Pakistan’s high walls

A person on a bike was refused entry at Cafe Flo, ostensibly because of his mode of travel

Recently, a cousin of mine visited Pakistan after a few decades. She was in Lahore for only a day and so and in the evening I took her around MM Alam Road, the street in front of my house. Seeing its current incarnation, she was surprised how the once sleepy residential street had become the hub of restaurant and retail activity in Lahore. We sauntered into a restaurant and had a decent meal, after which she was again surprised by how high the bill was. She noted that two decades ago, her mother earned that much in a month, and that too was considered ‘good pay’ back then.

In the last two decades, especially during the Musharraf era, the middle class in Pakistan has certainly burgeoned. With it, have avenues for spending all that extra purchasing power, from upscale housing societies, to state-of-the-art malls and a plethora of local and international restaurants. I distinctly remember that late into the 1990s one could count on one hand the upscale eateries in Lahore, but now the situation has dramatically transformed. Where there is certainly a laudable element in the fact that more people have become affluent in recent years, it is also clear that inequality has in fact increased. However, the most dramatic result of this increasing inequality has been our insensitivity and complete blindness towards people who are not as rich as the upper middle classes.

The other day I read about an incident at the upscale Cafe Flo in Karachi, where a person on a bike was refused entry, ostensibly because of his mode of travel. I won’t go into what the biker said, but even the Cafe’s official response has several problems and clearly shows how elitism and discrimination based on mode of travel, clothes and so on, has so seeped into our psyche that we don’t even realise it.

I don’t have space here to repost Cafe Flo’s explanation, but if you read it on their Facebook page, and replace ‘motorcycle’ with ‘car’ the whole post would seem ridiculous. Imagine driving in your dashing new Civic to the Cafe and then standing outside it, walking around, waiting for your friends, who come in their Corolla, and then going into the Cafe. No one will bat an eyelid, since its quite normal for one friend to come early and then wait for others. However, you are damned if you arrived on your bike! For then, you are surely a security threat! What is even more interesting is the fact that the person who profiled these gentlemen — a guard — was a working-class person himself and may have owned a bike. In his years at Cafe Flo, he had become so accustomed to looking down upon the less privileged that it didn’t even matter that perhaps he, too, belonged to the same cross section of society.

Now to the security threat: certainly, the city was Karachi and the country Pakistan, so security is paramount. However, did the guard or anyone else ever wonder what the best solution may be in such situations? Carry out a security check on the people you suspect. Wave your metal detector and pat them down till you are sure they are safe. A lot of restaurants do it, and all hotels do it, so there is nothing new or novel. I am sure the guard — being a guard — knew that that was the best way to ensure that the people going in are not a security threat. But then the guard could only think that if there was even a chance of these guys getting in. Their cardinal sin was coming on a bike and that predetermined their sentence — the guard was simply following the norm.

Cafe Flo’s incident aside, the same thing happened to some students of mine, a few years back, when they attempted to have some tea in a five-star hotel’s coffee shop. Thankfully, they had arrived in their car, but they had made the mistake of wearing crumpled shalwar kameezes. The coffee shop’s steward promptly approached them and told them that the ‘coffee shop’ did not serve coffee or tea. When I arrived and complained to the manager, who I incidentally knew, he told me that it was because they did not ‘look right.’ In the end, we were all served complimentary tea and sandwiches. However, I wonder what would have happened if I had not turned up.

The rise in the middle classes has made us forget those people who are not part of this dominant class. Since middle class neighbourhoods abound, and middle class purchasing power pumps up our consumerism, we simply don’t care about those who are not a part of it. A bit like DHA, we would rather like a high wall to be built to keep ‘them’ away — ‘them’ being the generic term for the strange creatures that do not have money. I just hope we wake up and smell the coffee (all puns intended), before it is too late.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 6^th, 2016.

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