Fast-paced, enticing, chaotic, infuriating - Karachi is all this, and a lot more!
CITY PULSE
Fast-paced, enticing, chaotic, infuriating - Karachi is all this, and a lot more! Karachiites share a love-hate relationship (mostly love) with the city, wholeheartedly embracing not only its splendour but also its flaws, which is something I am fairly cognizant of, having lived here for 20 years.
As a Karachiite, half of your life (or even more) would be spent on roads. Only cars to see and honks to listen, the bustling traffic combined with unending commutes make Karachi’s roads unsolicited second homes to us. On the city’s merciless roads, the impatient drivers attempting to overtake each other, going wrong ways, breaking signals (often followed by ‘chai pani’ sessions with traffic police) put up quite a show to spectate. In addition, we all have to contend with pollution, smoke and dust.
Though we wouldn’t have minded an actual roller-coaster; the city has still got us covered with its bumpy rides. The bone-jarring rides with speed-breakers, pits, turns, open manholes and stray dogs give us the adrenaline surge which can make the ride unpredictable and fun, or a painful experience, depending on the type of personality one has. The open manholes and their material spilling out are what you get after you get done with your ride; they certainly don’t make it pleasant for you to walk about.
Karachiites have quite a knack for writing and they write wherever and whenever they desire. The horrendous amount of graffiti, on almost every surface and wall of every nook of the city, speaks volumes about their aforementioned trait. This being said, a bright side to look at would be the abstract art seductively done in the city with bright, red-coloured ‘paan’ stains that beautifies the character of the city all the more.
A while back, when I was coming back from Lahore to Karachi, I saw garbage heaps through the train’s window and instantly realized we had arrived. Quite an identity we’ve created! It hurts to see the vast disparity between the cleanliness maintained by one city and not maintained by the other; it’s only fair to concede Lahore the winner here! With the city plunging deep into the abyss of its waste, we should fear the day when Karachi would be renamed from ‘the city of lights’ to ‘the city of garbage’. And you know what? Your Audi is barely of any help when you throw litter out of it on roads. Okay?
We have always been blatantly boastful of our several beautiful beaches, but can we be anymore? The majority of our seasides have now been deplorably metamorphosed into sewage dumps, rendering the title ‘City by the Sea’ quite a misnomer. The unfiltered industrial effluent and the non-degradable plastic waste being discarded diligently into the sea has polluted the city’s coastal line to an excruciating extent, and our beaches are no longer places people used to yearn to go on weekends.
Karachi is hot due to the munificent blessing of the blazing sun all year long. Humidity, lack of green, and pollution top it off like no other! Don’t get fooled upon catching sight of someone in damp clothes into thinking they might have just stepped out of the shower with their clothes on; it’s only the sweat glands in full motion! Though we have water-parks as a potential antidote, loss of people’s bladder control, when in pools, has always made me keep this option off my list.
Imagine living under scorching heat with an out-and-out scarcity of any green. Tormenting, right? The barren lands with a tinge of green, referred to as ‘parks’, don’t help the situation even a tad bit. No fresh air and vehicle smoke make the atmosphere congested to breathe in. With an acutely urbanized life and scanty green and natural vistas, the equation seems fairly out of balance for Karachiites, rendering them with no place for catharsis. The little green that one could still find every so often would be ‘artificial turf’ - fake grass.
Not a single day goes by without these two making a cameo in an already tumultuous story, sufficing for the ultimate villain every story needs. Ever since I gained consciousness, electricity and water supply have been playing hide and seek with the citizens. And irrespective of many claims been by various governments, nobody knows when this agonising game would end.
The city, in all its glory, has also been slightly dangerous for its residents. In the face of the humungous rate of unpredictable street crimes, Karachiites have now intrepidly grown a thick skin. Gunpoint stories now induce giggles rather fright. Keeping two mobile-phones has given satisfactory results in averting many (actual) thefts. For Karachiites, life always goes on! And we wouldn’t have wanted it any other way; for what’s life without little adventures?
Colourful and heavily-ornamented local buses galore, with their broken skeletons, and speakers blurting out shrieky 70’s songs, are now deemed quite a misfit in the mega-city, and rightly so. Always teemed to death, these buses with their instability are still in business due to the lack of a government-owned public transit system. The facility of roof-top seating on these buses, however, is the silver lining that I look forward to!
Even with its shortcomings, the metropolis, with all its grandeur and diversity, has always been and forever will be loved by us with the hope of better days to come. Its peculiar idiosyncrasies make it what it is; and writing an innocuous article to vent out might be the maximum bad one can do. It’s simply not unlovable!
