Commuted sentence
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‘COMMUTE’ means travelling back and forth as well as reducing a penalty or punishment. If economists’ data-backed advice to employees resenting the daily drudgery through chaotic traffic to and from their workplaces could be summarised, it would be ‘welcome the commute as a commutation of your house arrest’.
A study published in the Harvard Business Review, which came out as the world was just about recovering from Covid-19, lists predictability, structure, ritual, shared experience, initiation of the workday while leaving home and closure upon returning, acclimatisation of our office and home personalities, prep time for tasks and meetings, and the daily reminder of why we work (also called ‘purpose’), as the benefits of commuting to work.
Some, if not all, are offset by certain factors in our context. Predictability turns into uncertainty as a ‘Lashkar’ this or a ‘Sipah’ that can block any thoroughfare anytime they like. The structure of traversing the same route every day, around the same time, and arriving at work on time is scuttled by anxiety, frustration, and embarrassment for myriad reasons, the ubiquitous ‘VIP’ movement among them.
Moreover, diversions dictated by a court order allowing a dharna or processions and protests in the guise of freedom of expression lead to traffic snarls stretching for kilometres, making you wonder more about the purpose of the state than the purpose of your work.
Long traffic snarls make one wonder about the purpose of the state.
Top this off with the poor-man syndrome — driving the wrong way, instead of taking a U-turn just a few hundred metres ahead, using wheelchair ramps to ride motorbikes and rickshaws on overhead pedestrian bridges, and citing rising fuel prices as justification for these shortcuts. Water tankers and dumper trucks run amok, trampling motorists and pedestrians alike, without fear of accountability as they have the backing of one mafia or another. Throw in the ethnic mix associated with various types of transport business ownership, and you have a right royal mess on your hands, putting paid to all theories about physical mobility being the prerequisite of social mobility and progress.
Political parties in power pander to the interest groups, and those in opposition use the transport issues, especially the fatalities resulting from them, for attention-seeking stunts. In 1985, an errant public transport hit and killed a student waiting at a bus stand in Karachi. Her name, Bushra Zaidi, became synonymous with the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation, morphing into the Mohajir Qaumi Movement and reigniting ethnic embers in the megapolis. The ethnic complexity of Sindh’s capital can be gauged from the fact that most of its inhabitants cited Urdu as their language in the few population censuses we have had. At that point, Karachi hosted the largest concentration of Pakhtun population in the world.
Fast forward 40 years, and Afaq Ahmed, head of Haqiqi, one of the MQM factions, has been arrested on charges of inciting the public against dumper trucks violating the city government’s recent ban on their entry during daylight hours. The defying dumpers were being set on fire by vigilante-type mobs. For the longest time, Mr Ahmed was considered off-limits to law enforcement for his perceived backing by the establishment. Things have come full circle many times over. Is yet another MQM faction in the offing? A smattering of acceptable types is increasingly seen giving keynote speeches at lit fests and moderating sessions ranging from poetry to freedom of expression.
If so, it is not the first time that entities reputed to have indulged in everything from xenophobia, torture, mu-rder, kidnapping, and extortion are being rebranded for another round of alliances with entities with similar, if not worse, reputa-tions.
I once had a colleague who drove 110 miles (177km) — one way — daily to work. This was before the Covid-driven remote and hybrid work frenzy; fuel prices had not yet started impacting the divorce rate in the US, and reductions in emissions to combat climate change were being conceived, but Ms Thunberg was not. Asked why he would undergo such a taxing commute voluntarily, he beamingly rattled on about an affordable, bigger house in a quieter, safer neighbourhood and decent schools compared to D.C. To underline that he did not resent his long-haul commute ‘a wee beet’, he added, “Brother, my grandmother is still roughing it out on rickety donkey carts on unpaved African roads.” It was an apparent jibe at my antecedents in Tharparkar. Asphalt-paved freeways with traffic discipline could still be our road to prosperity. However, in the current national logjam, the life sentence for our collective obeisance to usurpers seems to be without parole or commutation.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2025
