There is no better night in Karachi than the Chand Raat (night before the Eid day). The shopping and festive fever starts picking up the momentum since the first day of the Ramadhan. It reaches the peak during the last ten days and then the climax on the last night.
This is the time when nothing can stop Karachiites from going out and shop till the dawn. It doesn’t matter who occupies the presidential palace or who is getting bombed by Pakistan army. Inflation, food and energy shortages, terrorism, nothing can stop them from spending money and feel happy for themselves. They are truly brave people, as they work hard to live in the now and they know how to enjoy it. Of course they are worried about how they are going to spend an entire month without any money left. But lets just not think about it now, they tell themselves. Lets just concentrate on how we can knockout the salesman at the Kurta Corner.
I didn’t get much chance to survey the shopping areas this Ramadhan. No, I was not too busy fasting and offering prayers. I missed several fasts and I prayed once or twice each day. What I did during this whole month? Why I didn’t call some friends to come and rescue me? I am asking myself.
May be it was work, I have started another blog and made it compulsory for myself to come up with one post each day. Any one who blogs regularly would agree with me that it is difficult to come up with fresh ideas every day. Every thing that you thought worth blogging, has already been blogged. It’s a difficult path, each day I go through doubts. May be I shouldn’t have started this blog at all. It becomes more painful to come up with new ideas when you are in doubt. So I need to assure myself all over again. No this project is good, it has so much potential, look at the link backs they are not bad for a week’s blogging. Then suddenly an idea strikes me and I start constructing my post.
I go through this doubt, re-assurance and light bulbing every day. Its really exhausting sometimes specially when I have to keep up with all the fried goodies at iftar. I am not the kind of person who would leave all the food and rush to the mosque for maghrib prayers. I sit firmly on the dastarkhawn and do justice to each and every thing that is there for me to eat. Even when I am not fasting, I never miss an iftar.
I feel sleepy after iftar so I go out for a walk. I walk from DJ science college to the Pakistan Chowk, then to Civil Hospital, then I turn around and walk back to Aaram Bagh, then to Fresco chowk and back home. I love the buildings on this route. They were built during good times. Walking past them, I think about how these buildings looked when they were new? Who were the people that lived and worked there? How was the life back then? Why don’t people make such beautiful buildings any more? I walk past garbage, and I think there is no hope for this city. Its the filthiest in the whole world and nothing is ever going to change this. Then I see women in burqas, and I think that each day there are more and more women getting attacked by the burqa virus.
When I am back home from walk, I am tired. My body is just as fat as it was an hour ago when I left home for the walk, it is my mind that needs rest.
I sit back on my desk again, staring at my computer screen, downloading movies, listening music, reading blogs, chatting with friends. It’s all necessary. Thank God I don’t use facebook or orkut or other social media sites. I simply can’t. There is really no time for any new activity at all.
But I think I should go out and do some shopping. Or atleast, I should go to the saloon for an haircut. I look like Saddam Hussein freshly out of his cave.
