aleem

> This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends. His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".

> But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

It results from lack of ownership which makes accountability hard (politicized institutions with diverging agendas). During these rains, an entire township (Naya Nazimabad) sank underwater and many areas are still waterlogged. This township was built on top of a low-lying lake that was reclaimed. The approval of such projects involves dozens of authorities, each of whom charges an "expediency fees" and corruption is deep rooted within them. An officer who comes in for a 2-4 year tenure on low government salaries is incentivized to maximize his earnings during his short tenure.

The second is the lack of engineering involvement. The government sector doesn't exactly attract the top talent at good salaries. The tenders on the other hand are awarded based on nepotism and personal gain. There is a long list of botched projects in the civil sector. None of the desalination and water treatments plants are operational, in the entire city, for example. They have not been for years now.

The sewerage infrastructure in many parts of the city, as exists right now, is worse than the French sewers built in the 14th century[1]. These sewers are open-top and become dumping grounds for garbage due to lack of a garbage collection infrastructure. The encroachments around and above these sewers fall victim to Tragedy of Commons[2]. The whole thing is a mess with no easy solution and if this years' heavy rainfalls become a future trend, the situation will be unsustainable. Many homes were waterlogged for days and weeks with no power or connectivity (cell towers have around 24-48 hours of standby power after which they went down).