Woke up again today with the sound of thunder and glimpses of lightning through my bedroom window. Another stormy day for the residents of Karachi which is now becoming quite a frequent occurrence and disrupts life across the city regularly.
While I rearrange my activities for the day to suit the weather conditions I am thinking of the effect that this change in weather will have on the various crops, and especially the fruit varieties, including my favourite fruit mango.
Already my friends tell me that the reports from Multan about the next mango crop are not very encouraging.
Other fruits too of the citrus family like kinoos who are on their way out season-wise might be impacted during their next season. Another fruit that I am worried about is apple as this is another favourite for fruit lovers.
All these crops are endangered at various stages of their development and farmers throughout Pakistan have to be extra vigilant and careful; otherwise, we might lose some of these precious crops.
While the farmers in the fields adjust to the new weather conditions the people living in big cities have also to adjust to the new weather conditions which they do with the new lifestyles that have become an integral part of our lives since the Covid experience and top of the list is the work from home method. This is also now the standard method to tackle sudden rainstorms and inclement weather in Karachi.
As clouds gather, office workers speedily wind up their work in their offices and head home to finish whatever they were doing at their respective residences. With each passing day the work from home method offers new advantages and more people adopt it for different reasons.
As if inclement weather was not the only motivation this method is also now being considered to save petrol, which is in short supply internationally by declaring few days as work from home. This obviously requires a responsible response from those affected so that they handle their assignments with the same efficiency as if they were actually in their respective offices.
It is a difficult task as environments at home in Pakistan may not be conducive to work and the households might not take it seriously.
In most cases what is required is separate work area for the bread-earner of the family but than there might not be enough space to accommodate such a work station and the concerned person might have to carry on his or her work in the midst of screaming children, smoke and smells of different aromatic foods and all the other smells and sounds of a middle class home.
Achieving creativity in this atmosphere is really a remarkable feat but it is being done in many households in Pakistan and in metropolitan cities like Karachi where work from home is very common and has intensified in recent days in view of the erratic weather conditions that force employees to either stay at home and work or hurry home from their place of work as storm clouds gather around the city.
So how popular is the work from home experience? The statistics are simply mind boggling. On any given day. roughly 330 million people worldwide work remotely; of them there are professional, scientific, and technical services (41.4%), information (38.8%), and finance (37.6%), which hold the highest percentages of remote workers. Western countries lead in remote work adoption, while Asia has a lower adoption rate. Something that was the result of a deadly epidemic has moved from a pandemic necessity to a staple employment model for many organizations.
Sometime ago I had read about a young man who gave up his life to try and save his laptop. He was confronted by two robbers who demanded he gave up his laptop. Little do uneducated dacoits know about the value of a laptop and especially if the owner has been working on it for a whole day.
The young man refused and tried to grapple with the dacoits who calmly shot him and he died on the way to some hospital. As the saying goes, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip and there are many dangers lurking between working from home and working in the office. In the crime-ridden streets of Karachi work from home might not be as easy as it sounds.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a well-known columnist
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