Funerals & load-shedding

Attending a funeral and offering condolences to someone over the death of one of their family members or relatives demise is part of Pakistani culture. But the commemoration of death is practiced more forcefully in the rural areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P). In case of a person’s demise in a rural family, the family members inform people of both nearby and faraway villages through the local mosque’s loudspeaker.

But now, people feel stressed when such a demise occurs in their homes due to huge power cuts in rural areas. The power cuts not only cause food and water shortages, but also suspends all communication means in various areas of the country, especially in rural locations. General observation reveals that the duration of power cuts in rural areas extends between 16 and 20 hours. The few hours of power that people are given can be interspersed during any time of the day, which makes it all the more difficult to plan activities.

Now, when villagers head to local mosques to make loudspeaker announcements regarding a funeral, they are encountered by load-shedding. Announcements are not made in due time and a centuries-old culture is being chipped away because of a modern crisis. Some people have now installed loudspeakers on pick-up vehicles and cars to make announcements of funerals in nearby areas, in a desperate attempt to preserve this culture.

Villagers now feel that with the increase in power cuts, the attendance of people at funeral services and their presence in graveyards during burials is decreasing with time. In K-P’s rural areas, when there are fewer people at a funeral, the less respectable the demised person is thought to be. Thanks to unscheduled and prolonged outages of electricity, both well-known and not-so-well-known people are now equal in death, making for a laughable irony.

The people of K-P, who are seen observing strikes, staging protests and demonstrations, burning tyres, and chanting slogans against power outages, aren’t just doing this to battle modern difficulties, but also to salvage their culture. If new energy sources are not sought, there is a very real threat that the difficulties of the modern era may take us back into the darkness of the past.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2015.