Karachi — the land where nothing works

Pakistan has lawlessness, a growing population, creeping inflation, water shortages and electricity breakdowns.

In case anybody noticed that I hadn’t written last week and wondered if it was because I might have been spirited off to some exotic location, or had been bitten by the tsetse fly, an explanation is in order. It was because the utilities had conspired with almost military precision on the same day to ensure that this writer should be given a taste of what life must have been like before the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps in the Stone Age, so that he would be in a better position to appreciate what people living in Buffer Zone and Orangi are going through. I must say they had done a pretty good job. The only reason that prevented me from adding my name to the list of disgruntled citizens who are planning to head for Native Jetty so they can throw themselves off the bridge, is a firm belief that there is such a thing as being jinxed, and the hope that this total functional meltdown was just a one-off thing and is not likely to be repeated.

But it was really bad while it lasted. The script looked as if it had been written by a disciple of Franz Kafka with all the absurd trimmings of an awkward concept. It started off with the electricity being shut off. The gas generator unilaterally decided it was in no mood to cooperate and after coughing and spluttering a few times gave up the ghost. The electricity came back two hours later but the wild oscillations of the repeated voltage fluctuations damaged the UPS and a number of appliances in the house, including the fridge and the computer. There was an explosion, and I wondered if the Lyari gangs had decided to settle their grievances on my lawn. It transpired that four saver bulbs had exploded. I couldn’t dial the KESC helpline on 118 because that very morning the landline decided to malfunction. While contemplating which of the utility heads should be promoted to top position in my hit-list, my night watchman brought me the glad tidings that the DHA hadn’t supplied any water for the last 10 days, and that the driver of the water tanker would once again be the Rotarian of the Week.

And so it came to pass that I sat on the lawn of my residence that evening last week, helpless, drained and exhausted, gazing at the grass stiff and brown from lack of moisture and listening to the quiet friction of foliage. I stretched my stiff limbs under a thin sun and nodded off. In the far distance, the cold romance of clouds had already iced into position, and the wind was fresh, humid and cool. But it still wouldn’t rain. It was the black bird chirping in the palm tree that woke me up, and the first thought that entered my mind was: Why does everybody appear to be hell-bent on destroying this city? Why is there a conspiracy to ensure that nothing works?

Take for instance the KESC. If one does manage to get through to the helpline, after wading through the language barrier and pressing the right button, the voice at the other end is invariably polite, focused and friendly. Details are meticulously recorded, a complaint number is registered and one can almost hear a murmur of sympathy at the other end. But, the fact is, nothing happens. The only thing that changes is the complaint number each time a complaint is registered. If a caller is alert he will notice that the warm welcome is precluded by a terse message in two languages about how the worker’s strike is inhibiting employees from carrying out their duties. This is something that has been going on for the last so many months. It is a ‘right royal mess’. But before anybody starts calling for the public disemboweling of the KESC chairman, he must remember that the utility is, after all, a private limited company with its own rules of procedure and is not a department of the government. It is operating in a city of inept, lethargic and corrupt officials governed by a beguiling combination of lonely gullibility and cunning ambition. The laid-off workers have apparently destroyed the maintenance trucks with the sliding ladders and are also being accused of stealing wire, which causes irregular voltage fluctuation, and operating small parallel maintenance units where they are charging inflated fees for fixing a fault. The point is: Nobody is doing anything about it, neither the president nor the prime minister. The Sindh government doesn’t want to get involved because it has now got embroiled in a fresh controversy centering on replacing the local government system by the commissioner system — this has already ruffled quite a few feathers and has now become an issue for the courts to handle.

A number of years ago when Mr Lee Kwan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore, made a stopover at Karachi airport en route to a European destination, a local journalist asked him in the VIP lounge what the secret was for becoming an Asian Tiger. “It’s really quite simple,” Mr Lee said, “Make sure you have twenty-four hours electricity. Everything else will follow.” Instead, we have lawlessness, a growing population, creeping inflation, water shortages, electricity breakdowns, the failure of the government to punish Stone Age customs which have been outlawed but are being defiantly practiced, the gradual erosion of a fragile, educated middle class, political boorishness, religious intolerance, the machismo that is a natural corollary of military rule and the increasing influence of paramilitary authority, with its own hierarchy and pecking order. The future in Pakistan looks pretty grim.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 21^st, 2011.