How fast you want to go?

I am sure many will find this funny or even hilarious, but often times I have thought about the sad fact and truth of lives of millions of such people in Karachi and presumably elsewhere in Pakistan and then outside Pakistan as well.

The time is around 6:30am when I was out to shoot sunrise and here I find almost every bus loaded with these people. Since most of the work is in my area and Karachi being such a huge metropolitan area with the biggest populated city status in Pakistan as well, most of these people must come out of their homes at early 5 or so. The "modern men" like me wake up at 10 or later and have wonderful reception of everything they go and work at their pleasure but most importantly go on living on our lives without giving a hoot about them. Oh, wait, the modern, liberal, wise and educated rich people also care. The intelligent and rich geeks like me create Website Bands containing messages of "End Poverty" or "Make Poverty History" which everyone else follows because people like me are popular and every one wants to do the same thing as popular people do and hey, it looks cool and modern and global too. So, yeah, they care. They know what goes around.

The intelligent, moderate, cultured and rich people go to concerts and have drinks and spend some money on 100 such people. They go to concerts again and manage something like G8 or whatever and they create lots of hand-bands or whatever and they wear them. The original such bands then give rise to more stylish such bands wearing slogans such as "Friendship Forever", Love and so on. The modern, educated, liberal and wise rich men like me DO care. We shoot their pictures, we colorize them, we propagate their truck art works all over the world. The more enlightened liberal, wise, educated and caring rich people go to different places such as UK, Australia and Texas where they see such buses all colored and decorated as nicely as "these" buses look.

Then some wise, rich and educated person decides to hold an exhibition too. These things get popular. Cricketers use them. Lots of people use them. They feel good and "Cultured" sitting in those buses in brave new world outside Pakistan. So, you
see, the "caring man" of the modern society of rich ideas, greater intellect, deeper pockets, higher esteem and certainly better sense of global knowledge DOES a lot of things to "bring awareness" and "care" and such things in the world about these people.

But what I am so ashamed to admit is that the lives of these people NEVER change. Why should any one ever give a damn to look into their lives. Deeper than the outer shell. That thick crust of mysteries, stillness and quietness in this fast-paced world, PL drenched corporations, surrounded by draconian media and liar governments with ugly agendas. No one shall ever look into their lives. No one shall ever know what goes around the world in which they breathe and live. No one shall ever act upon their grievances or shortcomings and the lives they could have adopted - as wise, intelligent, liberal and rich as ours.

'They could have been somebody, they could have had class and they could have been contenders instead of the bums that they are' (apologies to Budd Schulberg for using his words). This could be extremely flawed photography and so on but I am glad that the picture does show the stillness of the bus and everything else around moving (sort of paning technique I couldn't do properly I guess) which is quite on the contrary. The title is not addressed to these people shown in the picture but to the viewers. Because it's us who may be leaving them behind in hurry not other way round.

Sorry if I wasted anyone's precious time. It's just a picture, afterall.