Fear and Loathing in Karachi

I've been meaning to write this for quite a long time, but something or the other, mostly laziness, has kept me from doing so. But events in Karachi over the past few days have spurred me to pen my thoughts. Yesterday, I was coming home from my grandmother's with my parents when my mother piped up, 'Faysal beta, please be careful these days when you go visit your friends (as it's the end of summer, many friends are going back to college abroad, so I've been going around town bidding them adieu). I'm not forbidding you to leave the house, but try to meet them at their homes instead of at restaurants on the street, as 'they're' picking boys up at random who are never heard from again. Just the other day, your uncle was telling me how one of his workers' son was grabbed from the street along with his friends. Alhamdulillah, he escaped but the others weren't as lucky.' Now normally, my mum is quite chill for a mum. I've seen some pretty uptight mums so I'd say mine is the Ferris Bueller of them all. Dad takes our only car to work, so she lets me hop on public buses to go wherever I want (Once you get over the paan spitting, bad BO and filthy seats, it's not that bad really). Sure, she adds her fine print (which mum doesn't?); no bus after dark, Hassan Square is as far as you can go, and not on days when there's trouble in the city (since this is Karachi we're talking about, rule no. 3 keeps me grounded a lot of the time. That and my mum's refusal to let me go abroad for college makes me suspect she has empty nest syndrome (Read: She loves me so much. Awwww). Keeping in mind the mother I've just described, you can understand that I was quite surprised when she put a leash (albeit a thin one) on my city-trotting. At the time I just put it on maternal instinct, but later this incident got me thinking about what's been brewing in this fair city of ours. Let's be clinical about this. Let's put ourselves in the kidnappers' shoes for a bit. Either the kidnappers are serial killers, paedophiles or human traffickers or they have the sole nefarious purpose of instilling terror in the stout hearts of Karachiites for whatever sinister agenda(s). Whatever the cause, it's turned Karachi into a nervous, quaking wreck. And when people get nervous, they start acting irrationally. It is this irrationality that I shall discuss in this article. A quick google search shows that in 4 days 77 people have been killed in the recent spate of violence gripping our fair city. Another search shows that Karachi's population is approximately 13 to 15 million. Let us assume it is 13 mill. Therefore: 77/(4*13000000) = 0.0000015 That means that there are around 1.5 killings for every million people alive per day.1 million is the estimated population of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, a sprawling area. Everyday, max 2 people will get killed here. Out of a million. Factor in the fact that the violence is mainly limited to certain areas of the city only, and the probability decreases even further. There were 6 kidnappings on Tariq Road you say? Sweetie, have you SEEN the sheer number of people in that commercial centre at any given point in time? That means a BIG denominator, while the numerator remains 6. Low probability again. Which puts the problem in perspective doesn't it? In comparison, Tuberculosis is the 3^rd biggest killer in Karachi’s slums, well above homicide. Hence, we have more reason to fear germs than terrorists. But I don't see us walking down the street wearing facemasks. Why? Is it because in our minds, bacteria are microscopic, virtually non-existent critters while a terrorist is a gun-toting, big, bad wolf in dire need of a shave? We really haven't changed from when we were kids. We still fall for the 'Bogeyman-will-come-and-eat-you-if you-don't-finish-your-greens' story our grandmothers told us in our childhoods. Now the lion is the terrorist and eating your greens is milling like scared bleating sheep.

  When our relatives and friends abroad or even in other Pakistani cities telephone in panic, saying they just saw that 6 more people died in Karachi and are we OK, don't we laugh it off, telling them not to worry? Where's that composure now? What's interesting is that people in the States think that we have a pig of a time here, that we literally dodge bullets everyday in our efforts to lead normal lives. But we know it's not as bad as they purport. We probably think the same of people in Iraq and Palestine. But ask them what it's like eking out an existence there (I have), and unless they live bang in the centre of a warzone, they'll roll their eyes too. The media plays a big part in this mass hysteria. In order to sell their brand, they only report that which is likely to shock and awe. Telling us how many people did NOT die in Karachi today is bad business for them. If they did that, the news would take a lot longer to deliver. Most of us would switch to the shopping channel. Remember, fear is a powerful tool to keep the masses in line. We won't speak up if we are scared. And that's what 'they' want. Case in point: we still refer to 'them' as 'them'. Can we get more Orwellian than this? To quote Roosevelt, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. So put on a fresh pair of pants and be empirical about everything. There is comfort in probabilities.