Looking up the sky

It took nearly twenty-five years — and a first-time female chief minister — to recognise that governance is not only about managing risks, but also about restoring colour, connection and a little joy to public life. Basant arrived like a rare breeze of fresh air for Lahoris who have watched their city decay from a cultural capital into unplanned housing societies, shrinking green cover, traffic chaos, informal settlements and recurring flash floods.

For the first time, Gen Z appeared genuinely taken aback — confronted by something unfolding outside their usual fortresses: screens. Many paused, momentarily unsure, as they gulped down the sudden shift from reel to real. It was the millennials — those who grew up in the 1990s — who stepped forward, guiding newer generations through a celebration they had only heard about. What struck me most was that even though the songs were over twenty-five years old, they felt startlingly alive, as if time had resumed from exactly where it had once been paused.

One of the quiet joys of Basant was the revival of language itself. A whole vocabulary resurfaced in the air — gudda, patang, machar, pari, para, manja, charkhi, pinna. Words that had survived only in memory were suddenly spoken aloud again. A bridge formed between generations, and this time Gen Z was listening — intently, curiously, eagerly.

Abrar-ul-Haq's Kuriyan Lahore Diyan and Fariha Pervaiz's Dil Hoya Bo Kata became relevant once more. Smiles appeared, sometimes hesitant, sometimes disbelieving, as people absorbed the possibility of joy amid uncertainty.

Basant adds festivity not through spectacle alone, but by transforming the ordinary into the communal. Rooftops turn into gathering spaces. The sky becomes a shared canvas. In a city exhausted by repetition, Basant reintroduces joy as a public experience, reminding us that celebration is not an escape from life, but an essential part of living it.

The Chief Minister of Punjab deserves applause for recognising a long-ignored pain point of citizens — the absence of festivity in everyday urban life, despite acknowledged security risks.

A bank officer holding a kite string admitted, half-smiling, "I spend ten hours a day staring at screens and numbers. Some days I don't even remember what the sky looked like." He was not complaining. He was simply stating a fact of modern urban existence.

This quiet exhaustion now defines our cities. And this is precisely why allowing Basant to return is not a sentimental indulgence, but a timely and thoughtful decision by Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz.

For years, Basant has been debated only through the language of restriction and fear. What rarely enters the conversation is what its absence did to people.

A schoolteacher recalls how February once felt different. "Children would come to class restless but happy," she says. "They talked about rooftops, kites, food and colours. After the ban, February became just another month of exams and pressure."

At its core, Basant is a pause — an interruption in relentless routine. For people worn down by everydayness, it offers what psychologists describe as cognitive relief.

A young software developer from Gen Z recently confessed that she had never truly experienced Basant. "I've seen it on YouTube," she said, "but I've never felt it." For her generation — raised in algorithm-driven worlds — Basant will not be nostalgic. It will be a discovery. Real colours instead of filtered ones. Real faces instead of profile pictures. Real laughter instead of reaction buttons.

For older Lahoris, the festival unlocks memory. One elderly man recalls flying kites with his father on a crowded roof. "We didn't have much," he says, "but those days felt rich." When Basant disappeared, something else vanished with it; a shared emotional vocabulary that once connected generations.

Critics often argue that joy must wait until all problems are solved. But societies living under prolonged stress do not heal through austerity alone.

In a time when even looking up at the sky feels like a luxury, Basant offers permission to pause. Sometimes, leadership is not only about managing risk. Sometimes, it is about recognising when a society needs colour, connection — and a little joy — to survive.