mehreenkasana:

How much wealth can one flaunt before the miserably poor before they decide to do something about it? My daily room rent at the club was more than the monthly salaries of most of the staff. I ate dinners with friends that cost more than the monthly salary of government school teachers. I bought a shirt for my wife that could have paid the tuition for a child to attend school for a year. It was about 65 dollars and hand-embroidered. How much can one indulge oneself before one senses some dissonance? Before one feels some shame? And I am not saying this is a unique Pakistani problem: I have felt something similar stepping out of the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York after a round of drinks with friends and hopping over a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box to get into my taxi. That too is obscene. That too has made me feel sick.

Unequal distribution of wealth and income have been much in the news in the West in recent years and discussions of these subjects in the more serious intellectual journals have reached a fever pitch recently since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s tour de force, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which adduces new evidence and arguments to show, among other things, that concentrations of capital and income in the top 1% of the richest persons in America have now once again reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. And there is much discussion there on how to combat and curb these fundamentally inegalitarian trends. But in Pakistan, where things seem much, much more extreme, there is little or no talk of how to redistribute wealth. The dreams of social justice of the 1960s and 70s have not just died, they have long been buried and forgotten.

The Discombobulating Hedonism and Exclusivity of a Karachi Club