Shandana Minhas October 8, 1998

Tags: Children , Media , Poverty , Society

Shandana Minhas is a featured columnist on Chowk. She also teaches literature at a private school in Karachi, so she can earn enough money to support her filthy free lancing habit.

rel="tag" href="/tag/death">death
tolls and civic breakdowns. Instead we smile wryly (never really
expected it to be any better), maybe even sigh, and go back to doing
what we need to do to survive without losing a significant percentage of
our sanity.

For a Karachi dweller life is like a particularly bumpy ride down a
pitted, pot-holed street (lets say Sharah-e-Faisal). You see the ditches,
you want to avoid them but the hands clutching the steering wheel are
not your own. The interesting thing about these mysterious hands is that
they do not appear to be attached to anything. The body is in
Islamabad..in denial..but the right one would be the first to deny the
left even exists. Attempt to wrestle their grip from the wheel and
you'll find yourself being bonked on the head with a hefty jail term,
and unlike Zardari you won't get an AC. After years of studious practice
we Karachiites have learned to just sit back, buckle-up, and talk to the
others in the back seat about fruit and other things that don't bite
back. In the meantime the city continues to dance in the arms of
invisible forces, crushing innumerable civilian toes along the way.

People who have undergone a severe trauma often react by distancing
themselves from the event itself, or their identity. They fragment,
create another personality better equipped to deal with the emotional
fall-out. Hence Karachi for many of its inhabitants has become a totally
separate entity from the streets where they live and breed. It's in
orbit around an imaginary sun we cannot see and it has absolutely
nothing to do with the garbage we dump or the lights we break. We are
numb to its entirety, we cannot absorb its vastness any more than we can
drink its water and not die of cholera. Hence it is easy for us to
ignore what happens to people "the other side of the bridge"; to look
right through leprosy scarred beggars at intersections, to think
everyone who asks for our help is a fraud. Perhaps a little voice in our
heads is screaming "no no this is not fair this is not right" as we turn
the other cheek to yet another pimple on the face of creation, but it's
okay because that voice doesn't belong to us, it cant possible be
talking about us. I like to call this phenomena "epiphany with
ostrich".

So communities in Karachi (as in most other large industrial cities in
the world) are divided into colorful hot air balloons on the basis of
ethnicity and income; suspended hundreds of meters above the real world
waiting for the righteous winds to come and blow the bad guys away. To
this end many segments of society are undergoing a religious rebirth of
sorts (pop stars turning into tableeghi jamaatis etc). But since even
religion has disintegrated to the point where it has innumerable sects
culture as a whole remains a motley collection of one messiahs do's and
another messiahs donts. Because we are so fragmented we are unable to
make that one united push that will hopefully rid us of those nasty
things some of us call problems and others call government servants. We
will continue to be stuck in this rut till we realize we all have a lot
more in common than four limbs and bad hair (notice I don't say
functioning brains?). This is probably not going to happen anytime soon
If the present government has anything to do with it (and the three
before that): so do leave a note for your great great grandchildren
telling them how happy you are they've stopped shooting at the
neighbors.

It is said you cannot throw a stone in Karachi without hitting a cynic
(conversely you probably cannot throw a cynic anywhere in Karachi
without hitting bedrock or cement). There is a very simple reason for
this. Natural selection dictates that the strong survive and, I'm not
sure what the statistics are; its probably harder to kill a cynic than
it is to kill an optimist. Cynics expect the worst; they thrive on
chaos and destruction as it fulfills their predictions. They grow
embittered and thick skinned, frown a lot, little children run screaming
when they enter the room. But cynics by definition are prepared to take
life's hard knocks. Optimists take things personally, hence are more
prone to do silly things like join the CPLC and fight for what is right
(just like Captain Planet only they don't all wear their undies on the
outside). And everyone knows that doesn't do any good, in fact
sometimes it can even prove fatal.

So many in my generation (1965-1975) are not surprised when we walk
into Copper Kettle and catch glimpses of embittered twelve year olds
with sardonic leers on their faces, even if that is more frightening
than anything Freddie Krueger could have dreamt up. We go to thematic
parties along the lines of MTV's "the grind" and discuss "the
inevitability of the Islamic revolution in poverty stricken nations"
with people who have just come back from college in the states. We have
long since given up resisting to the pressure of "you know standing in
line wont work - …why don't you just jump it" and are passionate in our
belief that there is nothing left here for our children to be and anyone
who believes the only way to go is up has obviously been smoking
something. We don't get much representation in the media because we
don't think most people can read and those who can don't care.

The generation before us had their "seasons in the sun", the generation
after has grown up with these conditions and adapted to them with great
alacrity (scenario fits right into their video games). Those of us who
are indeed suffering from "compassion fatigue" are content with what we
have and fairly conversant with reality. Those of us who aren't are
sitting here waiting for the little men In white coats to come and take
us away..but they'll all been very busy with the bomb lately.