Karachi is a beautiful city with one small problem: everything here tests your patience as if patience were a compulsory subject in the CSS examination. You leave home to reach somewhere in thirty minutes and return with a new personality, three emotional problems, and enough anger to write a letter to the United Nations. Actually, scratch that the UN should write a letter to Karachi asking what on earth is happening here.
And if you think the city is testing your patience, wait until you see what it has done to the roads.
For starters, why does every road look as if it has survived a war nobody told us about? One moment you are sitting peacefully in your car, and the next moment your head hits the roof because your tyre has discovered a pothole the size of a swimming pool. Honestly, driving in Karachi has reached a stage where I do not need Google Maps to find my destination. I need a satellite to warn me about the next hole trying to swallow my car.
The potholes, however, are not the only obstacle. The speed breakers then enter the picture. I don't understand why there are so many speed breakers? Is the city trying to stop speeding, or is it trying to stop people from reaching their destinations altogether? Some roads have so many bumps that your car starts feeling like a washing machine on the spin cycle. You leave home with your bones in the correct places and arrive at work wondering whether your spine is still under warranty.
At this point, Karachi does not need a traffic police department. It needs a physiotherapy department at every signal. Yes! Speed breakers here are not speed breakers. They are spine breakers. I have started measuring distance not in kilometres but in the number of times my head hits the roof. Oh, you live ten bumps away from me? Nice, we're practically neighbours.
In fact, I don't even bother asking for directions anymore. I just ask, "How many head injuries away is it?"
The person who invented speed breakers in Karachi deserves an award for "Most Creative Way to Torture the General Public Without Going to Jail". It's brilliant, really. Diabolical, but brilliant.
Then there is this road that gets repaired, dug up, repaired again, and dug up once more. What exactly are we searching for underneath? Gold? Oil? The remains of an ancient civilisation?
Of course, once you finally escape the roads, traffic welcomes you with open arms. Karachi traffic has its own rules and, apparently, nobody has read them. A car wants to go straight, a motorcycle wants to go diagonally, a bus wants to become a train, and a rickshaw believes it has a sab chalta hai licence. Everyone is in a hurry, but somehow nobody is moving. And then come the horns. Why does the person behind you keep honking when you are stuck behind another hundred vehicles? What exactly am I supposed to do? Grow wings? Fly over the car in front of me?
Well, the noise is only half the problem. Some drivers seem determined to attack your eyesight as well. Karachi apparently believes that if your ears have suffered enough, your eyes should not be left out. Yes, these are the people who drive with their high beams on at night. Why? Are you driving a car or landing an aeroplane? I am trying to get home, not apply for a pilot's licence. One look into the rear-view mirror and I can see my ancestors waving goodbye.
So in Karachi, Google Maps should stop saying, "You have arrived." It should say, "Congratulations. You survived."
The post The only thing moving fast in Karachi is my blood pressure appeared first on express tribune.
