COVER STORY
Of community and ownership…
“Living in England was wonderful civil and easy going.” Iggy Pop.
How would you feel if someone else is taking all your life decisions? Scratch that, our parents may already be doing that for us - brown people problems. But freedom to choose our lives, our interactions and our social structures is essential to all of us. It was so encouraging to see the municipal governments in the UK gathering people together and holding referendums on whether the people needed a new library or not, and what should its location be. We also have referendums here, but those are for way more sensitive reasons. When policy is being made via an inclusive process, the people get a sense of belonging and own up to public property.
Juxtapositions in this regard between our countries would serve quite some purpose here, except for humour. In the UK, the people have a voice, and they make sure it’s heard. While we also have a voice (it’s very loud), and we also make sure it’s heard (via anonymous, toxic accounts on twitter), we don’t muster that voice for community issues but only when we need to hate Malala as an act of national obligation. While the mayor of London may have been grilled for skyrocketing prices of housing in his jurisdiction, we rarely read the manifesto of a party before voting (some may think nihari and looks are also important, but so should knowing the mindset of the candidates be).
Trivia: Four countries make up the United Kingdom: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There have been talks of secession. Scotland has had referendums deciding its fate and the issue of Ireland has been the most recent one in the context of Brexit.
While they have these notice boards in every hamlet, carrying everything from courses to public service announcements, we use our academic notice boards only to shame the pupils who couldn’t make through a pointless exam. And then, there’s ownership: they would stock books in the iconic telephone booths that are now outdated, they’d still buy tickets before boarding the Manchester tram even if checking is done almost never, they would clean their houses and also the road that runs in front because they feel they have a responsibility towards everything.
Here, we steal street lights set up by municipal bodies (quoting from personal experience), don’t even pay the government taxes (please see direct and indirect taxes before countering this point), thrash our metro buses on every minor inconvenience (because why not?) and dump the garbage possibly everywhere that’s not our home. We put the blame and the onus of responsibility on everyone else: the state, the government, the US, the Jewish lobby, the leprechauns and Anabelle the doll - but are too naive to realise that we all fail while doing nothing and looking the other way around.
Of accessibility and reach…
“Just close your eyes and think of England.” Queen Victoria.
I have a problem with segregation. Before you work out the creepy undertones and judge me for promoting the intermixing of genders in our social gatherings, that is not what I am talking about (but to each his own, of course). There’s nothing more unjust than classifying access to certain places on the basis of social, financial, security and class structures. Sri Lanka took me by surprise by having none of the security paranoia that anyone would assume a country that has been engaged in a bloody civil war for 30 years would have. A city is supposed to belong to the people, not to structures and ideas. Remember when we used to play video games as children, and we would just explore the cities via our characters - the police department, the slaughterhouses, the municipal buildings and the warehouses? It’s almost like that in the small island. Thanks to how their cities are built, there are often not any hefty walls surrounding the structures. Manchester’s airport opens directly on the road, and Heathrow has the subway neatly catering to it. Here, visits to the airport are an incriminating business, you are just convinced you must be guilty for all the checking they put you through.
Trivia: Four countries make up the United Kingdom: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There have been talks of secession. Scotland has had referendums deciding its fate and the issue of Ireland has been the most recent one in the context of Brexit.
Trivia: The London Bridge might not be what you think it is. The often flouted
location that you see in movies and posters is the Tower Bridge, near the Shard - the tallest building in London. The actual London Bridge is an older structure near it, and is much sadder in its outlook.
The libraries, leisure and community centres merge with the greater picture of the cities, and welcome all without many questions asked. The canal and riversides are the public domain, no fancy housing society or elitist club has a monopoly over it. This sort of egalitarianism percolates throughout the society: everyone uses the public transport without having his reputation ruined, while sharing a seat with the people from the lower strata of society might give our elite something resembling a cardiac arrest (is this also why neither Lahore’s metro bus nor the Orange Line dares to touch the upscale areas?). This is not to say that there’s no segregation, whatsoever. There’s racism, of course, and there are financial considerations. But the difference is that the access to everything, even if limited initially, can be had via mobility that’s not very difficult to come by. It doesn’t depend on the blood (barring the royal family), and isn’t determined by whose grandfathers cosied up to the colonists a century ago to turn their fortunes around. And because there are no states within states or cities within cities, people hoard up to put a show of confidence in their abodes. They put graffiti on the walls, they gather in squares and crossroads to dance and chill, they walk and run and laugh in the parks, they eat and play - they live. They live in a place where they don’t desperately want to get out of. Also, when I talked about graffiti, I didn’t mean the red spit of chewing paan splattered around. Though you did come in close, Karachi!
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