Hoardings or blot on the landscape

The city has recently witnessed a weird phenomenon during elections, that of a war being waged through the medium of hoardings. Huge hoardings had regularly been coming up for greeting political biggies. Care was taken, not too inconspicuously, to mention in them the names of the sycophants who put them up lest they missed out on favours if and when dispensed by the object of their veneration.

Others of opposing parties, however, had been piqued at the practice and, in sheer derision, had been mockingly putting up hoardings to celebrate the tour of their favourite people.

Although in bad taste, there was nothing much that could be done about it. Politics in this city is plumbing such depths that nothing surprises one anymore. Not too long ago sycophantic messages used to be plastered all over the walls of public buildings, particularly, in areas of greater visibility. The concerned authority was generally successful in eliminating this abhorrent practice.

It had the public walls on the arterial roads cleaned up but in some areas still different variety of advertisers are permitted to display on them their artistic flair, generally, on political themes. With public walls mostly becoming unavailable the sneaky politicians have taken recourse to hoardings -- legal or illegal.

Apparently, their need for communication with the people, or even their adversaries, is so crushing that they have to take recourse to such methods regardless of the feeling of utter distaste that is aroused among the general public for them.

No wonder, therefore, one finds political personages brazenly smiling down on passers-by from huge hoardings installed at strategic sites like road-junctions with high-density traffic. That these could be and, in fact, are traffic hazards for the unwary road-users is, of course, of no concern to them. Reports have appeared from time to time about the resolve of the concerned authority to remove illegal hoardings. To what extent it has succeeded in its efforts is, however, not known.

The hoardings are not treated in the developed world like this. Billboards are banned in several countries. In the pre-development period, Rawalpindi was well-endowed with green assets. Now collectively, people and the administration should devise a strategy not to tarnish its beauty further. Among the many deliberate acts that disfigure the city are the outdoor ads, ugly graffiti on the walls and the unseemly hoardings, which now have come to display a new low that the state politics has sunk to.

Since the city fathers nurse an urge to add the "environment city"-tag to Pindi, they would do well to decide early to banish all the hoardings from the city confines, thus banishing from it, at least, one kind of pollutant.