Visual pollution

Karachi is slowly turning into the kind of metropolitan which suffocates the senses and traps its citizens into concrete madness. The number of billboards dotting the city is alarming. The Karachi sky is no longer liberating. Why am I being forced to read corny taglines and uninteresting advertisements? The grammar-Nazi in me cringes at most of these boards and the human in me dies a little every time a board screams that my chai can only be perfect with a particular tea whitener. This barrage of aggressive advertising is making our existence mundane and materialistic.

The Supreme Court (SC) recently ordered the removal of illegal billboards in Karachi. Apart from aesthetics, this is due to the accidents caused during the monsoon season. The SC recently stated that it is unhappy with the KMC’s pace in the removal of billboards from footpaths and green belts.

The problem with having so many billboards all over Karachi isn’t limited to accidents or aesthetics. It is an inherent problem of living in a big city that has barely any rules. As advertising hits the inhabitants of Karachi hard, you see all sorts of gimmicks to sell things. One recently saw advertisers putting up cardboard flowers and grass blades on green belts. Can you please let us enjoy the real flowers and grass? It’s sickening that there are no limits to the lengths companies go to convince their customers to buy their product. Sure, advertising is necessary. But does it have to overwhelm your senses and numb you?

Companies that can afford to crush any competition have now come up with a new strategy to combat human intelligence. Put 50 little boards all along the footpath so people are forced to see the ad repeatedly. What’s sad is, these advertising strategies probably succeed.

Billboards are effective. You look up at a giant structure in the sky, screaming that your skin needs a particular cream and you are forced to think about it. However, billboards can also be counter-productive. There is no sole structure in open spaces which you can actually look at while you drive. With the plethora of billboards, our gaze is forced to wander from one hoarding to the other, some louder than others. There is no coherent building of want in this scenario. It’s just new images, new words, new slogans, new jingles. We have all seen the ‘To-Lets’. There are ways to advertise, but I am not comfortable with companies thinking they can buy bits of my city sky whenever they want. We need to get a grip on this and at the very least, be critical of these concrete, obnoxious structures before they dull our active brains into mindless wanting.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2015.