Of horses, and garbage

If you are aware of the existence of the Islamabad club’s “riding section”, and if you know how to ride, then perhaps you’ve had the experience of going from there to Shakarparian on horseback.

The path that goes there; runs through a forest. It is an exhilarating experience; you see beautiful landscape; which almost seems like a vision of paradise! There is a place where you see wild grass, farther of you see trees, then hills turning into mountains behind the trees, and the blue sky with a cloud or two above the distant mountains. It almost seems like a painting.

But what you also see while traveling through the trail are piles and piles of garbage! Where does it come from? It was a mystery to me. How did the garbage get here? It is said that some of the hotels on the Muree road dump their garbage there. At times you see a person or two dumping garbage there, while you ride on as if unaware of their existence.

It is almost a cliché to blame the authorities, or anyone else for that matter for our problems. But the issue here is a larger one, its about how we as a society dispose off “our garbage”, and at a deeper level, how we deal with our problems. The fact is that we don’t! We leave them for other people to deal with.

So we will throw garbage on the earth and someone else, the sanitation worker, CDA, or Captain Planet, or even Gaia the Spirit of the Earth will pick it up but not us!

Although this might not be an issue now, but how we deal with our problems will come back and haunt us. Maybe not today, maybe not next week, maybe not a year from now, but 15, 20 years down the line we or our children will be paying the price…

…the horses walk over the garbage. You can hear glass bottles breaking beneath their hooves. The breaking glass almost sounds like a “protest”; a protest of some long forgotten “injustice”. An attempt to express “sorrow” to some higher “Being”.

You also come across some streams, even a small river. Their water looks like “crude oil”, it was once “crystal clear”. But now it looks like oil and smells like toilet waste…the cost of man’s march towards “progress”.

The horses gallop on, occasionally a horse revolts, the rider is able to re-establish control with his whip and a few swear words. The horses have been coming to this track for years it not decades! They are old horses. They might be getting tired of coming here.

We decide to turn back before reaching Shakarparian. The horses move faster now, they are anxious to get back home. In a place or two we are greeted by barking dogs. Telling us to get off “their” territory, their hunting grounds, we are invaders in their home!

My horse gets shocked on seeing a “pig”, he jolts back. The pigs feed on the garbage, a new eco-system based on garbage has evolved; a new world has come into being. On seeing horses the pig runs away…we are now back at the club. I dismount and head towards the office to settle my account, the payment for the riding I did. A tall man with a large moustache greets me; “it’s been a while, seen you after a long time”; almost as a question. “Yes, was busy”; I say which is a lie. “Yes as you get older life becomes busier, more complex, and more difficult even. Yet you must remain an optimist. Pessimism is a sin. It happens for the better, everything happens for the “Better”!