S.A.J. Shirazi

Winter in sprawling Lahore spells horror for thousands of residents. Not because of cold but due to the phenomenon of smog. Let your gaze roam over the cityscape while standing on top of the Yadgar-e-Pakistan and one finds how the skyline of the minarets and domes looks dark and sad against the clouds of thick smog.

The fog is triggered by temperature inversion – the formation of a static layer of cooler air close to the ground as the nighttime temperature drops. Normally, air closer to the ground is warmer than the air above it, and therefore rises. Inversions are frequent on winter nights after the ground has cooled down so much that it begins to chill the air closest to it often causing mist to form as water vapor precipitates on dust particles. Normally the morning sun swiftly breaks through the mist and heats the ground, which warms the air above it, breaking the inversion.

Adil Najam

According to the 1998 census, the population of Lahore was 6,319,000 (6 million) inhabitants.

According to today’s Daily Times, these inhabitants managed to make 9,580,902 (9.5 million) crank (prank or hoax) calls to the emergency 15 number in 2008 (how many cranck calls were made to other numbers remains unknown, but is likely to also be an obnoxiously large number). No matter what the current population of Lahore might be, if these numbers are true it means that on average each Lahori man, woman and child made more than one crank call of Emergency 15 in 2008.

We are, in fact, an emergency-prone people, as evidenced by the fact that there were an (additional) 52,486 calls that were in fact legitimate calls to Emergency 15. This means that only about one-half a percent (of 1 in every 200) of calls received by Emergency 15 were legitimate.

Owais Mughal