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We moved to Islamabad at the time when Junejo shrunk the sizes of all cars for bureaucrats. So from a fleet of cars and an army of security personnel, in our palatial house in the province we moved to a shrunken car, no security, no trees and a rented place we never could call home. It was so small even our cats ran away. Within a year we moved to F-6 where every one we knew lived a door or a street away. Life was suddenly good for my eight year old understanding, for I had a lawn and pets again. The air was clean, the trees plenty. It was almost as if the entire city was germless, spick and span. Then Islamabad used to be called thirty minutes from Pakistan, apparently a city so perfect it had none of the problems that Pakistan had.

We didn’t understand that even then Islamabad was divided, keeping a certain class into the G-sectors and some into the F-sectors. We hardly went there and when we did it didn’t seem to matter. We were kids. Nothing mattered back then.

I couldn’t understand in early 1980s why the school I went to was urdu-medium. Why the state had changed that? I’d moved from a convent school to an urdu medium government school but then we didn’t have a choice. It was all what my parents could afford. No doubt it was the school where the elite in the bureaucracy sent their children.

We went for nightly drives to a silent Jinnah Market, with closed shops and our volkswagon being the only car brave enough to handle the occasional families of boars that came out of nowhere. Children had nowhere to go until they opened the Japanese park and the there was the zoo but we were happy. Happy with our half an hour of television in heated lounges. Life was simple. Every one knew every body else. The shop keepers knew our names, the neighbours were all friends and every one knew they were equals. There was no or little jealousy. We did sense how our fathers won or lost friends and visitors as he was transferred from one ministry to another, usually at the same time as change of governments. How the phone calls increased or reduced but we never talked about it. Children never talked about how cool or big their fathers were. It was discouraged and uncouth. We were all too disciplined. In fact the occasional sighting of a young lad driving his father’s official car was the scandal of the week. All wives worked voluntarily at Behbud and APWA, and the annual fairs was like a family get together.

Perhaps the first sign of things to change was when all houses got that ugly circular mass on their roof tops and suddenly your success was measured by how many or how big a dish you had.

Things changed drastically when situation in Karachi got worse and all the rich and the mighty moved to F-10, a place we in F-6 considered to be a different city. Like Rawalpindi perhaps. Pindi was also another city, <em>’paindoo’</em> was what we called it. It wasn’t cool to be from there or to visit there. We were proud of our secluded world. With F-10 came a new breed of young fashionable youth who would fight in school over who was richer, who’s house had underground parking while who’s house had a swimming pool in the basement. It didn’t mean anything to us but we learnt that apparently these things matter. Suddenly it mattered how much you spent in the school cafeteria. Those like us refrained from going near the cafeteria as we took our packed lunches. Suddenly our fathers despite being in grade 21 or 22 were ‘poor’ because we didn’t own a single car, we had not travelled abroad and so on and so forth. It didn’t matter that the Prime Minister or the ministers called our homes. That our father’s appeared daily on television with those who run the country, the fact that our fathers actually did run the country. It didn’t matter. Surprisingly we’d been taught not to be proud of it or to show it off and now our companions were all people show showed off things that mattered so little.

As we grew older none of us kids wanted to go into the civil service. We’d seen our father’s work hard, sometimes all through the night for little money and little respect from the political governments. We were told that like all good things, this elitest lifestyle will come to an end and we have to make something of ourselves. We also wanted to have jobs where we were more secure. Putting your father’s name on the CV was not generally acceptable to most people. We also wanted to have jobs where we were more secure. Most of us went into the private sector. This was at a time when multi-nationals were moving to Islamabad so opportunities were plenty. There were also NGOs where uni-sex clothing and children of the English speaking elite spoke of liberation of all under privileged, women, children, and even men over-burdened in the patriarchal system. We all grabbed our opportunities and most of us, having had studied only from state funded institutions managed to do well as we’d learnt the value of hard work. It was about being more than some one’s child. It was about making it on our own.

But things didn’t remain so forever. The areas past Fatima Jinnah Park slowly merged into the rest of Islamabad. Very soon, where you lived, what you wore and the car you drove became as important as the people you mingled with. Friends were made for networking purposes, the more important the person the more ‘friends’ he has. Ironically we’ve seen this in our childhood and see how superficial it all is.

Lately Islamabad has been changed outright. The trees, the one aspect that made Islamabad special, are being cut down. New roads are being constructed to make room for the plenty of cars although there is still no place to park them. Every single crossing has been branded by one of the million companies out there. There is nothing that sets the ‘federal capital’ apart from any other large city anymore. Most of all, now people all have problems with water shortage, sewerage system, no proper waste disposal systems, inadequate and too expensive health care and the list goes on. The barriers have been broken down. Islamabad is like any other city now.

The last straw has been the army’s genuine attempt to move from ‘pindi; to the ‘cool and happening’ Islamabad. Desperate to become the newly formed elite and to show off their newly acquired wealth and contacts, they too have moved out here. The superficiality of life that was frowned upon before has now become institutionalized. People consciously choose the sectors they live in to show their prestige, while magazines like GT show pictures of all social wanna-be’s clinging to one another for a moment in the limelight. It’s the era of the Nouveau-riche.

The car leasing companies now give out big cars to people who feel they own the world for cars are today what mobiles were five years ago. Who’s mobile was bigger and cooler than whom’s. And yet, the number of bicycles and public transport has increased. The poor have increased but are submerged and now seen in the mass of cars zooming down the roads.

Islamabad has now been taken over by this new alien culture of where every one wishes to be powerful and popular. Jobs are still given on the domiciles, or on the person’s last name if not the father’s name written prominently on paper. Those who truly are from here, who’ve seen the ups and downs of such a social set up watch from the side lines and laugh at the fickle world. New expensive restaurants are emerging for the rich, some cater to the ‘cool’ while there are hardly any that cater to all of Islamabad, except perhaps at Pir Sohawa where all gather irrespective of social status and power. Along with this has increased the number of sexual harassers on the streets, men who follow the newly liberated women in the cars and knowing they have no one to stop them. No laws against them, and the police plays no role for every one is so important today that they can’t touch anyone. Today we live in an Islamabad where every one is so important that no one is important any more.