Different cities, different cultures

Nowhere is the contrast in cultures between cities more evident than aboard the 7.00pm flight from Karachi to Lahore on a Friday. As with most inter-city weekend flights, many of the passengers are people returning 'home' after a stint of work in the country's largest city.

And one can almost instantly identify these individuals from the manner in which their swoop for the newspapers from Lahore, looking up bits of information specific to their city; the way in which carefully contrived Urdu accents slip out to allow in more of the native Punjabi which for much of Lahore is the first language and the manner in which a deep silence descends as the evening meal is served, indicating the typical Lahori reverence for all things culinary – even when it comes packed in sterile, plastic airline containers.

Certainly, over the last two decades, the gap between different cities, different regions, within the country has widened. Too often, rather than being celebrated as a healthy indication of diversity, of cultures happily coinciding and accommodating each other, difference is today also a indication of distance, of hostility and a lack of tolerance.

Thus, too often, Karachi labels Lahore as being 'crude' in style, or of lacking sophistication; in turn Lahore accuses Karachi of being an inhospitable city peopled by ill-tempered residents who have none of the warmth of Lahore.

But beyond the standard jokes, the harmless jibes, there is a deeper, angrier spirit that lurks. It is this spirit that leads to indifference being expressed about the prospect of Karachi declaring autonomous status, or indeed to political forces within the deeply urbanised setup of the Sindh capital calling for 'Karachi to become Hong Kong', converting itself into an independent city state.

The increasing gulf is evident in the fact that surveys show that more and more people have 'little interest' in news that does not relate to their area of residence – or, to put it more bluntly, that people in Lahore show little interest in events in Karachi and vice versa.

Newspapers and indeed even television programmers, not surprisingly, respond to this trend by providing more items that are still more distinctly focussed on a particular city or region, and in turn perhaps help the existing insularity to become still more deeply engrained. It is a difficult cycle to break out of.

But at the same time, it is obvious that the pattern must be broken. The increasingly separate 'worlds' of Lahore and Karachi, of Punjab and Sindh, and of every other region in the country must be provided with firmer linkages.

The people of Punjab must better understand precisely how much havoc the ongoing drought has brought for Sindh; they must too listen to the angry political slogans from Karachi, and indeed better understand the motives that underpin them as a first step towards resolving issues, rather than simply dismissing those who raise slogans as traitors.

In the present environment, building bridges between communities may take time. But certainly the effort needs to begin. A starting point may well be to hail differences as a positive phenomena, rather than necessarily a negative one; to quit arguing over ethnic or lingual superiority or attempting to force on others a new political or social culture.

Instead, the points that distinguish people from different parts of the country should be seen as nothing more significant than this; the right to speak any language, to adopt any mode of cultural practice should be accepted – and indeed recognised as a point of strength.

Only from this basis can a new, more equitable harmony be created – within which all cities, all provinces, all cultures are equal – regardless of the language people speak, the lifestyles they lead, the clothes they wear, the hair colour they opt for, the restaurants they frequent, or any other similar trivial factors, which seem increasingly to dominate discussion about the destiny of a nation that badly needs to find for itself a more cohesive identity.