A man grappling with another individual in a bid to be the
first to reach the huge dish heaped with rice; another person dressed
in Western clothes hitting the one next to him with a plate to clear his
route to the food station; people falling over each other and scuffling
in a race, where the prize is a plateful of chicken botis and pulao.
These are not scenes from a famine and hunger stricken land, but from
our very own ‘land of the pure’, with real life people – people, who
have three square meals a day, but who act shamelessly like animals
converging on meat and bones tossed to them.
The mayhem described
above is also not a figment of my imagination, but was seen by millions
of Pakistanis on television, during an event organised in Faisalabad in
the honour of some luminaries from the ruling party. Not that this
behaviour is unique to political workers alone, it is endemic to us as a
nation - at wedding feasts or any other place where a large group of
people, however well fed they may be, are served free food.
I
have seen smartly attired, educated guests at dinners rush to the buffet
table, shoulder themselves edgewise into queues with utter disregard to
gender or age and then heap their plates with meat as if they were the
condemned and this was their last meal. Having once raised my voice at
one such spot, I became the focal point of numerous pair of eyes that
indicted me as a freak.
I even incurred the wrath of a distant
relative, when I left his wedding reception after witnessing the
stampede that left me and a few others standing forlornly for a long
time, while a sea of guests swirled around the tables not willing to
move away after serving themselves. The scene forced me to walk up to
the host and stammer some flimsy excuse and permission to leave the
event, as a “civilised dinner was awaiting me at my home.”
At
another wedding that was serving live barbeque, a commotion drew my
attention to a spot where unprintable language was being hurled at a
poor waiter. I was later told that a group of guests had lunged at the
poor creature in a bid to get at some freshly barbequed kebabs and in
the ensuing melee had upset the tray. The resultant mess was immediately
attributed to the poor man’s clumsiness and he became the centre of
retribution, without cognisance of the fact that the whole episode had
been initiated by a pack of human hyenas.
There is a spot in one
of Islamabad’s many commercial areas known as Rana Market, where a free
evening meal is served to the public every evening. While this is a
great gesture and will surely earn the sponsor a lot of merit in the
eyes of the Creator, it amply reflects our nature, for there is never a
day when the place does not become an arena of conflict.
One look
at the regular diners, who frequent free dastarkhwans around the
country is enough to indicate that a vast majority of them are
professional freeloaders, who ought to be ‘splitting rocks’. It is
ironic, but this professional freeloading has its lighter moments. I
once attended a wedding dinner in Bahawalpur Club, a long time ago,
where I spotted two very robust looking men attired in expensive ‘Do
Ghora Boski’ kurtas loading their plates with chicken pieces. Always in
search of new material for my columns, I decided to follow their
movements as discreetly as was possible. The pair moved into the two
distant corners of the marquis, but staying in eye contact. Chicken
pieces flew into their mouths with unimaginable speed and even more
unimaginable wastage. I watched them gobble two platefuls of our
‘national bird’ before descending on the dessert.
It was then
that I decided to ask my hosts if this pair had been invited by him. He
not only responded in the negative, but mustering four young men from
the family, walked up to the one nearest to him and asked him whether he
was part of the ‘baraat’. It was at this point that the scam artist’s
luck ran out, for another guest, who happened to be the local Head of
Police, chose this moment to enter the marquis and walked up to the
little group. I couldn’t suppress a twitter as the uninvited guest
looked around him and then lunged for the entrance of the dining area
with a couple of waiters and two constables in hot pursuit, much like
the scenes in the hilarious ‘Keystone Cops’ movies.
I would,
perhaps, understand the reasons for this shameless and animalistic
behaviour in people stricken with poverty, but when educated, well fed
and perfectly normal individuals exhibit the same, I start raising
questions, the answers to which lie, perhaps, with social scientists and
psychologists. To an untrained mind such as mine, this is an aberration
that needs analysis; for such behaviour disfigures our national image
in the eyes of the civilised world.
The writer is a freelance columnist.