are you insane?

An opening of a new outlet of clothes in Pakistan opens a window for mockery that chirps the sonnet of insanity. People come, chatter, smirk, sway, sip and leave.  Insanity in disguise. Cameramen with big cameras, over-polished anchors on the lookout for an interview, grabbing women with shimmering make-up and screaming clothes, and men with dazed quantity of hair gel and confused statue-of-liberty hairdos, and neatly placed snacks on flying platters.  Glam and clam just don’t mix, so loudness is the requirement if you want to be noticed. 

Girls would take enough time to make sure their lip gloss is shiny enough, top is revealing or clingy, shoes are spotless, mobile phone is fancy, accessories are blink blink, hair is blow dried, and on arrival, gait is flying with flirtatious whiff. All the preparation pays off when enveloped with default remark ‘You look so pretty’. Everyone is labeled pretty no mater how unattractive one looks, how distastefully one’s dressed up or how grotesque is the image. So, don’t be flattered, it’s just a cliché. After such effort-ful time before arrival, girls those who are twenty and those who are fifty (yes they deserved to be called girls too, after all it’s just an age.) they forget the most important thing to carry, THEIR WALLETS WITH MONEY OR CREDIT CARDS. I wonder if they even know it’s a shop’s opening they are going to, not a club’s. Well, it’s apparent that who cares buying when cocktails and snacks are for free.

Well, men behave pointless to the occasion and will repeat their default statement, ‘Business is slump. Recession is too bad on us.’ Again, it’s a cliché. Amazingly business looks unharmed when their wives and children are showered with big ‘pocket money’. Do they even know what recession is or what causes it?   Apart from this, do they even know why people are invited at an opening? You go to a shop to buy bread when you have money not when you are hungry. By the way, do the shop owners recover the expense of their ‘glam shine event’ from their sales on that day? I don’t think so.

I feel more pity on the products displayed in the shop. Whether bags, shoes, accessories or clothes, they are just ‘deported’ from one shop to a new one. One can easily see the finger prints on quite many handbags that show how many hearts wanted to own them but oh golly, their price tags, they come with high voltage shocks. I have seen many women who, before even picking a bag, remarks ‘I don’t need one at the moment’ they pick one up, roll it over  (b’cause price tag is always hiding), keep it rolling and place it back carefully and finishes the last part of remark ‘and this is not even the colour I wanted and size is too big’. Hmm…did the colour change from what you saw before picking it up? Ah, I can see how bag’s emotions are hurt. On the other hand, clothes don’t have to show their misery with finger prints. Their erectile threads speak of their shelf age. I remembered many from an opening of Karma’s boutique on Zamzama. But they are lucky, they don’t have to pay for their travel.

Besides, why blaming the populace or the privileged, a local handbag for 6,000, low quality imported branded shoes for 10,000, and good lord, local designer-wear with high quality glitches for  minimum 25,000! Hey you guys, have you heard of global economic crises? Or is global warming the only flash that comes in mind when word global is spoken? Well I salute the MEN who have come up with a new cliché ‘recession’ and use it to get away.