City of lights... only during the day

We complain about being a poor country that does not have enough resources, yet we have enough energy to waste.

Not once, not twice... but a dozen times I have witnessed the city of Karachi being true to its name. The City of Lights, as it was called, has of late seen more than its fair share of darkness. But wait... there have been instances of the city being alight, trying hard to regain its past glory. It’s quite a pity that that has happened only during the day when it is least needed.

At 5 pm at the peak of summer, I was rather upset to see all the street lights near Karsaz and on Sharah-e-Faisal shining merrily as far as the eye could see. With the sun shining brightly and the sky clear, it seemed as if the lights were trying hard to give the sunlight some competition but were failing miserably.  And ironically, these same lights are often not working at night, when they’re most required. So at say 10 pm you can pretty much expect these lights to not be working. It seems as if the department responsible for this is following a different time zone altogether — Canada’s perhaps?

The masses are constantly encouraged to switch off extra lights and save electricity in every way they can to help conserve our resources for the future. Public service messages instruct us to set the temperature of our air conditioners at 26 degrees Celsius because they consume less energy then. We are told to ensure that all power switches from microwaves to cell-phones are switched off when not in use.

Why?

So the government can waste all of it only because the people responsible are too lazy?

We complain about being a poor country and not having enough resources, we complain about the incessant load shedding, the KESC complains about not being supplied with enough gas, and yet we have enough energy to waste.

Instances such as these make me feel that the problem does not lie with the lack of resources but the lack of rational and responsible people to handle the resources that this country has been blessed with. If we continue wasting away what we have because of negligence and irresponsibility, then our future will be just like what these street lights are at night — dark.