the new year parties!




I keep thinking and pondering on this most peculiar trait of affluent Karachites namely the people gracing and habitating the streets of Defence, of going totally frantic and senile on new year's eve. The salons of Khadda market and shahbaz are chock-a-block with women of all shapes and sizes pruning themselves for the evening parties. Grocery stores are crowded with people buying drinks and munchies to serve to their guests all through the night - for, in one guise or another in almost every house a new year celebration is planned and is being executed come midnight!

The whole area resounds with gunfire at the stroke of 12, because trigger-happy residents - translate men with inferiority complexes have to reassert their masculinity and machoism with appendages and phallic symbols, and nothing tops, cars and guns. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is out on his motorcycle, car, or a SUV on the streets of this wonders of wonder. And, in case you own a gun, a killing machine along with a car you are the perfect and complete alpha male and therefore must be eyed and drooled upon by all potentially virile females.

And then there is a mad scramble to reach the party. All the roads and major intersections are blocked - a brilliant but failed idea of some traffic lackey somewhere in the chain - people instead of getting to where they are going get stuck up on the road and like us wannabes, welcome the new year in the car sulking and bitching about the traffic.

Finally, comes the party! UFFFF, how mendaciously boring and predictable, the conversation is next to nothing, the company absurd, the drinking out of hand, the collection of characters most strange and the whole idea of trying to be someone who we are not evident in the air.

The drinks are hard, the constitution of the drinkers weak and that makes for so not a pleasant a combination. Both men and women drink, no, gulp down alcohol as though they are in a race to chase the bottle. Combine this tendency with not so wonderful and totally uninteresting personalities and you have a bunch of people you'd never want to be near in a million years come what may!

The parties of Defence on this fateful night are boring, very predictable and totally inane, I wish I never make it to the one this year!!!

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