Stepping out of isolation

I received at least 20 personal travel advisories before coming to Johannesburg. Don't get mugged (do I have a choice?), don't be shot (thanks for that one, I'll try my best), don't stick your hand out of a moving car (okay), don't walk around outside after sunset (vampires?), don't go to an ATM alone, don't wear a watch, leather, smart shoes, nice shirts and shoes (am I travelling to the 17th annual Hobo World Summit?).

It's quite a feat because, coming from Karachi, theoretically there aren't many places in the world where you can go to and not feel safe. It got to me initially and my first day here I spent eyeing everyone a little furtively before the guilt sank me: it's a terrible way to be in a new country, especially one where the sky can be as big and as beautiful and as pure as here.

This security thing is a strange business and I'm not sure it's something we'll ever come to terms with. I can live happily in Pakistan with the Taliban and suicide bombings and growing urban crime and yet be nervous coming into Johannesburg. It is not something that has to be understood anymore, it is something that just has to be lived with.

*************

International isolation plays all kinds of tricks with the mind. For various reasons, it hasn't been easy for Pakistanis to travel in recent years, myself included in that honourable and burgeoning list. This is thus my first trip outside South Asia for many years and despite having previously lived abroad, I have felt out of sync.

We say in Pakistan that Karachi is so cosmopolitan, bursting with all kinds of Pakistanis, and in terms of the rest of the country, it is. But compared to Dubai or Johannesburg, Karachi is one person cloned 15 million times over. And to mingle among this mass of culture, dialect, language, colour, to interact, can be disorienting at first if you're not used to it. Slights are seen where none are intended, words are misheard, intent can be misunderstood, gestures and the nuances of those gestures are easily overlooked.

It's like learning how to be a person of the world again and to do this in a city like Johannesburg, which houses three to four entire worlds within one city, is altogether trickier. Globalisation hasn't yet fully come to Pakistan, and much as the country has hurried along over the last 20 years, the world seems still to be passing the country by. It's difficult to capture in a space like this, for it is seen largely in little things, like airports, or customer service at shops, or roads and public transport, or the size of malls and the number of global brands in them, or buying proper, not pirated, CDs, or grand cinemas, or skyscrapers.

On the plane over, two kids sat next to me, whizzing through the touch-screen TV on their seats as if they came out of their mothers' wombs holding just such a contraption. I meanwhile fumbled along, vainly searching for buttons, trying to make sense of all the symbols, amazed at all the options and at how far in-flight entertainment had come. I finally adjusted but until I had I felt like a pensioner, and I'm not even in my mid-30s. More relevantly, I felt as if from another world altogether, where you're lucky if you get a smile on the plane.

I can see why then so many expatriates don't try to overcome this, don't try to adjust, because it isn't easy. It is much easier to seek the comfort of your own and what you know. It is not the way ahead.

Pakistan's cricket team is also coming out of and battling isolation. It will not be easy.