Vagaries
of inflation
Shakir
Lakhani
NOVEMBER 5, 2019
Whenever retired senior citizens meet, they invariably talk
about how to survive in these days of runaway inflation. Their income is fixed,
as they live mostly on their pensions, and if they’ve been wise, they get
dividends from their investments. In fact, senior citizens are the ones who
suffer the most from rising prices. They often talk about how they manage to
make ends meet.
One of them says he now has a haircut once in three months;
another has got his head shaved so he won’t have to go to a barber for six
months at least. Some of them now buy their diabetes and hypertension pills
from shops selling smuggled medications from India and China. These are
available at half the prices of locally manufactured medicines. As for edible
items, it’s been a long time since they last ate apples or mangoes, while the
cost of meat has turned almost all of them into vegetarians.
The cheapest haircut I remember cost four annas (twenty-five
paisas or quarter of a rupee) in the nineteen fifties. By 1980, the cost of a
haircut had risen to five rupees. Today, it varies from a hundred (in the
slums) to a couple of thousand in the posh areas of Karachi. I do not know how
much a roadside barber charges nowadays, as I haven’t been to the old city for
many years now. You’re sure to be deprived of your cell phone and wallet if you
are stupid enough to go there.
I remember buying a good pair of shoes for just fourteen
rupees after getting through my matric exams in 1960. Recently, after an
expensive pair of mine was stolen while I was offering Friday prayers (the
third time it happened), I thought I’d buy a cheaper pair to wear on such
occasions so as not to feel bad every time my shoes were stolen. Someone told
me of a place in the Pakistan Chowk where new factory-rejected shoes are
available at throwaway prices. The cheapest pair I found cost eight hundred
rupees. Compare this with the prices of shoes in Clifton, which range from five
thousand to twenty thousand rupees. The astounding thing is that even the shops
selling very expensive shoes are always full of customers.
The same goes for dentists. Within a stone’s throw from my
work place in Clifton, there are six dentists. The most expensive one charges
eight thousand rupees just to look at your teeth, so if you want to have a
tooth removed, you’ll find yourself poorer by fifteen thousand. Twenty years
ago I paid rupees fifteen hundred for removing an infected tooth. The cheapest
one charges a thousand for the same job, and undoubtedly, there are dentists in
the slums who charge half this amount. One would’ve thought the expensive guy
wouldn’t have many customers, but no, his waiting room is always full. And he
will continue making millions even if the price of petrol is trebled.
I’ve accidentally discovered something that apparently no
economist in the country has noticed: the link between gold price and the price
of goat meat. I remember when goat meat used to cost about a rupee a seer (a
seer was roughly the same weight as a kilo). It is now a thousand to eleven
hundred rupees a kilo. The price of gold has also increased by the same ratio.
A tola of gold used to cost seventy to eighty rupees in those days. Gold price
too has increased a thousand fold to eighty thousand per tola.
With this information, it should be easy for the government
to control inflation: just force gold dealers to reduce their prices steadily
to about half of what they are today. And there is only one way to do it. The
PTI got sixteen million votes in last year’s elections. We can assume that a
quarter of these voters were women. So the Great Khan only has to ask all his
four million plus women followers to sell their gold in the local market and
see how gold prices tumble, along with the prices of meat and other edibles.
Please note that I’m offering this advice not because I’m the Dear Leader’s
fan, I’m doing it for the benefit of my countrymen. And I don’t want any credit
for it either.
The writer is an engineer, a former visiting lecturer at NED
Engineering College
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