I spent two weeks in Paris. Two weeks walking through a city that behaves as if it has signed a lifelong contract with order, beauty, and self-respect. And then, almost immediately after, I went to Peshawar. The distance between the two cities is measured in kilometers, but the distance in time feels like several centuries. In fact, the journey felt less like travel and more like time travel — from a functioning present into a past that seems unsure whether the future ever arrived.
Paris welcomes you gently. It does not shout. It does not push. It does not honk every three seconds to remind you of its existence. The roads are clean, marked, and respected. Traffic flows like a disciplined orchestra; every car, bicycle, and pedestrian knows its cue. People stop at red lights even when no one is watching. Not because they fear punishment, but because rules there are not seen as insults to personal freedom.
After two weeks of this calm civilization, I landed in Peshawar.
It felt as if a war had ended just yesterday. Not the kind that leaves ruins, but the kind that damages the collective nervous system. People were out on the roads, alive and moving, yet disoriented — as if they had survived something traumatic and had lost their sense of time and space. There was motion everywhere, but no direction. Noise without purpose. Energy without coordination. Evolution, it seemed, had paused here for a tea break and forgotten to come back.
If Paris is organized, Peshawar is improvisation at its finest — or worst. If Paris plans, Peshawar reacts. If Paris thinks in systems, Peshawar thinks in moments. The roads in Paris are built to serve people; the roads in Peshawar appear to exist purely to test patience, suspension systems, and faith in humanity. Lanes are suggestions. Signals are decorative. Zebra crossings are abstract art pieces, meant to be admired, not used.
Parisians follow rules with an almost boring consistency. In Peshawar, rules exist mainly to provide people the thrill of breaking them. Traffic laws are treated like mild advice given by a well-meaning but irrelevant uncle. Helmets are optional, wrong-way driving is a creative choice, and honking is not communication — it is a lifestyle.
Paris feels modern. Peshawar feels medieval — not in the romantic sense of castles and knights, but in the sense of dust, disorder, and survival instincts. Paris invites you to return, again and again, whispering promises of discovery. Peshawar, on the other hand, gives you a single strong feeling: I hope I never have to come back.
Paris is a city of museums. Peshawar itself is a museum — except that the exhibits are alive, loud, and completely unaware that history has moved on. Everything here belongs to the past, yet refuses to admit it. Time has not frozen politely; it has stalled aggressively.
Of course, for those who live here, all of this looks normal. Chaos becomes invisible when you grow up inside it. As the saying goes, a mental hospital is the only place where every insane person feels perfectly sane — it is only the outsider who notices that something is deeply wrong. Coming straight from Paris, I felt like that outsider. I kept waiting for order to appear, for logic to arrive late, apologizing for the delay. It never did.
What lingered in my mind, both tenderly and sadly, was the memory of a well-known poet from Peshawar who once wrote that Pashtuns taught civilization to the rest of the world. As I stood still in traffic and watched people drift across the road, unhurried and unafraid, as if steel and speed had quietly agreed not to harm them, I felt a quiet question rise within me: which civilization was that, and might it one day find its way back home? The thought itself is not meant to mock the claim, but to marvel at how strangely words can echo when the world around them has moved in another direction.
On a lighter note, if you ever plan to visit Peshawar, here is some friendly advice: do not bring a modern vehicle equipped with advanced sensors, scanners, and warning systems. Your car will not survive the psychological shock. It will beep continuously, panic at every angle, and eventually question its own existence. In Paris, such vehicles feel safe and intelligent. In Peshawar, they develop anxiety disorders within minutes.