RECENTLY, the American scholar and South Asian expert Christine Fair wrote an article for the online journal War on the Rocks called ‘How Pakistan beguiles the Americans: a guide for foreign officials’. Fair remarked on Pakistani generosity with this statement: “Whereas Indian ministry officials will serve you tea in a chipped mug embossed with a faded graphic of the ministry’s logo, Pakistani hosts will serve their hosts coffee or tea in a mug … and they will even gift you with that mug.”

Fair counts this as one of the ways in which Pakistani officials charm inexperienced American diplomats into making things go favourably for our country in the State Department corridors that decide on foreign policy. While calculated generosity may be a clever ploy to manipulate the game of international relations, the innate Pakistani impulse towards philanthropy on a large scale and charity on an individual level is actually natural and uncalculated, almost to a fault. We are raised from a young age to give as much as we can to those less fortunate than ourselves.

This was nowhere more evident than in the recent Sindh heatwave that lasted five days and claimed more than 1,000 lives, most of them in Karachi. While the government remained silent and health services collapsed, hundreds of volunteers sprung into action. Appeals went out on social media for donations of money, cold water, bed sheets, ice, and life-saving medications. People scrambled to meet the demands of hundreds of poor, starving citizens who were already suffering from the effects of relentless power cuts, low-level malnutrition and waterborne diseases.

Read more: Eleven more heatstroke patients die in city

Because this is Ramazan, people got together to pack and distribute iftar boxes filled with dates, biryani, chips and cold drinks. Others handed out bottles of cold water at traffic intersections and to beggars, homeless people, and street cops. In addition to the regular services of charity foundations like Edhi and Chhipa, which already perform on an astonishing scale to serve this city of 20 million people, everyday acts of heroism were apparent everywhere. To those of us who live in Pakistan, this is just the way we are.

The innate Pakistani impulse is to give on a large scale.

Volunteers who went into public hospitals were horrified by what they saw: filthy wards, populated by rats and cats, bathrooms and common areas that hadn’t been cleaned in decades; people sleeping five to a bed and on the floors. Private trusts were created overnight to take on the responsibility of some of the wards: they raised money to hire janitorial services and standing air conditioners to provide some relief to the victims of sunstroke during Ramazan.

But while this is a commendable effort, there’s a dark side to all this nobility. At least in Karachi, the government has completely abdicated its responsibility to provide not just the basic services, such as water, electricity, and education (and it abandoned this in the rural areas of Sindh decades ago).

Read more: Bilawal puts blame for Karachi deaths on centre

Now, the heatwave has exposed it as unable and unwilling to even provide disaster relief to its citizens. And if ordinary people fill in the gaps so effectively, as is already happening in the field of education where citizens are adopting and building schools all over the nation, there will be little impetus for anyone in charge to fulfil their responsibilities towards even its most vulnerable citizens.

As Dr Nasim Salahuddin wrote in her column ‘Preventable deaths’, the Met Department didn’t issue any public warnings about the heatwave. Nor did any state media broadcast any public service messages discussing heatstroke and what steps should be taken to recognise and treat it. Meanwhile, private media chose to focus on the sensationalism of death in talk shows where plenty of blame was apportioned but very few solutions were discussed by all the experts and talking heads.

Read more: Karachi should prepare for more heatwaves

CNN’s Saima Mohsin appeared in a now viral video clip in which she tried to go inside an Edhi morgue to report on the heatwave deaths, but the smell was too overpowering for her and her team. Subsequently, she wrote a blistering op-ed in which she said the “stench of death should shame the government”.

Yet so far, there has been no shame. It’s an astonishing fact that Pakistan is the only country in which the citizens bail out the government, instead of the other way around. And in Karachi, as the days went on, there was no space in the hospitals, not enough attendants to wash the bodies, and not enough buses to transport the dead. The graveyards quickly ran out of space to accommodate them anyway.

Yes, the generous and soft-hearted people of Karachi were able to give water bottles and food and medications and supplies to those in need. But for how many days, months, years, can they carry on giving? And in all honesty, why should they?

Read more: Tales of agony at the JPMC

The writer is the author of A Season For Martyrs.

Twitter: @binashah

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2015

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