One of the worst things that can happen to an op-ed writer is to have to change the topic of what he or she wishes to write just before the deadline. I had sort of settled on my topic but then I had to drive down to Lahore airport a few hours ago. Having visited Karachi three weeks ago I kept wondering what was so different between Karachi and Lahore. There was not much of an obvious difference between the two cities. There was however something that was very different and I just could not put my finger on it. My trip to the airport brought it back to me. I saw no army or police checkpoints anywhere on the main roads in Karachi that slowed traffic down to a crawl, especially none on my way to the airport. We in Punjab are well aware of the horrible security situation in Karachi and how badly the rangers were needed, yet the absence of roadblocks in front of the government or armed forces buildings made me wonder a bit about all the roadblocks in Lahore. As far as the ones on the way to the airport are concerned, as I thought about them I realised that interestingly they are found at the entry points intoLahore’scantonment areas. These roadblocks it would then seem are there not to protect ordinary citizens but rather the protectors and their families. Of course I am all for protecting the families as well as the men and women of our armed forces who are fighting so valiantly against the terrorists and now even corruption. Though I must admit that over almost a decade of these security roadblocks, I do not remember a single incident where any major group of terrorists was stopped or a major attack thwarted by them. As far as police roadblocks are concerned, forgive me for being cynical but they seem more designed to shake down motorcyclists of the young sort. That then brought up another related but very interesting question. Why are all the major roads in Lahore being made signal free except the Mall Road? The Mall is one road that has some of the worst traffic and I know that since I travelled twice a day, six days a week from one end to the other for almost seven years. I figured out the answer to that question also. Even if you make the Mall signal free, you will still have to have multiple roadblocks when entering the cantonment, when passing in front of the police barracks, when passing in front of the Chief Minister’s (CM’s) office and the Governor House, and then when reaching the civil secretariat. The basic problem I have with all the new signal free over, under and sideway passes is that at least within the city it is quite often that we see slow moving motor rickshaws, motorcycles and an occasional donkey cart sharing the same signal free road, slowing traffic down enough that the aggregate speed with which we manage to traverse Ferozepur Road for instance is now about the same as it was before the famous over and underpasses. I do realise that I sound anti-development but, as a physician, I would have hoped that some of the money being spent on making Lahore’s roads signal free had instead been spent on improving the quality of care available to the poor people of Lahore in our major public hospitals. I am sure that just one underpass costs more than the money needed to clean up and add public bathrooms in all of the 2,200beds inMayo Hospital. But then I quite understand the embarrassment our CMwill have to go through for being the ‘man who fixed the bathrooms’ in Mayo Hospital. So, roads it will be and little else that may improve the lives of the famous masses every politician seems to be working for. And, of course, other than the workers involved in breaking down and rebuilding Lahore’s roads, few of the masses benefit from them since they do not own cars and do not live in places where signal free roads are even accessible. And no, I am not going to become nostalgic and start talking about the days when Jail Road actually had a jail on it, or Main Boulevard in Gulberg was a tree-lined, rather under travelled road, or when Liberty Market was the end of Lahore, and when Walton and Kot Lakhpat were separate towns. And no, I do not want to talk of the times when my friends and I went drag racing on the Mall either. That Lahore is gone forever. But it does not mean that Lahore should be converted into a concrete jungle like Dubai. Lahore, after all, was already a beautiful and vibrant city, a centre of arts, education and culture while Dubai was just a fishing village. To build itself Dubai just needed money since all the space was just an empty desert. But converting Lahore into Dubai means that old Lahore has to be destroyed first. It is not progress that people like me lament but rather the need to create monstrous concrete artefacts that our present leaders evidently want to be their contributions to posterity. But then, as I said above, building a road also sounds much better on a politician’s resume than fixing bathrooms in a public hospital. I also understand the need for security that is represented by the police and army roadblocks but I wonder if anybody has ever carried out an analysis of their efficacy. I wonder if the public inconvenience that results from these impediments to traffic has ever been proven to be of any benefit in terms of improved security. Frankly, modern day terrorists are too smart to be stopped or deterred by these roadblocks manned mostly by a bunch of utterly bored personnel. The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)