Hamara Parcham Ye Pyara Parcham singer Naheed Akhtar Perhaps this is a familiar sight across Pakistan.
It’s a familiar sight the next day, at another intersection, with another youngster 10 or so years older.
Whatever happened to good quality ‘milli naghmay’? Why do we keep going back to songs from 30 or even 50 years ago to rekindle the national spirit? Have we become incapable of producing good anthems? With Sindh Government’s Covid-19 restrictions on the verge of being relaxed hardly a day before Moharram starts, should he even entertain the idea of turning his speakers on? The shops around him - medical, general and hardware stores, kebab and drink kiosks - are open, but one never knows when the shrieking sirens of a police van might suddenly sound from around the bend. The only missing element from his table is the sound of Vital Signs’ Dil Dil Pakistan blaring from his small, blue tooth-powered speakers. His makeshift table-stall has the usual Independence Day merchandise one glances at while walking past such stalls: decorative pins, small stacked bundles of green paper flags, some miniature flags, and a handful of their bigger versions. At an intersection near Bagh-i-Mustafa in Karachi, one of the many scattered and tucked-away pieces of land technically qualifying as parks that haven’t been appropriated by squatter families in the building-strewn area of Aisha Manzil, sits a teenage boy with a dilemma.
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