Our Commissioner, Shoaib Siddiqui, last Sunday ordered the removal of encroachment in 30 storm drains to allow rain water to flow freely to the sea. The encroachers are not impressed. They are not co-operating with the 3,000 clean-up crew, that is, 100 per storm drain, because they know this order and this show of efficiency is just a formality they have to endure every rainy season. They will be left to encroach as soon as the clouds disappear from Karachi skies. This is just a game played by the homeless public who build their shanties on any available free space, including the banks of a storm drain, we call 'nullah' and the city administration, which wants to absolve responsibility for its lack of concern through the year and pretends to do its work only when the rainy season is right upon us. Every year it is the same story.
The interesting thing, however, are the locations where the storm drains are. Many are well known, such as the famous Naher-i-Khayyam in the Clifton Cantonment, which was at the centre of a controversy about why there was a great flooding in the posh locality during a great deluge nearly a decade ago. The storm drain was so constructed that it was unable to carry the flood to the sea. It is still too narrow due to the legalised encroachment on its banks. You can remember the name of this nullah but what about those which have no name and are known by a number which is the 'name' of the road nearby?
Would you recognise 12,000 Road, 7,000 Road, 5,200 Road, 10,000 Road to be names of roads? You will need a survey map to locate where these roads are. Yet these are not the only roads without a proper name. Half the roads in PECHS have no names but an alphabet and a number. If you live, say, off Tariq Road in one of these lanes, you say 'off Tariq Road' or 'two lanes behind Tariq Road'.
All the roads in the old city have names. Some of these names, mostly the Hindu names, have been changed. For instance, Motilal Nehru Road is now Jigar Muradabadi Road. You may not like the change but at least they are not anonymous numbers. But why are localities which were planned and built after Partition not been named? Except for the main arteries nearly all roads are nameless, just numbers. After the 1965 war a number of roads, in Saddar especially, were named after dead heroes. The concrete road sign always gave the full name and the word 'Shaheed' at the end. There was such a mushrooming of 'Shaheed' roads that we used to joke that in the year 4,000, when Karachi would have become a rubble mound, architects who dug it would authoritively state that the Shaheed family was the most powerful rulers of the kingdom of Karachi. As proof of their claim they would show the numerous Shaheed road signs they dug up.
The authorities are niggardly about allotting proper names to streets and bylanes probably because they believe the list of famous names from our history and culture should have prestigious roads named after them. These names seem to be used up, from Tariq bin Waleed, to Mirza Ghalib. A few roads are named after political figures, such as I.I. Chundrigar, Liaquat Ali Khan, but if a road had been named after one of the military dictators there would have been strong public protest. Even the Defence Housing Authority has avoided naming one of their roads after these politico-military figures.
Karachi does not lack great people whose names should be commemorated by naming roads after them. I would personally like a road to be named after the great education activist Anita Ghulam Ali, and another after Sattar Edhi. The list is quite long of doctors, social workers, activists who make us proud. There are sportsmen and women too. I only know of one road named after a tennis player, Said Hye in Bahadurabad.
A name not only commemorates the person after whom a road is called, it also acts as a way of fixing historic facts. For example, who was Strachan after whom a road in Saddar is named? He was not one of the famous colonial officers of the British Raj, like Frere or Macleod. But he has done some yeoman service to develop a modern city. So names are important and every road in Karachi ought to have a name. A road number is so ambiguous. Why would anybody try to find out the history of Road 5,200?
The problem is we do not want to remember the past, not even the time when there was an East Pakistan. There is no mention of 1971 which led to the fall of Dacca. We will therefore never have a road named after, say Raja Dahr. Even a name like Raja Tridev Roy who left East Pakistan and settled in the Western wing of the country as a political protest does not have a road named after him, probably because it would remind us of our shame in losing the Eastern wing.
There is no end of names which can be used to name roads. So many artists, musician, contemporary poets, writers, novelists, sports men and women, activists, doctors, scientists, educationists, industrialists, civil servants and many more who have belonged or belong to this city deserve to be commemorated through roads named after them.
A number is good for prisoners, for a road it is all wrong, it lacks identity.
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