It was my first day. The moment the aircraft landed, I started calling those friends with whom I used to frequent the Burns Road area for lunch or dinner whenever in Karachi. None of them were available at that time somehow. I decided to leave my stuff at the place where I was staying and go straight to Burns Road on my own to have dhaagey walay kebabs in both forms (fresh off the skewers and those fried in butter) at Waheed’s age-old joint. I also wanted to have the unique concentrated milk dessert – rabri – from the corner shop selling the Delhi-style rabri in the same block as Waheed’s. I knew I would find someone to share the food with once I was there as I know many people who work in that neighbourhood of the city. The kebabs and rabri were as good as ever but what soon made the good taste vanish from my mouth was the municipal disaster I saw around me. These older parts of the city had never been perfect and were always infested with issues of sanitation, waste management and cleanliness. But all that has further deteriorated. The gutters were overflowing, solid waste was heaped up along the pavements, the streets were stinking and the traffic on the roads and by-lanes was rough and undisciplined like never before. None of the residential buildings around me were either renovated or freshly painted. Long and short cables and wires of electricity, telephone, television connections and what not enmeshed the sky above me. It was dangerous but no one cared. On the last day of my brief trip, I was asked over for lunch at a residence within the premises of the University of Karachi and the Institute of Business Administration (IBA). From DHA to IBA staff town, it took me about two hours to reach. There were traffic jams and vehicles moving at a snail’s pace all along. No one, particularly motorcyclists, followed even a single traffic rule. The encroachments on both sides of even the main arteries of the city narrowed them down, making them look like alleys and by-lanes. There were large trucks and huge trailers freely moving about busy roads and streets in the heart of the city, perhaps openly violating the rules. Men, women and children jaywalked on the main roads as almost all the footpaths were occupied by vendors of different kinds. After a quick lunch and a brief chat, since I had to catch a flight, we left the IBA staff town and passed through the area between the airport and the university. I took two different routes when on my way to the university premises and then on the way to the airport from the university premises and tried to observe what was happening around me during those three hours on the road. Karachi is an arid area but it was never this bad as people and municipal administration planted trees, tried to build parks and create green patches wherever they could. But this time there was not even a blade of grass or a tree planted for miles. Occasionally, one would find the thorny keekar tree boasting its only brownish green presence on the otherwise dry and dusty plains. There was no paint on the greyish cement blocks used to raise walls, houses and commercial buildings. The only paint found on the walls of low-income Karachi is splashed by advertisers who freely use these walls for pushing different products, consumable or otherwise. And then there is the graffiti of political parties and religious groups of various hues and colours. The most striking sight in Karachi are the hundreds and hundreds of multi-storeyed buildings coming up even in squatters and low-income unregulated areas in order to provide cheap accommodation to an ever increasing population. Most Karachiites don’t just live without potable water, proper sanitation and drainage and with power and gas shortages like the rest of the country, they, in fact, live in far more dangerous conditions than those in small towns and villages due to unregulated and unsafe construction of buildings. The potholed streets will not kill them as much as the tall buildings coming up at a rapid pace without any safety regulations. The passes, underpasses, bypasses, overpasses, bridges and ramps worth billions of rupees built by celebrated municipal governments and provincial administrations over the years have not solved the congestion issue on major roads. The urban planning for the city has not been adequate nor has this lopsided planning ever been implemented fully. On top of that, there is no will for investment in mass transit through affordable means like reviving the circular railway and creating decent modes of transportation still in sight. Karachi’s pro-people planners and thinkers, architects and engineers are never consulted in matters of urban planning, landscaping and creating a modern, liveable city. This is simply because the land, transport and other similar mafias control the city. Remember, Parween Rehman, the director of the Orangi Pilot Project, killed in cold blood because she spoke for, struggled for and sided with the poor and the disadvantaged. The quality of life for Karachi’s poor, working class and lower middleclass residents is seriously inferior to other cities in the world that get to generate comparable wealth. I am not talking about large cities in richer countries. The failure of successive provincial governments and city administrations is in your face when you enter the city. It is the MQM, the PPP and the successive military and civilian federal governments who have brought Karachi to where it is today – bursting at its seams and waiting for a disaster to happen. Mafias, land grabbers, extortionists and terrorists rule the commercial, financial, cultural and industrial hub of the country. Baldia Town is one such example where the poor workers were burnt alive for the fault of their employer who refused to share his profit with extortionists. Bilal Tanweer titled his work of fiction on Karachi, ‘Scatter here is too great’. In fact, the scatter here is too scary. Tailpiece: One wouldn’t mind ending the column on a rather optimistic note. The state and government institutions are in a shambles but the citizens and their associations continue to strive for a better future, a progressive, prosperous Pakistan. What took me to Karachi this time around was the Karachi Literary Festival. It is increasingly becoming more public, more inclusive, more representative of the city and reflective of its character, more multi-ethnic and more multiclass. The sixth annual edition of the literary festival in Karachi organised by Oxford University Press Pakistan concluded with a series of musical performances and short speeches by way of a vote of thanks. KLF was co-founded in 2010 by Ameena Saiyid, the head of OUP, and Dr Asif Farrukhi, our arch fiction writer, critic and scholar. It draws thousands of people to its plenaries and concurrent sessions every year. This year, there were 200 writers, poets, artists, actors, academicians, musicians and performers who were mostly from Pakistan but joined by their compatriots from the UK, US, Germany, India, Bangladesh, etc. The audience didn’t just come from all across the city but from the towns in the interior of Sindh and parts of Balochistan. A village of books, ideas, literati and performing artists came alive in the scenic environs of the Beach Luxury Hotel – the historic Karachi hotel by the sea. The keynote speeches by two formidable women of our times, the Indian fiction writer, Nayantara Sehgal, and the Pakistani poet, Zohra Nigah, kicked off the event on a reflective and serious note. However, there was a zest for life and creativity, a feeling of hope and optimism and an ambiance of celebration and festivity for three days. The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad. Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com
