for Pakistan was their hallmark. After a very long time I saw hope and relished every moment of seeing this face of Pakistan.
To get to the golfing facility, I had to travel by the famous Ring Road circling most of Lahore. It was impossible to see beyond the immediate vicinity of the road at the huge development that lines it because of a persistent smog that blanked the view. I call it smog because it is called smog in popular terms but I entirely disagree with the characterisation. Smog has an element of Fog – condensed water vapour – in it. What we see in Lahore is devoid of any vapour (or very little)and instead is a composition of carbon from smoke and dust. They don’t yet have a name for it but let me coin one – carbdust?
Where do these come from? Uncontrolled urban expansion and an incessant rural-to-urban movement of people gives rise to oversized cities which result in unplanned developments which then command the need for greater movement of people within. The Metros and the Orange lines supplant the motorised vehicles which probably now most dwellers of our ever-expanding towns and cities own. The exhaust smoke gives us the carbon, burnt and un-burnt – which is far more dangerous – around which then coagulate the dust particles from urban infrastructure developments and a plethora of housing colonies.
Winter helps such dastardly formulation. The earth cools faster at night and the humidity saturates quickly the air in contact with the ground. While carbdust envelops the ground at a certain height, forming in scientific terms an inversion layer, the temperature lapse is slower than normal of the cooler air as it rises, which all adds to the heat stirring the mixture some more because of increased entropy.
A combination of entrapped dust, carbon and saturated air gives us the impending doom – deadly particulates – that this entire composition then becomes.
Climate change is one phenomenon, what we are doing to add to its consequences are these numerous steps of neglect and uninformed suicide that are making our cities huge death traps.
This year it happened all over, this fact of engulfing smog – wherever it is still smog – and of course our very own carbdust. Most Asian nations still suffer from the latter. It will be time before we graduate to the level of Smog. There were though times when our lands only had mist which deteriorated to smog. Now we are on a reverse journey; and instead have carbdust.
There will be more of it as we fire up the coal-based power plants already on order. Even Paris had its share of smog this year, which is kind of strange because they are a very conscious society and have this beautiful River Seine that snakes through the town, sucking in the air-based pollutants keeping the air clean for Parisians. But then they too falter at the hands of climate change.
I heard a pulmonologist explain that the smog composed of three different particulates: the bigger ones, your nose filtered; the middle ones made it to the lungs and gave you lung and chest infections which can sometime deteriorate to pneumonia; and then there are those minute ones which make it to the blood stream – these give you heart attacks, literally. Remember hearing how many known figures have died this winter of heart-related problems. I don’t have the data but someone should look these up and then correlate that with the carbdust, or the smog if you please, enveloping all our cities and see if there exists a relationship.
But this is too much science and I have digressed too far from those young men of immense potentiality and the hope that I saw associated with their person and their achievements at this young age. As we waited for the traffic on the course to clear at different times they kept bombarding me with what I thought of the future political direction of the country.
Their own talk was laced around raw cotton imports and the likelihood that the government this year just might let some in at a certain subsidy. I also learnt from them that, while the big fish still swam peacefully and happily, there had been a loss in the textile sector of some 15-30 percent closures because of unsustainable competition. The single biggest reason for these losses was the cost of production. The inputs cost far greater forcing the minor players off the field.
Infatuated still, and steeped in the Imran Khan romance, they somehow wished me to give them hope on him. They were equally jaded by his inability to translate their dreams into reality as if a long-lasting romance had ended in heartbreak.
Would he at least return in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa? Probably not, I answered; KP is not known to return an incumbent ever. Also, even in 2013, if the opposition had so intended, the PTI could have been so easily upended in KP. He is far from a comfortable position there.
On Nawaz Sharif they were visibly disappointed to hear that, in all probability, he will survive the Panama inquest in the courts. And more than likely, NS or the PML-N will have another run for five years. Will they then improve in their approach and attitude towards governance? I thought they will. They clearly disagreed.
Suffering a bad game already at their hand, I closed the argument that if both the father and the children – including a daughter – heard stories on each other every night one would have to be heartless to not change in the face of such relentless personal scrutiny. They nodded in polite agreement and set about in their ruthless massacre of my golfing prowess.
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