Rickshaws that talk

There’s a whole new world of continuing education plying roads, especially with what’s written on backs of rickshaws.

When you travel, you learn. When you are stuck in traffic, you learn even more. Depending upon which VIP is gracing the roads, who is demanding what, and how many trees are being sacrificed at the altar of which road, your stuck-in-traffic time can increase to a couple of hours or more. So you might as well spend the time constructively. There’s a whole new world of continuing education plying the roads and much of this has to do especially with what’s written on the backs of our rickshaws.

Consider this small journey — or a very long one, depending on one’s point of view — from Lahore’s Jail Road to Liberty.

Here I am on Jail Road, stuck as stuck could be. A rickshaw edges forward, and it has a lesson written down on it. The coaching begins. The first lesson is actually a heady mix of foreign policy guidelines and tenets of our national ideology. It educates me about who our real enemy is and how we should tackle it, and on what lofty ideal our national ideology is based. Yes, yes, we have read enough of it in our textbooks, and it’s the same old ideology. But now it’s on wheels. And just because it is mobile and can stealthily land near you, it can be too close for comfort: bumper to bumper, side mirror to side mirror. As my car crawls, one rickshaw after another repeats the lesson — a very handy and effective mobile education system.

Half an hour has passed and now I am on Main Boulevard. Whether I am ready for it or not, it is time for another class. This one teaches me who is a good Muslim; who can be a good Muslim; who deserves to die for saying what; and what mode of death should I strive for if I want to go straight to Heaven. After undergoing the drilling of the second lesson, which has continued for an hour, I now reach the Liberty roundabout. As I am wedged amid countless automobiles, I look around. By now I know the pattern, and have also acquired a taste for the lessons on three wheels.

I am not disappointed. A rickshaw creeps up on me. Since my intellectual and spiritual development has already been taken care this one focuses on my physical well-being. It divulges some important facts. I learn that the answer to all my blocked heart arteries that I have or will ever have is simple: ajwa khajoor. I don’t need to go for any by-pass, or see any heart specialist for the rest of my life. All I have to do is eat ajwa khajoor plus its seed, and my coronary arteries will become/remain unclogged and free flowing, unlike the traffic in Lahore. We don’t need a hospital for heart ailments. We just need to grow more ajwa khajoor trees.

As if to save me from a complex neuronal activity, a Suzuki Bolan manoeuvres itself and somehow manages to halt in front of me. It has its own piece of instruction written on it. It says to me: “Follow me I am your dream.”

If rickshaws with academic pretensions decide to educate me about foreign policy, national ideology, divine designs, and health sciences, then a Suzuki van can be excused for being presumptuous enough to think that it’s my dream. Besides, you never know. After all, dreams come in all shapes, sizes and models. I intend to follow it. If I manage to inch forward, that is.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2012.