As Islamabad prepares for another opposition march, drivers and businesses are counting the cost of the barricades.
Islamabad, Pakistan — Two boys scale the rusted corner of a shipping container marked “EVERGREEN” in block white letters. They kick up into handstands, legs steady, without so much as a glance upward, even as traffic passes on the road behind them.
The clip runs 27 seconds, cut exactly to a verse from rap singer Cheema Y’s Punjabi track “Police”, about containers of smuggled goods crossing the border that nobody can account for.
The four-tonne container beneath their feet carries nothing at all. It is one of what transport associations and officials put at between 1,500 and 2,000 heavy steel boxes barricading Islamabad’s roads ahead of an opposition march.
The idea for the video, shared on Instagram six days ago, was the brainchild of 26-year-old Mujaddad Asrar, a callisthenics and parkour athlete. Asrar has been staging shoots like this one on Islamabad’s containers for several years. This clip, along with several others, went out from a friend’s account rather than his own, because the friend has a bigger following, he says.
“It’s like clockwork every year,” he told Al Jazeera. “One lot of containers or another comes right on time, like it’s part of the calendar. It’s basically a fifth season.
“Yeah, these containers have now made Islamabad as Containerabad,” he added, cheerfully.
