Like every city, Lahore has a story. Not the textbook story that is learned and unlearned in academic drudgery every year, but a story of how Lahore got to where it is now --one that spans Pak Tea House to ‘selfie’ cafes.

Lahore’s multiplicity in terms of cultures isn’t as broad as that of Karachi or Islamabad, and anyone who tries to convince me so has failed. Lahore is not a city of many cultures. Lahore’s Punjabi-ness is one of the reasons why migrants from other parts of the province so comfortably allow their metamorphosis from villagers into city-people-with-rural-ties. The more I see Lahore from a distance, the more I see people desperately trying to break off with these ties.

This time around, the city of my birth and, well, nearly thirty years that followed it, seemed drifting away from where I had left it. Something I notice every time I visit Lahore, following a lapse of a few months. "The city isn’t the same anymore!" And, if I can’t say it now confidently, I can imagine myself saying it loud in a few years from now.

There are some core things that make up the character of a city. For Lahore, I felt it was its nonchalance, its mindless love for food and entertainment and laid-back attitude to almost all life’s problems. It was never the uptight showroom as it is becoming now. The proud ‘peindoo’ of Lahore is diminishing behind layers of makeup and borrowed accents. He is drifting into corners.

Lahore has become another of Mr Gatsby’s extravagant parties where anyone and everyone is invited but nobody knows why they are here except, well, since they are here, might as well have fun.

Lahore is losing its character to a class of people who are growing away from their culture and closer to imported values through expensive, branded education. The word ‘class’ has become synonymous with ‘cool,’ despite being worlds apart. And, anything that screams money is cool because it gives them the confidence to fit in, the confidence their pedigree can’t, the broken sewage pipes of their village can’t. The new-money slur has become a pride in a messed-up way. Who is the coolest person in Lahore? Anyone who runs a good beauty salon and a Pan-Italian restaurant! Real values have been replaced by fake Chanels.

Lahore has developed a strict code of right and wrong. This time around, I deliberately tried to see my city from an outsider’s eye. All I could hear my friends talk about was missing in their lives -- not getting into the right school, the right college, the right restaurant and the all the right places to hang out at. The right car (another series of rights), the right neighbourhood, the right designer and just the right brands (I can go on and on).

So, the rest of the 90 per cent in city is just wrong! The importance dedicated to the abovementioned things is the survival tactic for the new generation of Lahoris. Like myself, most of the people I know are first generation growing up in Lahore but nobody talks about where they come from. People have so violently severed their connections with their rural past that they are willing to borrow anything from the new environment mindlessly replicating immigrant psychology.

Before you come up with things like global influences and modern metropolitans, let me stop you right there. My issue is with the shame that comes with one’s culture which has its roots in the past than future. With all these rights we seem to be doing just the opposite. All I see is wrongs -- over-dressed, overdone girls thinking feminism is doing what they want, young boys flaunting money they haven’t earned, everyone thinking everyone who doesn’t live in Lahore is scum, and nobody questioning the money and where it is coming from.

In these wrongs, people rotting in the parking lots while we spent more than their month’s pay on single dinner. Talk about rights!

So, when an acquaintance who recently returned from her LSE graduation asked me if I would call her, I just wanted to ask her if I could call her phony. Can I, please?

Seeing this, I share Biff’s angst who told his father, "You are a phony, a fake phony." Yes, that felt good.