Dead Ducks

FEBRUARY 2004 - As most of Pakistan descends on Lahore this week to celebrate Basant and the city fluctuates between bans on kite manufacturing and flying, all roads will lead to the walled city. This part of Lahore, impossible to navigate through most hours of the day or night, will play host to thousands of revelry-starved people. Hotels are already over-booked and rates have gone through the roof. Elsewhere, all possible places where people can hole up for a night or two have been taken up. The city is all dolled up and ready to party.

Lahore is widely regarded, as the cultural capital of the country, though how much culture actually exists here or indeed flourishes, is a very debatable issue. Islamabad has been dead from the day it was artificially created. There is as much culture there as in a homegrown turnip. Karachi has sunk in its own mire. Buffeted by so much social turmoil and stripped of its position the day a field marshal (of sorts) decided to abandon this port city as the country’s rightful capital, it is barely functional. In pockets, there is vibrant life and while many still think Lahore can’t hold a candle to Karachi, the city’s problems are now at a stage where solutions are beyond human ingenuity. Lahore is by default, if nothing else, the only cultural oasis. The rest of what passes for urban life is not worth mentioning. Rutted and pock marked roads, festering sewers and gutters, unmanageable amounts of garbage and muck, millions floating around in a daze, complete breakdown of laws or basic regulations and in between a hundred more cancers – these are the legacies of what we still insist on calling cities and towns. The villages, which is where most Pakistanis eke out a sterile existence far below the poverty line– well the less said about them, the better. They have been long forgotten by all of us who fight and swear their way through the daily urban grind and have no time or patience for anyone or anything.

Lahore’s brilliant planners have hit upon the novel idea that traffic solutions begin and end with underpasses. This is the same virus which infected the Sharifs to commit the folly of a useless and forlorn motorway that takes you from nowhere to nowhere. They also widened some of the city’s main thoroughfares to ensure trouble-free traffic. This was a cockeyed plan and therefore got the green light. Since no one ever questions people who issue orders in Pakistan, this current epidemic of underpasses is going to stay. It will eventually be the epitaph of the province’s Chief Minister just as the devolution plan was that of a general whose name I temporarily forget. Predictably by that time, far too much water would have flowed under far too many bridges and no one will be around to pick up the scum of another public folly committed by leaders who have as much vision as a block of wood in the dark. What this city needs is a mass transit solution, but then doesn’t the Ravi need some check on the effluents we dump into it by day and night? The fact is that public policy is at complete variance with public needs. What is doled out, is nonsense.

There is, every now and then, some grand talk about building a cable car to ferry people across the river to the Baradari. This elegant, old building, once the sojourn of emperors, was a few years back entrusted into the foolish hands of the Lahore Development Authority which blew a packet and turned a perfectly wonderful piece of our heritage into a cement monstrosity. Now the Baradari sits like an ugly toad surrounded by a river that looks and smells like the large sewage pit. That’s what it actually is. No sign of life can be found here. Over 200 factories ensure that the poison they pour into the river day and night effectively kills all living things, cockroaches included, even though they are reputed to be amongst the last great survivors of mankind’s unhappy stay on this planet. Since common sense bid goodbye to all those who are destined to rule us, hopefully the architects of this cable car folly will equip each car with oxygen masks. It is generally believed that without them, crossing Lahore’s pride and joy, the river Ravi, is more hazardous than the waste materials it is choked with. ‘Crossing the Ravi can be injurious to your health,’ should be the slogan for the cable car.

It is not surprising that instead of wasting time and money with such stupid projects as a cable car over a cesspool, there should be a massive clean up operation of this river and an across the board closure of all those factories which have killed the river. The necessary laws are there, rotting in dust-covered manuals – there is no shortage of good laws in the country, but there is no one to implement them. The rulers have no reason to and the people have no will to. And that goes for the rest of the city, the cultural bright spot that draws millions, particularly when Basant is in the air. Instead of putting up ceremonial gates, arches, buntings, banners, lighting and other equally colourful but pointless decorations, there should be a massive clean up drive, be it to prepare the city for Basant or for restoring to Lahore, a bit of the glory that was this city. We think nothing of feasting in the Lahore Fort or partying in the decrepit Shalimar Gardens, but we are oblivious to other parts of the same legacy that we swear by given half the chance. Recent visitors to Jahangir’s Tomb were appalled at the state it is in. We were in school when they started ‘renovating’ it. They are still at it and from the looks of their dazzling progress another few hundred years cannot be ruled out. What’s keeping them from completing their job? And when you are in the Badshahi Mosque, avoid looking down its sides. Not a pretty sight. I wonder how soon we will be able to stage a collapse of this building? I can’t remember ever seeing the domes glistening white unless the monsoons are in full swing. The rest of the year, they are swathed in thick layers of dust, as is most of Lahore.

No the fact is that Lahore is choking in its own pollution. It is hard to determine which is dirtier, wrote somebody last week. Karachi or Lahore? I would quickly add Gujranwala to it and then add the rest of the towns and cities that make our urban soaking pit. So what can be done? Most would say, precious little. Like the traffic which now holds the cities in a snare (the President created Karachi’s longest and biggest traffic disaster on Thursday), people are trapped in a gridlock which gets bigger and bigger by the hour. There are thousands of vehicles jockeying for position and the traffic ‘system’ or its hapless executors, the policeman are totally lost in dealing with this daily misery. No one can get from anywhere to anywhere without losing sanity. Other societies pay the price of progress but we are paying the price without any progress. The irony is that the city can be cleaned up, the pollution that keeps us sick all year long, can be curtailed, the flows regulated, but where is the vision and where is the will and where is that band of enlightened men who will think not of today but farther down the road? The answer is nowhere. We are dead ducks. Happy Basant.