Celebrating the deluge

More than likely, you have attended one or more weddings in this proverbially festive season. Or you may be set to attend one during the next few days. And if the wedding was within your close family, the usually week-long whirl of it is sure to have left you groggy – with fun?

Weddings in the middle and the upper middle class are always a spectacle, bearing gifts of many familial entanglements. Destination weddings, with their cinematic settings, belong in a different category and like other weddings were greatly subverted by two years of the pandemic pause.

My perspective here is restricted to Karachi, with its multiple flavours. I suspect that the lifestyles of the Punjabi aristocracy, the crème de la crème of Pakistani society, would have their own expressions of glare and glory but the scene in Karachi is fairly opulent and it has touched, commercially and socially, a fairly large number of people. I am told that some high-end restaurants are fully booked for a number of weeks. Workers of tailoring shops have sleepless nights.

Talking of weddings, I want to underline two specific aspects. One is the higher than usual participation of family members who live abroad. Though the threat of Covid lingers, in particular consequence of the ongoing Chinese experience, there is this sudden sense of liberation in international travel. An added incentive is the decline and fall of the Pakistani rupee. In short, you run into more Pakistani expatriates visiting their home country.

Another aspect of getting together at wedding receptions is the opportunity to share thoughts about the state of the nation and the temptation, in a sense, to cry on someone’s shoulder. Your concerns and your moods do not change when you wear very expensive clothes and step into a perfumed environment of song and dance. You cannot ignore the reality of fear and disorder that lurks out there in the dreary streets of the city’s sprawling neighbourhoods.

Frankly, this is not the occasion to do any justice to the alarming situation that is developing in Karachi in the context of law and order and crime. The social fabric is in tatters. The media is not paying much attention to this process of disintegration but the rich in Karachi can feel it in their bones. I had thought of picking out some incidents of this week, but they too are hard to handle.

There are three separate faces of the worsening Karachi situation. There are reports almost on a daily basis of citizens being looted at gunpoint and being shot at when they resist, resulting in fatalities. One is advised to never challenge the muggers. One media clip this week showed how customers sitting out at an eatery in Gulshan-e-Iqbal meekly handed over their wallets and phones to two muggers, one of them carrying an automatic weapon. It seemed such a run-of-the-mill exercise.

Then, there are regular incidents of police encounters in suspicious circumstances that often lead to serious injuries or even deaths. Take the example of this headline on Wednesday: “Trigger-happy policemen shoot ‘innocent’ youth to death”. But the most disturbing violence that has been repeated in Karachi is how the mob literally lynches suspected robbers. There was one incident recently when two employees of a telecommunication company were lynched by a mob in Machhar Colony when someone mistakenly accused them of trying to kidnap a child.

There is a message here that our rulers are not able to comprehend. The rise in militancy, resulting in acts of terror, can easily prompt a meeting, say, of the high-powered National Security Committee (NSC) but the phenomenon of the instant formation of mobs that are ready to kill in anger in a total loss of reason seems beyond the intellectual grasp of those who occasionally assemble in the PM’s Office.

But the rich – those who have amassed wealth mostly through unfair means – do have an inkling of what is happening. They are fearful of where we are headed. Meanwhile, they are trying to find an escape in conspicuous consumption. The current wedding season, in cases where fortunes are invested in a display of pomp and show, is one manifestation of the elite’s confused state of mind.

As I have said, a large number of expatriates are visiting Pakistan, mainly to attend wedding functions. Their presence underlines another important trend that is increasingly influencing the Pakistani mind. It is the desire to leave this place and find refuge in some foreign country. This is a serious matter. I know some well-to-do families desperate for an exit route to a safe haven. Pakistan has become a great country to go away from.

A recent PIDE survey finds that 37 per cent of the total population would like to leave the country if they are given an opportunity to do so. This is an astounding proportion. Next time you see a gathering of any kind, just think that more than one-third of them are already emotionally rootless in this country. According to the survey, the number of those who want to leave the country has increased with increasing incomes and higher standards of education.

I am conscious of the fact that this column is appearing on the first day of 2023 and a note of cheer about a Happy New Year would be in order. But the more I interact with people who appear to be well-informed and genuinely concerned about the current state of affairs, the more I tend to lose hope about what 2023 would bring for us.

For that matter, a sense of fatality is taking us into its grip because we have no control over what happens to us. All we can do is continue to watch this phenomenal contradiction between a bejeweled show of affluence and the mounting deprivations of the common people. Yet, the pity of it is the level of depression that you find among those who are in a celebratory mode.

The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail .com