Pakistan – A Mob With No Civic Sense

When­ev­er I dri­ve on the roads or wait in a queue in Pak­istan, I always pon­der why most of us are so impa­tient, fraught and lack any sense of basic civil­i­ty.
There is no civil­i­ty in our behav­ior in any walk of life that we as a nation par­take in. So much so that any odd encounter with a civ­i­lized per­son in our soci­ety star­tles us, and makes us feel lucky of hav­ing met such an unusu­al per­son.

These are the kind of peo­ple who play a lead­ing role in man­ag­ing queues, giv­ing way to an ambu­lance, leav­ing their lane for your car, avoid­ing honk­ing horns, and halt­ing their cars to allow pedes­tri­ans to cross the roads. While this should be the nor­mal con­duct of cit­i­zen­ry, unfor­tu­nate­ly, they are indeed excep­tion­al deeds in our soci­etal con­text. And most of us, in our herd men­tal­i­ty, fol­low quite the oppo­site.
Cer­tain mob behav­iors have become too com­mon in our soci­ety.

Every oth­er dri­ver, in reck­less and rash way, bom­bards you con­tin­u­ous­ly with pres­sure horns and forces his high beam head­lights on you to give way as if he is the most impor­tant per­son around.
Or a per­son in the queue, who cheek­i­ly skips one or two and moves for­ward in order to pay his bills ear­li­er than the rest of the lads, who, of course, accord­ing to the queue break­er, have all the time in the world to stand and wait there.

While break­ing these civic norms, every­one among us has an excuse to offer. These excus­es range from emer­gency, to an urgent appoint­ment, and not to men­tion the “old age” or “health issues” card played by many.
We also expe­ri­ence it fre­quent­ly that once a per­son in the row (hard­ly resem­bling a row as every­one is scat­tered like bees on hon­ey) starts speak­ing about the break­ing of queue rules, oth­ers fol­low the lead, tak­ing refuge behind the back of this one valiant per­son, who has some­how man­aged to gath­er some courage to take a stand on the issue.

Anoth­er norm in queue ethics or non-ethics is using your rel­a­tives, friends or acquain­tances to get your job done with­out fac­ing the queue. These fam­i­ly mem­bers are always will­ing to oblige and sub­mit your bills even if you are stand­ing at the end of the queue.

Sim­i­lar­ly roads in Pak­istan have become a vio­lent mob of cars, whose dri­vers are ready to brawl, grab each oth­er throats, hurl abus­es at each oth­er just on the triv­ial mat­ters, which most of the time rarely falls in the cat­e­go­ry of mis­takes or dri­ving fol­lies. Mis­takes are nev­er accept­ed by any par­ty till eter­ni­ty.
Anoth­er com­mon phe­nom­e­non is the way big large lux­u­ry SUV’s and sup­posed vehi­cles of elites can com­plete­ly over­whelm you. Such a class in our soci­ety can bare­ly wait for the traf­fic jams or road emer­gen­cies, for them, wait is for the com­mon aver­age man of the soci­ety. Often these SUV’s have spe­cial pri­vate secu­ri­ty guards too with their long hair, bushy beards and Kalash­nikovs in their hands resem­bling the ancient Viking tribesman or Gaul.

Fol­low­ing any incon­ve­nience in traf­fic, these guards will jump down from the back of the SUV’s at any moment to start knock­ing at the win­dows of the com­mon folk to move ahead and make way for the vehi­cles of their all-pow­er­ful boss­es.

Now let us talk about the low­er order of food chain – the glo­ri­ous motor­cy­cle wannabes who are always ready to show their feats of spec­tac­u­lar stunts on the roads, twist­ing and turn­ing their bikes and flirt­ing with their and oth­ers’ lives.

The rules of ordi­nary dri­ving sim­ply don’t apply to them. They can move from one lane to anoth­er in a split sec­ond on the back of their bikes by frac­tion­al­ly miss­ing the hoods of the pass­ing by cars or vehi­cles. They can open­ly and gal­lant­ly trav­el in the oppo­site direc­tion on a one-way road or street. And if they end up crash­ing their bikes with a vehi­cle, it is always the vehicle’s fault.
Sim­i­lar­ly most of them are also hav­ing col­or-blind­ness issues. For them, red means green and vice ver­sa on most traf­fic sig­nals. These gen­tle­men are the reflec­tion of our every­day Pak­istani trans­port and pub­lic life.
For that mat­ter, those few peo­ple who even try to fol­low the basic rules are doomed and ghet­toized by the major­i­ty that lacks basic civic sense and road ethics. And such ratio­nales add up mak­ing the fab­ric of our very own soci­ety.