KARACHI — At approximately 11:37 AM this Eid, 27-year-old Sana Ahmed emerged from her duvet only to text her WhatsApp group: “Y’all, Eid just isn’t the same.” That proved prophetic, by 9 PM, after a marathon 10-hour scroll session, she’d declared the holiday officially “underwhelming.”
“I woke up and opened our Eid WhatsApp thread,” Sana recalled between swipes. “Everyone was griping that ‘Eid feels wrong,’ so we started forwarding pics of girls in full festive glam and promising, ‘Next year, we’ll do this.’”
“I remember Eid in my childhood was completely different,” Sana says with a nostalgic smile. “I’d be up before dawn, feeding our family goat and helping my mother prepare kheer. By mid-morning I’d be racing my cousins through the alley, chasing each other before lunch time.”
She recalls the buzz of neighbors gathering on the street, aunties fussing over her new frock while uncles sharpened their knives, and the crowded courtyard at the mosque where every hug and “Eid Mubarak” felt like a warm invitation. “We were elbow-to-elbow, helping out with the qurbani, sharing meat, and swapping stories near our fav toy stall.”
When pressed about her Eid plans this year, Sana admitted she simply “couldn’t see the point” of dressing up or dragging her family out of the house. “Why should I put on a frock just to sit in traffic on the way to some relative’s home, only to stand around passing platters?” she shrugged. “Everyone’s more interested in taking the perfect plate-shot than actually talking to each other.”
She says that even her younger cousins tried to coax her into a quick hangout. “They said, ‘Come on, Aunty, let’s meet at the park for a few minutes.’ But it felt so forced: I’d rather be under my blanket than pretend to care about small talk under a sweltering sun.” Her family, resigned to her digital retreat, simply left plates of biryani by her bedside and let her doom-scroll in peace.
Still, Sana isn’t ruling out a comeback. While she found this year’s effort “exceedingly pointless,” she confesses there’s a small part of her that misses the chaos of real gatherings. “Maybe next Eid I’ll surprise myself and even convince my siblings to ditch their phones for an hour,” she muses. “But only if someone promises not to make me stand in a line to hug my third cousin twice removed.”