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THE past couple of weeks have been packed with news and not just of the international kind. There were elections in Azad Kashmir, verbal duelling between the PPP and PML-N and an intense debate on a system that has collapsed. And in the midst of this came the matter of superior sounding administrative units versus local governments.
What more could a journalist want? Yet more bad news it seems. For there was a relatively unimportant news item in the oft-ignored city pages of this paper, which announced a new underpass at the injunction of Margalla Road and Eighth Avenue. It seems as if someone, somewhere in the hallways of CDA has decided the short wait at the crossing is a wait too long. And Dubai-like, the rich residents of Islamabad should also not have to wait at all, for modernity means zooming around wide roads.
So a new underpass the city shall have — at a junction where the avenue is called Faisal Avenue, for it leads up to the mosque, in the green lap of the Margallas.
It is hard to keep count of the underpasses and flyovers CDA has inflicted upon this small city, especially in recent times. The new boss of the city, Mohsin Naqvi, is surely inspired by his boss, Shehbaz Sharif. As chief minister of Punjab, Naqvi was praised for his ‘Mohsin speed’, a term which paid homage to him and Shehbaz Sharif who too had been awarded a similar epithet. Both were praised for the speed at which they built projects.
