Nothing very much to celebrate

The desire to come up with an annual end-of-term assessment has eluded me completely.

On December 31, when press photographers are all geared up to snap the very last sunset of the year, it is customary to see Pakistani newspaper editorials present a balance sheet of successes and failures, which inevitably confront our parlous relationship with wealth. Now, how can anybody — and this includes some of the freeloaders in the assemblies — not arrive at the conclusion that they find it difficult to detect any significant difference in the level of corruption, inefficiency and mismanagement from one year to the next? A writer, who might still be carrying a torch for a particular political tribe and have a party flag tucked away in the top drawer of his desk, might exude a triptych of tributes on his party’s achievements in the fields of finance, jurisprudence and social welfare.

This is something that the PPP was and still is inordinately fond of doing. Nawaz Sharif’s minions have, after giving the matter some thought, wisely given the issue a wide berth and avoided the exercise altogether, because they know they would be spreading a layer of achievement as thin as Marmite. This desire to come up with an annual end-of-term assessment has eluded me completely. Primarily because there is little point commenting on congenital regression in a country where there is no government and the rule of law is teetering on the edge of extinction. Now tell me, which other country can you think of where opportunists have felt the necessity to forge academic certificates to get into parliament for a five-year sinecure? The rabble rousers, who make a daily pilgrimage to the Karachi Press Club where they produce elegant arrangements of vowel sounds, which range from a fog horn off the coast of Norway to a Royal Bengal tiger calling for his dinner, might as well pack up and go home, because nobody is going to do anything to tackle their grievances.



Now I am one of those chaps who still cling to the belief that during the country’s golden age (1947-1969), Karachi was one of the best places in the world to live in. There were nightclubs and jazz clubs and lots of bars in Saddar. Tolerance was the order of the day and communities existed in total harmony. We celebrated the holy days of the Hindus and the Christians and I remember the few Jews, who had not yet migrated to Israel, worshipped in their synagogue, secure in the knowledge they would be left in peace. There was no terrorism, no bomb blasts, no religious persecution, and Saudi Arabia had not yet started to fight Iran on Pakistani soil. There was entertainment, the kind you see in a civilised society. Coffee houses harboured intellectuals of all shades of opinion and on many an occasion, I would hear a Trotskyite hold his own against a tide of dissent for hours on a single cup of Kenyan brew, while an existentialist would argue that life is absurd. And when revellers celebrated the New Year in a spirit of conviviality, one didn’t see gangs of youths from the religious parties closing down hotels and spoiling other peoples’ fun. The Karachi Goan Association building, which used to be a second home to the Goan community, no longer stages the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, like “The Mikado” and “Trial by Jury” that brought a bit of Victorian England to Karachi. And on weekends, gamblers gravitated to the race course where they lunched on biryani and quenched their thirst on iced beer. All that has gone forever. Some of the fun has been taken out of life.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2013.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.