Daily Times

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.

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

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