Then and now: Lahore’s hangouts

Well now, let me tell you something. I have been around long enough to remember when ‘hanging out’ did not need a Wi-Fi password.

I got the idea to write this after reading a piece by our talented young writer, Fatima Ahmad, called ‘Youth Hangouts in Lahore’ on the Minute Mirror website. That article stirred up quite a storm in the comments, and from what I hear, it is going viral all over town. Well done, Fatima Ahmad, you got folks talking, and that’s no small thing.

Reading her piece got me thinking about my own younger days, back in the 80s and 90s, and how different things were then. So let me take a little stroll down memory lane.

Back in my day, our favorite hangout was not a café with fancy coffee or mood lighting. No sir. It was a friend’s drawing room. If the weather was nice, we would climb up to the rooftop instead. That was it. No entry fee, no minimum order, no Wi-Fi to fight over. Just a few plastic chairs, maybe a charpai, and a whole lot of talking that could stretch on for hours.

If it was winter, the drawing room kept us warm with a quilt thrown over everybody’s knees. If it was a clear summer night, we would go for the rooftop and a cool breeze. Either way, the cost was zero rupees. The only thing required was a friend willing to open the door.

For a little while, snooker clubs had their moment of glory. Young men would gather around the green table. It was not expensive, and it gave us something to do with our hands while we talked about everything under the sun, such as cricket, politics, girls, exams we had not studied for. That phase did not last forever, but boy, it was fun while it lasted.

Now here is something that has not changed one bit: the roadside tea stall, or dhaba. Back then, and even today, a dhaba remains the great place for gupshup for the people of our age. It does not matter if you are a rich man’s son or a working man’s son. Everybody sits on the same bench, drinks the same cup of doodh patti, and pays the same ten or twenty rupees for it. It is one of the few hangouts that has survived the test of time, and reading Fatima’s piece, I am glad to see the dhaba still gets a mention even today.

And let us not forget the college canteen. That was our version of a “co-working space,” except instead of laptops, we had textbooks we mostly ignored. Friends would gather between classes, share a plate of samosas, and somehow manage to solve all the world’s problems before the next lecture started.

Now Fatima’s article tells me today’s youth have a whole different world — cafés in Gulberg and DHA, shopping malls, gaming zones, and over 170 co-working spaces, if you can believe that. Where we had a charpai and a cup of tea, the zoomers have espresso machines and fast Wi-Fi. Where we had snooker clubs, they have got gaming zones. It is the same basic need, a place to relax, talk, and belong.

But here is where I support Fatima’s point: not every young person can afford those café bills. Back in my time, a rooftop or a dhaba cost nothing or next to nothing. Today, a single café outing can run into thousands of rupees. That’s a real difference, and it’s worth thinking about.

So maybe the lesson here, for old folks like me and young folks like Fatima’s readers, is this: hangouts will always change shape with the times, but the heart of it stays the same — people just want a place to belong.