Like many of you, I read an article in this week’s Time magazine entitled “To Have & Have Not - Kidnappings, bombings, assassinations, extortion, bribery—just another week in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city”. The title was warning enough, but I’ve never been one to listen to common sense, so I read the entire story from beginning to end. And then when I got to the end, I had to read it all over again so I could tell my grandchildren what a hatchet job in print looks like.
And the victim of the hatchet job? Karachi, of course, the city that fourteen million of us live in, work and play in, sweat and die in. Megalopolis, teeming slum-city, whore, angel, this city suffers insult and abuse and still continues to grow and thrive despite everything. Perhaps the growth is healthy; some of it is definitely cancerous, yet it still grows, beyond all understanding or explanation.
It seems that the plague that began in the offices of the New York Times, where Jayson Blaine fabricated dramatic tales of weeping soldiers’ wives and children when he had never even visited them, has spread to the offices of Time. Its symptoms are telltale: over-dramatization, over-simplification of the facts, an inability to write with balance and sensitivity, trading complexity and perception for visual gore and sensationalism. The sound bite reigns supreme – after all, it’s so easy to get a few quotes from a shadowy criminal and a colorful hairdresser and reassemble an entire city in four thousand words from the bones of their statements.
My objection to the Time article has nothing to do with its accuracy. I accept the fact that Karachi suffers from all the problems outlined in the article: yes, we have corruption on a massive scale. Yes, we have kidnappings and terrorism. Yes, extortion is the biggest industry. How can I deny the disparity between the rich and the poor? I was in the city the day of the explosion outside the American Consulate. I know people who were in the gym of the Sind Club when the bomb went off and tiles from the roof fell off and landed on their heads as they exercised on their treadmills. And that’s almost funny compared to the real scenes of horror only two hundred yards away, outside the consulate, where pieces of bodies littered the street and hung from the stately trees in the park surrounding Frere Hall.
But I take exception to the accusation in the article, never stated in so many words, but shouting from every line nonetheless: that the people of Karachi accept this state of affairs. That those unaffected by violence have no feelings for the turmoil and chaos that is a way of life for the poor. That as long as everything appears normal in Defence and Clifton, the educated and the elite can ignore what happens “across the bridges”.
How can this be possible? It’s like saying that when you’ve got a brain tumor, the unaffected parts of your body go around as if nothing’s wrong. In actuality, when any part of the body is unwell, the rest of the body feels it acutely. The whole body displays signs of suffering; fever, malaise, fatigue and weariness. And this is what Karachi is going through right now: a massive dis-ease that affects body and soul, mind and heart. Our ancient methods of medicine, Hikmat and Aryuveda both tell us that when the body is ill, it means it’s out of balance. Karachi is out of balance, and you can feel it whether you live in Issa Nagri, New Karachi, Nazimabad or Clifton.
The Time article was only able to touch on the most glaring signs. In fact, it gloats on them. How exciting that the criminals of Karachi use Black & Decker drills on the kneecaps of hapless victims. Look, you can get a Russian hooker or a forty-carat diamond with just a phone call. Women go around the city shrouded in burqas; a religious man looks at rich Karachiites eating McDonalds’ hamburgers and feels angry. Even the good people of Karachi play roles you could only see in Hollywood blockbusters: Edhi goes around collecting dead bodies after the “nightly bout of violence” (does he do it with his bare hands?), Ardeshir Cowasjee tracks corruption in his silk pajamas, Jameel Yusuf was kicked out of the CPLC because of his “ties to the Americans”. You can just imagine the Time correspondent growing more and more excited as he contemplates how to portray the lawlessness and hostility of the Karachi landscape; what words and phrases would give Karachi the garish, overbright tones of a City Gone Wild?
The Time article fails utterly in conveying the pain that we feel in seeing what is happening to our city. We feel two levels of pain: one, when we are affected directly by a violent, senseless act – a kidnapping, a dacoity, or even the grinding burden of bureaucratic bribes and being afraid of the police. The second level we feel is when we see others affected by it. It’s in the newspapers. It’s on television. It’s on the streets you drive through, on the faces of every person in the city, rich or poor. It’s in the drooping lines of the people that work in your house, or in your office, the ones whose only ambition in life is to save up to buy a motorcycle or get a daughter married. No matter how many rock concerts you go to or how many rave parties or how many salons for a Dynasty hairstyle, you can’t escape it. The city calls to us in pain and no deafness or blindness stops us from seeing and hearing it.
The article also fails to uncover the deep links between all levels of society. It tries to assert that there is a massive disconnection between poor and rich, between secular and religious, ethnic groups, social classes. But this is simply not the case in any modern city, and least of all in Karachi. Anyone who lives in Karachi knows that we are all interconnected, entangled with one another, entwined in the fabric of daily existence. The same hungry, poor, desperate people feed off the rich, spoiled, bloated ones, and vice versa, each taking what it needs out of the other. Similarly, the goodness and benevolence of the poor affect the rich, and the generosity and humility of the rich can and do benefit the poor. To ignore the connections is to misunderstand on purpose what makes this city tick.
Finally, the article fails to understand the fundamental truth about Karachi, but I’ll tell it to you for free. The truth is that Karachi epitomizes the global fight between good and evil. The criminal elements of society are well matched by citizens who hold honesty, decency and integrity dear to their hearts, who fight hard to help those crippled by poverty and corruption, no matter what their social status, who try every day to turn Jinnah’s vision of a thriving Muslim nation into a reality.
Those of us living in Karachi know full well we’re not Singapore or London, but that makes most of us even more determined to vanquish the villains and make a success of Pakistan’s greatest asset. Ardeshir Cowasjee and Jameel Yusuf are our city’s heroes; terrorists and gangsters are its enemies. The rest of us stand scattered across its spectrum, from the poorest slum-child to the richest industrialist, all of us joined by where we live, and all of our hearts beating to its collective pulse.
And the victim of the hatchet job? Karachi, of course, the city that fourteen million of us live in, work and play in, sweat and die in. Megalopolis, teeming slum-city, whore, angel, this city suffers insult and abuse and still continues to grow and thrive despite everything. Perhaps the growth is healthy; some of it is definitely cancerous, yet it still grows, beyond all understanding or explanation.
It seems that the plague that began in the offices of the New York Times, where Jayson Blaine fabricated dramatic tales of weeping soldiers’ wives and children when he had never even visited them, has spread to the offices of Time. Its symptoms are telltale: over-dramatization, over-simplification of the facts, an inability to write with balance and sensitivity, trading complexity and perception for visual gore and sensationalism. The sound bite reigns supreme – after all, it’s so easy to get a few quotes from a shadowy criminal and a colorful hairdresser and reassemble an entire city in four thousand words from the bones of their statements.
My objection to the Time article has nothing to do with its accuracy. I accept the fact that Karachi suffers from all the problems outlined in the article: yes, we have corruption on a massive scale. Yes, we have kidnappings and terrorism. Yes, extortion is the biggest industry. How can I deny the disparity between the rich and the poor? I was in the city the day of the explosion outside the American Consulate. I know people who were in the gym of the Sind Club when the bomb went off and tiles from the roof fell off and landed on their heads as they exercised on their treadmills. And that’s almost funny compared to the real scenes of horror only two hundred yards away, outside the consulate, where pieces of bodies littered the street and hung from the stately trees in the park surrounding Frere Hall.
But I take exception to the accusation in the article, never stated in so many words, but shouting from every line nonetheless: that the people of Karachi accept this state of affairs. That those unaffected by violence have no feelings for the turmoil and chaos that is a way of life for the poor. That as long as everything appears normal in Defence and Clifton, the educated and the elite can ignore what happens “across the bridges”.
How can this be possible? It’s like saying that when you’ve got a brain tumor, the unaffected parts of your body go around as if nothing’s wrong. In actuality, when any part of the body is unwell, the rest of the body feels it acutely. The whole body displays signs of suffering; fever, malaise, fatigue and weariness. And this is what Karachi is going through right now: a massive dis-ease that affects body and soul, mind and heart. Our ancient methods of medicine, Hikmat and Aryuveda both tell us that when the body is ill, it means it’s out of balance. Karachi is out of balance, and you can feel it whether you live in Issa Nagri, New Karachi, Nazimabad or Clifton.
The Time article was only able to touch on the most glaring signs. In fact, it gloats on them. How exciting that the criminals of Karachi use Black & Decker drills on the kneecaps of hapless victims. Look, you can get a Russian hooker or a forty-carat diamond with just a phone call. Women go around the city shrouded in burqas; a religious man looks at rich Karachiites eating McDonalds’ hamburgers and feels angry. Even the good people of Karachi play roles you could only see in Hollywood blockbusters: Edhi goes around collecting dead bodies after the “nightly bout of violence” (does he do it with his bare hands?), Ardeshir Cowasjee tracks corruption in his silk pajamas, Jameel Yusuf was kicked out of the CPLC because of his “ties to the Americans”. You can just imagine the Time correspondent growing more and more excited as he contemplates how to portray the lawlessness and hostility of the Karachi landscape; what words and phrases would give Karachi the garish, overbright tones of a City Gone Wild?
The Time article fails utterly in conveying the pain that we feel in seeing what is happening to our city. We feel two levels of pain: one, when we are affected directly by a violent, senseless act – a kidnapping, a dacoity, or even the grinding burden of bureaucratic bribes and being afraid of the police. The second level we feel is when we see others affected by it. It’s in the newspapers. It’s on television. It’s on the streets you drive through, on the faces of every person in the city, rich or poor. It’s in the drooping lines of the people that work in your house, or in your office, the ones whose only ambition in life is to save up to buy a motorcycle or get a daughter married. No matter how many rock concerts you go to or how many rave parties or how many salons for a Dynasty hairstyle, you can’t escape it. The city calls to us in pain and no deafness or blindness stops us from seeing and hearing it.
The article also fails to uncover the deep links between all levels of society. It tries to assert that there is a massive disconnection between poor and rich, between secular and religious, ethnic groups, social classes. But this is simply not the case in any modern city, and least of all in Karachi. Anyone who lives in Karachi knows that we are all interconnected, entangled with one another, entwined in the fabric of daily existence. The same hungry, poor, desperate people feed off the rich, spoiled, bloated ones, and vice versa, each taking what it needs out of the other. Similarly, the goodness and benevolence of the poor affect the rich, and the generosity and humility of the rich can and do benefit the poor. To ignore the connections is to misunderstand on purpose what makes this city tick.
Finally, the article fails to understand the fundamental truth about Karachi, but I’ll tell it to you for free. The truth is that Karachi epitomizes the global fight between good and evil. The criminal elements of society are well matched by citizens who hold honesty, decency and integrity dear to their hearts, who fight hard to help those crippled by poverty and corruption, no matter what their social status, who try every day to turn Jinnah’s vision of a thriving Muslim nation into a reality.
Those of us living in Karachi know full well we’re not Singapore or London, but that makes most of us even more determined to vanquish the villains and make a success of Pakistan’s greatest asset. Ardeshir Cowasjee and Jameel Yusuf are our city’s heroes; terrorists and gangsters are its enemies. The rest of us stand scattered across its spectrum, from the poorest slum-child to the richest industrialist, all of us joined by where we live, and all of our hearts beating to its collective pulse.
