Fogged & Smogged

JANUARY 2003 - Lahoris are going round with doleful faces and puzzled looks watching helplessly as slow, swirling clouds of fog start rolling in every evening from God knows where and before long have everything looking pale and spooky. This has been going on for many, many days now and clearly the Lahoris are at the end of their tether, although it is another matter that they can’t quite see where it is. Airline schedules, not the most accurate thing in Pakistan at the best of times, have been shot to pieces and the situation is such that the PIA Enquiries have gone into silent mode. Trains recently resurrected by Lt.Gen. Qazi are faring no better and no one can quite remember when was the last time they saw a train steaming into Lahore – or steaming out for that matter. As for road travel, it is a question of finding a very small needle in a very large haystack were you to opt for that mode of travel. In an area that seems to stretch for about a 100 kilometers, though I can’t swear it is on all sides, thick fog comes rolling in even before the sun goes down. Actually it is now foolish to mention anything about the sun going down, since it hasn’t been seen to rise for many days now. There are rumours that the FBI have nabbed the sun suspecting it of Al Qaeda connections and are currently fingerprinting it in one of their safe houses in Virginia. On top of it all, there is a beastly wind that’s been blowing right across the Punjab, NWFP and Balochistan plunging temperatures to below freezing and sending the population fleeing indoors. There seems to be no let up in sight. Clearly the gods are not very happy with Mr. Jamali’s government.

But why are the Lahoris so puzzled? It’s not the first time they have been fogged out and winters more or less now means this light gray mist descending over the landscape. The way they are complaining clearly indicates that they attach no blame to themselves for this sorry state of affairs, which explains the long faces in evidence. The fact is that this fog or whatever you may wish to call it is very much the creation of the people of Lahore, the capital of the Punjab. Throughout the year, all Lahoris, irrespective of caste, colour, creed or amount of bank balances, play a major role in spreading filth across every neighbourhood. The system is well tuned and now firmly entrenched across all strata of society. Diligent cleaning and sweeping of homes, shops, schools, business establishments is carried out daily and the refuse comprising decaying fruit, packages, half eaten food, left over bread, assorted items of daily use, soap wrappers, papers, plastic bags, heaps and mounds of dust and other equally inspiring items are swept out of various establishments and dumped on the nearest street corner. My refuse lands at your door, yours lands at mine and so on till all the streets look like various garbage dumps where the collection rots and decays and spills around. If it rains, and mostly it does not, the collection simply gets washed down to other people’s doorsteps while other people’s garbage gets washed down to yours. Some of it finds its way into gutters, which absorb them unless they are already choked, in which case all of it further spills out into more streets. As and when committee trucks materialize – and they don’t make a habit of it as we all know, this refuse is then transferred to another dump, larger than yours and mine, which is usually just beyond the city limits. There it festers and spreads whichever way the winds take it and since we are so good at waste disposal, a popular way is to simply set it on fire. The resultant smoke spirals its way into the heavens and thereby creates the fog, mist or spooky clouds that have Lahoris in a bind. Personally speaking, when you send shit up it comes down, sooner or later.

Coupled to this is the large volume of smoke belching – emitting is too polite a word, vehicles that plague every road in Pakistan. Diligent cops will fine you in Lahore if you so much as touch a divider line, but they are unable to spot or stop any vehicles, which are throwing out clouds of black smoke as they splutter about. In a way of course it is understandable because these vehicles throw out so much smoke fumes that most cops would need infrared gadgets to spot them. In any event there seems to be great generosity when it comes to catching and fining the offending vehicles. Were the traffic cops able to do their basic duty, half of Lahore’s pollution would come down, but these are foolish suggestions and best left unsaid. Large scale cutting of trees has gone on irrespective of the few voices that have been raised in protest from time to time. Tree cutting and chopping is a preferred life style with Pakistanis. There is something about trees standing upright, their green canopies spreading about that gets the goat of most Pakistanis. Their first thought is to chop it down, the more brutally, the better. If they don’t have a saw, they’ll borrow one; if they don’t have an axe, they’ll steal one, but chop they have to. It is almost a kind of psychotic reaction and while they don’t foam at the mouth or have their eyes rolling, they attack the trees in a manner that would win a standing ovation from Jack the Ripper. As Lahore has been robbed of its green forest, the city climate has taken a severe mauling so much so that there is little resemblance to what it used to be like. Add to this the enormous amount of people whose multiplication leaves bunnies gasping for breath and you have the makings of an ecological disaster. The smog that smothers Lahore and its environs is not God punishing us for electing the MMA, but all the filth we have been sending up which simply remains suspended throughout the year. In winter, when the temperatures come plunging down and the rains remain absent, the dust simply becomes smog. QED.

Of course while chaos abounds all around, the EPA or whatever it is called, has been exceptionally absent. Not that it is in much evidence throughout the year but this time there hasn’t even been a meow out of it. My theory is that they all got lost in the smog and are wandering around hopelessly deranged in muddy fields around Kasur, where some of them might even vanish in the marshes. It has been a disaster setting up the EPA and God alone knows how much of our taxes they have gobbled up over the years, but either they have a permanent speech disorder or have lost all vision. It is nevertheless amazing that they continue to exist in some blighted form but are totally helpless to even begin to take the first steps towards fighting this menace which is now as regular an event as Basant. As always we have made sure our priorities are screwed on the wrong side. Instead of blowing time and money on more and more Food Streets, for example, precious little has been done to protect the people of Lahore and their failing health. Cosmetic and vain projects win the day, but things of substance or far reaching importance fall by the wayside. Stepping out of Lahore on any evening is like a page out of the Hounds of Baskervilles. You can even hear the hound coming.