Running Fast, Going Nowhere

Its like running on a treadmill, you run for hours but you remain where you were. Its the state of our society and our national systems. Even running on a treadmill helps people loose some weight, get in shape and ward-off stress. But in our case only gains we have made are in population size, size of garbage dumps and our national debt.

Having spent five years in Beijing China from 2005-10, I experienced firsthand the process of social, economic and technological change. For instance, they had a national standards authority, that revised the standard sizes of dresses, small, medium and large, were all made slightly bigger as the population average had grown. The mark on the public bus doors, to determine half ticket for children below 12, was also raised upwards, twice during those few years, as average Chinese 12 year olds were now taller. That was the miracle of "Development", one could literally feel and see.

On the eve of 2008 Olympics, the city govt of Beijing announced a ban on shopping bags, and not just that also on indecent public behaviors like spitting, nose picking and taking a piss in public view. I thought to my self, "now that's impossible" and another example of paper work regulations that cannot be enforced, a futile practice that many state powers often exercise. But to my surprise, it happened, single use thin layered shopping bags disappeared, and the thicker reusable ones were sold at a price. There were public awareness programs in schools, offices, bus stop advertisements and neighborhood notice boards and all other forms of mass communication, national radio and television. Images and words were so effectively yet politely used that within a few months, I noticed a marked change in the public behaviors. Chinese were making progress, visible, tangible, physical and social progress, of which these are just two examples.

Before leaving Pakistan, like all my fellow Pakistanis, I too used to be a happily ignorant person, believing that we are making progress and with time we will be a modern and developed society, as if time was the only factor for positive change and development. But upon my return from China, I was shocked, from infrastructure to public behavior everything seemed to have either stagnated, degraded or totally destroyed. However, my fellow Pakistanis were still as blissful as I was when I left. Small things, like an new model but the same old technology car, or a new cell phone, smart TV or kids in private schools, they had many reasons to celebrate.

Now at age 45 I count myself among the old timers who saw how we used to do things in early 80's. Well for my younger friends who are reading this, you didn't miss any thing, we are still doing it the same old way. Only difference is that if we were transporting people in one Suzuki now we have ten, if we had one retail shop on the corner of the street now the whole street is made up of small time retailers. Sitting on their fathers and grandfather's seats these new retailers still keep a long, single entry "khata" or register, same type of weighing scales and same way of stacking up things. However some things that their elders used to sell have changed, there are so many disposable packaged fuzzy drinks, snacks, and of course the milk that our local "doodh wala" used to bring is now sold in tetra packs. Yes new super stores, malls and markets have also cropped up, but 90% of the population still uses the same old system of doing business.

We still build our houses and streets the same old way and we still dump our garbage the way we used to do. What has changed is the way multinational consumer good manufacturers package their goods. In our days there were no plastic bags, bottles or diapers in our garbage heaps thus every thing biodegraded and went back to nature. Which now add to the garbage heaps and go into the drains and blocks them. Multinationals products and their packaging has changed and so has our consumption habits. What has not really changed is the way our families, house maids and city govts work not even in response to the crisis like situation created by the external changes brought about by multinational consumerism.

Any Pakistani can give you many reasons for our plight, "War on Terror", "Dictatorship", "Corruption", all good candidates for the causes of regress. But no one would would admit that our state and non-state power centers have never really considered the need to improve and change the fundamental way of working. We often admit that are all collectively, unwilling to change, even slightly, i think this is a dead-end proposition. Masses in general do change in response to external stimuli, as in case of multinationals advertising changing our consumption patterns, even our social, cultural values. Its the states both visible and "deep", that need to take charge of the society, in the right direction.

Easiest and the lowest hanging fruit is the physical change. infrastructure and physical environment imposes certain behaviors that all have to follow. People do not bring their bullocks and rickshaws or take U turns on Motorways, because they cant. People dump their garbage on roadside heaps, because there are not enough and convenient garbage cans. drains block because they are uncovered, line losses happen because our transmission network is a mess. Then comes administrative, social and behavioral problems that require educating and convincing the masses. And its the state that has work on both simultaneously.

China may build a national Motorway network for us, (although we should have been able to build it our self) but they wont clean up our mess, do our town planning and impose standards on us. This we should do on our own. Our national leadership should set the direction of our public policy and academia, who need to turn to use of reasoned logic and science to solve the real world problems, rather than playing the paperwork number games. Now that our neighbors, both friendly and un-friendly alike have moved on and are ahead of us in technological terms, real change has become imperative, a matter of survival.