Kotha Pind Flats

It was just another of the usual days without breakfast. Just a glass of mango milk shake sufficed to move me out of the place I call home. After I came back from the much happening tour of Karachi, the uneventful life at Lahore seems more boring and aimless then ever before. Specially when there are vacations. I got up late as usual, and went on to the university just to follow one of the patiently made intricate plans of deceit. A class mate was there in the library, doing nothing. I made my way to him, chatted with him for a while, until a friend came. I have been waiting for him, but he sat with me for literally one minute and excused to go to the class he had.

I went off to my friend Wahab right off that moment. Wahab lives in the Center Flats, considered to be the dirtiest place in Lahore by many people. Amid the suburban Model Town and Faisal Town, Center Flats dubbed Kotha Pind flats by some people gives a ghetto look. Mostly single male students and workers from neighboring cities live here. Very few families can be found in the Kotha Pind Flats. In fact it is a peaceful place which is ripe with shops of food items, drinks, and restaurants. If someone wants to catch a glimpse of African people in Lahore, they got to come to Kotha Pind Flats. These flat buildings look monstrous and unending by Lahore proportions. They are obviously dwarfed by Karachi flat buildings. You don't find flat system very common in Lahore. People like to stay in houses not flats here. Moreover, the population has not exploded that much here as it had in Karachi. If Lahore gets industrialized, it soon will have the same look of Karachi, with massive buildings swarming with seas of urbanized people. Punjab still remains agricultural, and you can see it in Lahore. You don't see any of the massive industrial effects here. This might be the reason Lahore is a little more beautiful than Karachi. Industrialization means uglification, really.

Alive and Well in Pakistan

To tell you the truth, I am not an avid non-fiction reader, especially of the books on Pakistan, and even more if they are written by foreigners. The titles of such books may seem cliched and the subject matter all concerned about how Pakistan is a bastion of terrorism, and about how the primitive fundamentalism prevails over the whole country. One can clearly see the writers' own paranoia, deeply entrenched by let's say media, hinting conspicuously at how the people of Pakistan pose a very serious potential threat to the West. The authors will too delightfully engage in comparison which usually ends up in bashing the local culture and praising the West. They will how they barely managed to survive in the hideous terrain of Pakistan, and how they now are sitting in their cozy apartments in Texas, relieved after that near-fatal adventure: likening themselves to Rambo in the Afghanistan. Apart from these very ugly aspects of such books, my cynicism also stops me short of reading them, as most of these books are just written to cash on the rising global interest in Pakistan and its neighboring countries, making them as odious as one can imagine.

But the case is different with the book, Alive and Well in Pakistan. How I come to know about this book is a long story, but I will cut it short in order to not digress much, which is my unfortunate habit. On a hot day amid the tensions of the final exam, and desperately waiting for the classes to be over so that I can get back to home, I took the refuge at the university's library. I would seldom find myself at the library. But that day I found myself in the non-fiction category with books about Pakistan. I picked this one and started reading. There was a chapter on the writer's experiences in Multan, a medium sized town in Pakistan. As I have been to Multan many times, I found the description very realistic and down-to-earth. I grabbed this book and took it home along me. Alive and Well in Pakistan is written by an American journalist Ethan Casey about his short stay in Pakistan.

Ethan Casey has used very simple language to explain the various people and different situations in Pakistan. What makes it really interesting to read is the ordinary, less happening sort of events, he has covered, that characterizes the life of ordinary people in Pakistan. It was fascinating to read how he had grown a sort of near-obsession to discover Kashmir out of reading V.S. Naipaul. Well, the first part of the book dealing mainly on his obsession with Naipaul seems a bit boring and also a tad too stuffy. But the second part written in a diary-like style, covering Pakistan flows like a smooth torrent, and is enjoyably readable.

The book tells us of his brief teaching experience at a new university for liberal arts in Lahore, that is jam packed with students from the upper class section of society. He describes a lot of people he found in Lahore; honestly explains his efforts at improving his tennis game at Gymkhana Lahore, where he came to know many politically influential people. Apart from writing about politically and socially influential people, he writes about the people he just met living there. Particularly, he praised his landlady a lot, and I am sure he took a fancy for her. Other notable descriptions are of the Indonesian born woman who used to live in the same Guest House as him, of the spectators he met when he went to watch a cricket match, of a young man demanding his advice to marry the girl he liked.

If you are wishing for something very sensual and extraordinary, please don't read this book, you will be disappointed. But if you want to pass your time catching a glimpse of the really simple Pakistani landscape and Pakistani people in their chores, you got to read this book.