A photo journal from my life

I reside in hostel which doesn’t have any mess facility, so I had to visit Old Anarkali Food Street for my daily meals. Through this photo journal, I’ll be highlighting the route from my hostel to a restaurant at Anarkali which I usually visit.

Let’s begin our journey.

Students from my hostel, despite the water on the pitch, improvising the conditions and playing cricket.

Usual traffic at Kacheri Road, leading towards Anarkali. Its a good stop for rickshaw drivers.

Too much traffic at New Anarkali, blocking the way of even pedestrians.

Parked vehicles covering almost half of the way to Anarkali.

Traffic lights aren’t working, vehicles from all sides of road and pedestrians crossing at the same time.

A protest happening due to high gas bills, blocking the way of all traffic at Mall Road.

The busy entrance of Food Street.

Every hotel in food street has hired some guys for their publicity and marketing, who get in the way of every crossing person and introduce their hotel and menu.

Here we are, at our destination.

Through this photo journal, I want to highlight some key issues which I observed. The first question which arises is why do I need to travel this route daily? I got admitted to one of the biggest universities in Punjab, which is on top of the list of government universities and still I’m deprived of one of the basic necessities required at hostel. This makes me think of the level of facilities available to under privilege area students. If this is the level at the top of the rank, what will be the situation down the order? Being in final year, and also doing a job, time is the most important asset of mine, from which I have to spare 2 hours daily for this basic life need which could have been done under 15 minutes if the facility was provided at the hostel.

The second issue which I observed was related to the management of Anarkali. The street vendors have marked their permanent place in front of the shops, after them is a long line of parked vehicles, leaving even less than half of the total width to regular traffic. Due to this, mostly the traffic is stuck, blocking even the way of pedestrians. Being one of the key monuments and an old market in Lahore, Anarkali at least deserves a place for parking vehicles. If we come to solve the problem of street vendors, the first step of design thinking, i.e. empathize, comes in the way. We need to provide them some alternate place to earn their livelihood, but we don’t have enough resources.

The third gap I want to highlight is a social one. Although, there are traffic laws written in our constitution, but hardly anyone of us follows those. I find it quite hard to cross the roads during busy times because firstly, the traffic lights aren’t working and traffic from all sides is converging making it hard to cross the road. Even if the traffic lights are working, most of the people, specially the bikers, don’t follow them. Even the pedestrians don’t follow the zebra crossing rules making them exposed to a possible collision with a vehicle. If we need to solve these issues, we need to bring a change and start with yourself.