Dead as a Dodo

OCTOBER 2004 - If there is one more tourism conference, I am personally going in to blow it up. Every farce has a limit and this one ran out years ago, but because lip service to causes lost long ago must be paid to maintain the charade, conferences come and go. Millions of rupees are squandered on calling the same people who croak out the same wonderful mush about measures that need to be put in place for tourism to grow. They sound like badly worn out vinyl records of yesteryear and the handful of people, forcibly invited to attend the boring monologues or sitting it out for the large meals that accompany such farces, suffer through hours of tedium, half asleep and brain dead for all purposes.

This year, since bloody World Tourism Day descended on us, the babus of tourism, the ones who have single-mindedly ensured that tourism surviving here has roughly just about the same chances as an ice-lolly in Sibi in June, wasted no time in rigging up a conference with the usual rent-a-crowd gaggle of nobodies. A 12-point agenda – no less was rustled up and it was full of sound and fury signifying nothing, to quote from a line that I recently wrote. The usual nonsense adorned each noble objective. More international conferences, talk shows, interaction with media. The kind of objectives, which are designed to fill pages and programmed to self-destruct as soon as the ink is half-dry. Throughout the day, at various places where tribes of babus can be found hanging from trees upside down, eating berries, sanctimonious speeches were delivered where ‘experts’ pinpointed what ails our tourism and what steps need to be taken. Perhaps the star of tourism is on the rise for what else can explain the presence of the lady minister for this national ailment on board the Presidential jet bobbing from country to country like the little rubber ducky I have in my bathtub. Perhaps, having seen the States and most of Europe in a flash, she now has a pretty good idea how tourism works. If God forbid, she has picked up any ideas, she can rest assured that the minute these are revealed, the cobwebs of bureaucracy woven by the spiders of the state, will instantly engulf them and quietly strangle them to death. Tourism may be dead and long buried in our country because we now blow up more bombs than firecrackers on Shab-e-Barat and that not only is there no booze for the thirsty tourists, there is none left for the thirsty locals too. The last three months has seen the lucrative boot legging operations grinding to a halt. Like the Ojri Camp, this latest disaster too is now a mystery. Wags say that there is a fallout over rates and commissions between all the law-enforcing agencies which look the other way when boot legging operations are going ahead full steam and palms are perpetually and generously greased to keep the gravy line moving. While absence or dearth of alcohol is a big damp squib on this country’s tourism, it is not the only reason why no one other than Richard Armitage wants to come here.

Let us for a moment forget the crap about foreign tourism and ‘valuable foreign exchange’ the phrase that one has grown old with. How can anything remain so valuable after so many decades is beyond me. Perhaps like the fate line, which has decreed that Pakistan is passing through a critical phase, this too is now part of the ideology of the country. Let us all understand that only a gora who’s had too much to drink, or smoked too much cannabis or completely lost his marbles, would want to come here and a few seconds later, get blasted to kingdom come, by a frantic-eyed Jihadi who is traveling to heaven, or so the holy travel agents have told him. The only goras who are coming here or will ever come here are forced to since their careers and work undertakings so demand. They will stay away a hundred miles if they can because they know fully well that this country’s government may be doing wonderful things day and night for its people, but when it comes to law and order, the government simply cracks up and becomes a shaking heap. They all understand that law here is lawless and order fled the land aeons ago. If I hear one more government factotum threateningly intoning that ‘miscreants will not be spared’ and ‘those responsible for this heinous crime will not be spared,’ I will end up doing what I threatened to do with the next tourism conference. For tourism, let’s please spare the foreign tourists. Oh yes, we have mountains. So have others. We have lakes. So have others. We have history. So have others. We have cuisine. So have others. We are so hospitable. So are kola bears but no one has to climb a tree and live with them. Let us abandon, if we can, this parrot-like litany of what a great country this is for tourists. It has some staggering vistas, but are they good enough to die for and that too when completely sober? Sorry, the answer is no.

The sorry fact is that even for the intrepid Pakistani wishing to get away for a few days up north in summer or down south in winter, there is precious little and priced way beyond most budgets. The rest houses that the British built long ago, survive simply because the contractors then were not looters. However, they are only for the babus and their friends and relations. Here and there, you can grease a dry palm and have a few rooms opened up. Most places, the rest houses remain closed, out of bounds for the lowlies. Where private commerce has moved, the philosophy of skinning the customer to the bone, is the standard operating procedure. Services are scanty and poor. The food is inedible. The bathrooms have families of cockroaches on a permanent holiday. Most places, there is no hot water, unless they can fell the last pine tree and get a fire going. The beds are infested with all the world’s creepy crawlies and the basic standards of hygiene are missing altogether. The view is still good provided you can negotiate the Everest size dumps of garbage. In the more ‘developed’ resorts – for that is what we insist on calling them, the prices are sky high, the facilities miraculously absent. Since it becomes ‘the season’ as soon as a wayward tourist of the local variety is spotted, it is quite right to hike up the rates and further lower the dismal services. Throughout the stay, most people simply end up complaining about nothing working other than the bill.

What can be done? Well, actually nothing. Can tourism be taken away from the babus? Not a chance. Can we develop a system of accountability and lay down standards for all those enterprising people who ‘develop’ tourist resorts? Not in a million years. Who could be that bothered? If enacted, who would ever force it? No one. Look at what we have done with Kalam, just as an example. It is a horror, the ‘Heaven Rose’ hovels, the garbage, the pollution, the poaching of fish, the destruction of the road, the absence of any sanitation and yet Kalam struggles on for life, a victim of the tourism developers gang of serial killers. Murree is dead and gone. Let’s not even mention it. This government has dealt it the final coup de grace – the New Murree, an investor’s haven, a visitor’s nightmare. Nathi, is fast eroding and already coming apart. It will be dead soon. The famed Galiyat are sewers full of cheap eating-places and fleecing locals. Elsewhere, in the south, things are even worse. Those places that survive only do so because they have not been ‘discovered’. All the officials of tourism should be thrown out of their offices and sent out for six months to take stock of what we have done with our natural assets. Then let’s have a conference.