O Karachi

#43 by tahmed32 on March 25, 2003 6:31am PT
As I mentioned in my post, this was long before I was born. I heard the story from a reliable source but cannot verify it as of course all the players have passed away and the story is based on a telephone conversation.

u`s bewafa ka shehr hay aur ham haiN dosto
ashke-rawaN ki nehr hay aur ham haiN dosto

pakfin #32 I had never heard this story before. I fault our partition day leaders for not being more proactive in protecting hindus and sikhs and assuring them that they were welcome to remain in Pakistan if they wished. In doing so, I recognize that they had their hands full, and in any case the departing British were the ones who deserve full blame for not ensuring law and order since they were the established power at the time.
HOWEVER, if LA Khan actually chastised Mr. Khuhro for protecting hindus in Karachi, then this is a serious charge against him. Are you aware of any written sources on this question? I do know that this emphasis on the Urdu language was triggered the anti-West Pakistan feelings in then East Pakistan. Even today, there are monuments in every small town in Bangladesh on the language riots of the early 1950`s, and three days of mourning in march is still done for those who died in those riots. I thought that speech was made by Jinnah in Dacca, but I could be wrong. Any light Shahzad or anyone can shed on that??

#37 by faisaluno on March 24, 2003 8:07pm PT ``punjabis take our tax rupee, baluchis take our cars, sindhis take our seats in engineeing and med schools and pathans take our lives by sending us drugs, guns and tribal islam. imagine where would pakistan be if people outside karachi pulled their load``

You seem to have gotten quite a few things wrong here. First of all Karachi is the capital of Sindh and the largest city of Pakistan. At the time of partition the locals welcomed the immigrants with open arms. However, history is witness to the fact that the post partition bureaucracy consisted primarily of Mohajirs who did all they could to help other Mohajirs at the expense of the locals. Look at all the major residential areas of Karachi. Except Defence Housing Authority almost all post partition Karachi residential land was alloted to the Mohajirs at nominal rates, not to talk of evacuee property received in claims.

Even though you talk of Karachi in your posting, it clearly has a chauvinistic ethnic ring to it.

Talking about fundamental Islam, it did not come from the Pathans, but actully primarily from the Mohajirs of Karachi and Hyderabad. If you look at the pattern of voting, in the 1970 and the 1977 elections, Mohajirs supported parties like Jamaat -i- Islami and JUI, wheras the other secular parties had their strongholds in areas consisting of other ethnic groups, eg. Wali Khans NAP in NWFP. As regards violence and crime in Karachi, we all know which groups have been responsible for it.

Now let us get to the issue of admissions in professional institutions like NED in Karachi. Out of 650 or seats that were there, 550 or so were reserved for students with Karachi domocile. Only 6 each for students from NWFP and Balauchistan, 12 for the Punjab and 35 for the rest of Sindh. The rest of the seats went to sons and daughters of engineers, army oficers and to persons excelling in extra curricular activities. The basic result of this was that persons with Karachi domicile could get in with much lower grades than persons from outside Karachi. The students coming from the rest of Pakistan were usually the top position holders from their districts.

This is just to set the record straight.

Paigham, 40,

In india no one talks about the dream of gandhi, nehru or any one for that matter. The dream is that of the living people.

Pakistan is unique in the sense that there are those who talk about jinnah, they want to realise his vision. The others want to realise the vision of the book.

That is the primary reason why no pakistani can see the reality of today. They are lost in the past, 50 year old, or 1400 years old, what a choice.

There is harm in pakistanis accepting a jihadic republic of pakistan. At last MMA is making a determined effect, the ilks of tahmed who talked about 3 percent terrorists have gone quite, now the numbers are nearly 30 percent. I have great hopes for pakistan, at last the jihadists of the military have managed to put the political jihadists in power through the great device of graduate elected reps.

At last there is unity in pak society, jiahdists every where. This is the TNT vision, the vision of jinnah, leave out one speach.

#32 Pakfin...... Your story is right. My father told to make sure that L.A.Khan has ``solid`` backing Mohajirs were encouraged at loss to sindhis. Same thing happened in Punjab but it did not change as sindh as People from east Pakistan moved West punjab nicely fitted in same culture. Incidendtly Khan Bahadur Mr. Ayub K. was fired by L.K.Khan and he died broken hearted sensing the loss of Sindhis. There was no Sindhi Muslim Population to move to fill vaccuum so different cultured people moved and long term displaced Sindhi. In sense Sindhi ethnic was greatest looser group as today Karachi, Hyderbad and sukkar (not completrly) are typical north indian Muslim cities and Sindhi for sure. When big changes takes place there are looser and Sindhis are worst loosers and compounded by sindhi opportunist leaders ZAB, Junj.,Benzir and presnt CM od sindh.

#38 Faisal ....... You have pointed correctly )0.5 million city is expanded to 15 million ( some say its 18 to 20 mILLION ALREADY). Its impossible to be expanded 25 to 30 times and increasing still and have good transport, electricity and adequate water. The infrastructure(transport) ,electricity and Water are in shortage permanantly. My fear is as population jumps from 140 to 350 Million as predicted by my most expets in next 30 years the population will go to 30 to 35 million. ( Presently its 10% of population of whole of Pakistan). Which will be almost doubling will be creating great many problems.
I as a Karachian feel as China does is only Salvation. That is strict one child families. (We alaways praise china but do not follow in this matter. I think people will revolt as most men consider its private matter)

Other remidy like china to have Karachi Passport. China does not allow peasants move to Benjing and they are caught and deported back. There is ``city Passport`` in all big Chineses city. If done then Population of Karachi can be stabilized around 24 million. With such constant population progree done can show result.

I will request readers to suggest constructve measure so Karachi does not become nightmare. I personally feel Circular Raiway is not good idea as it does not take take place fast from one end to another

I think Karachi be given atleast 50% tax back by federal tank as Karachi is dieing slowly and revive. Please do not kill gold egg giving ``hen`` karachi by neglect.

I find very sad attitude od envy , jalousy and greed. The writer is born in good family and is is not fault. It is not his fault that his fore fathers were well to do. Some people write as if being rich is sin. It is not to be poor and lazy, and being stagnant is sad. This class envey is created by politicians but this not lead to any solutions.

I hope expak write constructive ideas for improvement of karachi

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

old karachi is dead. long live the new karachi. reflections of caucasian- indian-american muslim (talk about being confused) on karachi. for expat karachites, really worth your while to read this.

Karachi: through the looking glass
Friday Times

Ann Hussaini
The most surprising aspect of Karachi to a girl from small-town America, is that it feels strangely like home...


We`ve gone to the beach, and on the way back to Karachi from Balochistan I`m recording moments thro-ugh the car window again. The video camera has been my crutch throughout this trip - a way to apprehend and distance myself simultaneously from a culture to which I`m supposedly connected. I am an American with a Muslim Indian father. Or I am an Indian with an American mother, depending upon who you ask. Either way, this is my first trip to Pakistan.

It`s the nature of America to export its culture and devour everything in its path - my immediate family is an accidental by-product. Inspired by our Indian and Pakistani family, my father and I have come to Pakistan for a month-long tour of the places he grew up.

We`ve passed mud huts in the desert and shanties of woven palm fronds or corrugated iron and concrete where men sit by Pepsi signs written in Urdu. Now, as we head back to civilisation, painted buses appear, bejewelled with reflectors. A man in a kurta climbs aboard. I move my head between the black and white image in my viewfinder and the glittering painted birds and flowers looping across its side. Since I`m busy worrying about how to frame everything, I often remember nothing of what I`ve shot.

``You`ll have to make sure you catch a paan spit on tape,`` my cousin says.

``Or maybe you should film me asking someone to spit paan so that I can tape it.``

I have a certain amount of guilt for taking things away as electronic images so that I can edit and distort them as I like later - but doesn`t everyone do it? Isn`t it part of the American way to borrow the bits you`re interested in and discard the rest? Don`t others do the same to us, for that matter? Maybe it`s a sort of cultural entropy - we will all gradually spread into each other until we`ve gelled into one homogenous ``ueberculture``, held together by MTV.

On the car stereo Amir puts on Mojo Nixon. Suddenly I`m split between memories of hanging out in basement apartments with thrift-store clad college friends, and the things moving in electronic grayscale through my viewfinder. Chkchkchkchk,rockabilly guitar pick and a misty delicate tree I`ve never seen before; the riff moves on, dadum da dum da drr, through seas of low flat dunes, an empty road punctuated by dump trucks and camel carts, he`s in EEEVVVEERYthing, Mojo`s voice comes in as PAF jets roar overhead and Amir tells me put the camera down in a military zone. But we`re listening to rock n` roll and we`ve just come from the beach. Elvis is everywhere, yeah! Elvis is everywhere!

I never thought I`d take an American road trip in Pakistan, but here I am.

After two and a half weeks in bewildering, beautiful India and eighteen months living in New York, what surprised me about Karachi the most is how I`ve felt - strangely at home. I didn`t expect it. I expected to be happy to see my family, bored and trapped inside the house, and made nervous by men who might all, I assumed, prefer to see me in burqa. But Karachi feels right to me and I`ve been spending idle moments trying to unravel why. Maybe driving around with my cousins is providing me with an illusory sense of safety; maybe it`s the pleasure of seeing where someone you love grew up. Or it might be that Karachi is immediately comprehensible to an American small-town girl.

First off, it`s just the right size - within a few days I have a sense of where I`m going. The driving isn`t terrifying. The pace of life is easy. People might stare at my white skin -no one I`ve met has suspected I have a drop of Eastern blood - but they don`t harass me. And the city has so much . . . charm. I feel like I`m in an Eastern European city (but with Miami`s climate) in the early seventies. I love the blocky concrete austerity of the buildings, the swooping public monuments in the center of every roundabout, the aged neon signs and the awkward simplicity of the handpainted billboards.

Beaches might lack bathing suits, but they have far superior camels. The fifteen-year olds in my aunt`s apartment complex are messing around with the brand-new basketball goal, but the little boys are still playing cricket. Everyone`s still excited about the first couple of McDonalds. And the width and quietude of the streets, the hominess of the daily shopping and living activity I watch in the residential areas I`m visiting pluck at my heart. There`s a peace and routine here conspicuously absent from my life in New York. All of this is almost enough to make me put the camera down and just - participate.

Karachi`s beginnings of overlap with Western culture seem innocent; it`s a mid-sized town growing up and acquiring the things that the big cities have. Years of cultural programming make it impossible for me to ignore advertising, but the slack, clumsy way it`s done here is a complete relief compared to the glut of glossy rubbish I`m used to having thrown in my face in the US every day.

Who could dislike chilli chicken heroes for Rs. 50, or resist a mattress (complete with Supermodel) called Molty-Foam? Quaint things still feel present in their own way in Karachi; the things that we buried under our own momentum in the US. The city intrinsically possesses a retro-chic that hipster Americans from the Lower East Side collect by buying retro Chanel from 1969 at $300 a dress. And I wonder if my newfound love for Pakistan is really rooted in an older love for the places in the US where I grew up, in the days before the one new, exciting shopping mall or the one new, tastier chain restaurant in my neighborhood became fifty and everything, everywhere in America became the same. But when I stop rolling tape for too long, I`m hit with another reality. No matter how many analogies I draw between the US and Pakistan, I am in the East, under a militarised government. . Around the eyepiece I sneak as many glances as I can at what that is.

In US news, all Islamic cultures come across as one conglomerate block of absolutist tyranny. We grew up with images of the Islamic world as missile-bearing terrorists, threats to the American way of life. I find the constant presence of truckloads of soldiers here unnerving, but my fear gradually diminishes as I watch people living their daily lives with seeming nonchalance - and then I make another discovery. The tradition, repression, and authoritarianism of this culture, exotic but also mine by blood, is strangely seductive. Karachi has the tension of the hidden, and that tension by its very existence hooks into every open space I have and draws me to it. I like to unveil mysteries, to break into anything that keeps me out. Danger is enticing and austerity is sexy. Walls are sexy. Barriers are sexy.

In my cousin`s neighbourhood, every luxurious house has uniformed guards and walls, some garlanded with barbed wire and studded with broken glass. The only things that make it over these barriers uninvited are the cries of the cart vendors. I want to sneak in, to stand on the roofs of adjacent buildings and spy over walls upon these hidden lives. Would I see silent, still houses attended by servants who move aimlessly until their masters return, like extras on an empty set? Would men and women sit in silent dignity on weekends, watching their children run about on their impossibly lush lawn? Or could it be my most intense hope - a debacle of women lolling on lounge chairs reading Virginia Woolf while their husbands make land deals? I don`t know but I suspect that this fantasy isn`t happening very often. Perhaps Karachi is on the way to its own Prague spring. But the potential energy here has a subtle, luminous draw.

In the morning, when I`m waking up and off guard, the prayers emanating from the mosque are incredibly beautiful to me. I walk to the window and listen every time. The comfort I feel when I walk on the streets also seems beyond any rational analysis - as a white girl, I shouldn`t feel this, but I do. Perhaps I am genetically programmed to respond to a culture I inherited but never understood. My US independence shifts like sand, and I know - I know that I could live here and find myself transformed in ways I can`t imagine. If it gets too scary or too real, I start taping again so I can admire Pakistan later in the safety of my living room. Like Karachi, I have my own walls to control what I let in and keep out, what I will allow to transform me. I am an American; I want to take what I want and let the rest go.

Then Amir turns into his apartment complex, nodding at the chaukidar; we shake sand out of our shoes and dump the fish Nasir`s bought on the beach into his car. We climb the five flights of steps to the top, ready to go eat. The camcorder goes off for a couple of hours and Karachi rushes in on me again. We`re home.

for a city that has grown from a size of about 0.5 m people to a size of about 15 m people in the last 55 years, karachi has not done too badly. and contrary to the propaganda, the crime rate in karachi is about average for a city of its size. and this despite the fact that karachi does not have a police force in the modern sense of the word. and this despite the fact that about 40% of federal tax revenue is collected from karachi. in addition, karachi continues to find space for the tired and huddled masses from all over pakistan and afghanistan. and (as if this was not enough), karachites has given to the country, people like edhi and shaukat aziz and karachihites have created institutions like cplc.

and what do we get in return. precious little i say. punjabis take our tax rupee, baluchis take our cars, sindhis take our seats in engineeing and med schools and pathans take our lives by sending us drugs, guns and tribal islam. imagine where would pakistan be if people outside karachi pulled their load. how bright would be our future if baluchis got educated (instead of blowing gas pipelines), pathans got over their infatuation with tribal islam and punjabis got over their dislike of people who live across the eastern side of our border..

we can only dream.

for a city that has grown from a size of about 0.5 m people to a size of about 15 m people in the last 55 years, karachi has not done too badly. and contrary to the propaganda, the crime rate in karachi is about average for a city of its size. and this despite the fact that karachi does not have a police force in the modern sense of the word. and this despite the fact that about 40% of federal tax revenue is collected from karachi. in addition, karachi continues to find space for the tired and huddled masses from all over pakistan and afghanistan. and (as if this was not enough), karachites have given to the country, people like edhi and shaukat aziz and karachites have created institutions like cplc.

and what do we get in return. precious little i say. punjabis take our tax rupee, baluchis take our cars, sindhis take our seats in engineeing and med schools and pathans take our lives by sending us drugs, guns and tribal islam. imagine where would pakistan be if people outside karachi pulled their load. how bright would be our future if baluchis got educated (instead of blowing gas pipelines), pathans got over their infatuation with tribal islam and punjabis got over their dislike of people who live across the eastern side of our border..

we can only dream.

Karachi has also been referred in the past as ``Shehr-e-GharibaaN`` (City of the Poor). While Lahore can claim historical greatness and Islamabad can tout its serenity, both lack the opportunities and diversity of Karachi. Whether you are Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch, Urdu-speaking or Pathan, this city welcomes you with open arms and provide livelihood to you and your family. It would also enable you to send money to your relatives still living in your hometown.

What people see as garbage, over-population and political unrest is not a liability to be ashamed of. It is a mark of this city`s greatness. It provides refuge and shelter to the millions of Pakistanis who are unable to find employment in their places of birth. Karachi is truly the ``melting pot`` of Pakistan. It may not be beautiful and scenic but it has a heart of gold.

temporal #33: Koshish is San Jose based. A close friend of mine was a member. It is run by a group of really good guys from NED, in San Jose. Not a bad organization to be a part of.

hey ya kow they are planning to renovate karachi club annexe these days

so if you wana look at it for the last time they way it was
go ahead and take you peek ..

Shahzad:

I really enjoyed your reminisces…am from the same karachi and have somewhat similar memories…in fact I did a series on Karachi some years back…on what used to a precursor of the present ‘unplugged’ section…

some digressions:

---show me a city unchanged in the last 25 years and I will show you moen-jo-daro

---this writer (shahzad) has every right to reminisce about his past as he choses…if he was born with a silver spoon and if he choses to mention that I see nothing wrong…

---http://www.koshish.org/ looks good…just had a cursory look…will check out later in detail…somebody who intends to retire back in Karachi asked me about volunteering time there…after I have checked it out might recommend this to him…

---all cities have ‘other’ sides of the track or river…the poor bustees and the enclaves for the rich…in third world countries such divides are more pronounced…

---the real Karachi---keamari (an island really)…khara and meetha dars, (mahim maher did couple of excellent articles on them)…garikhata and pakistan chowk areas and the upscale old garden and jamshed road colonies (aamil colony, sindhi colony)…

---things that can be added if this is expanded and revised:

…pidc pan wallah
…hanifiya
…grand hotel in malir
…dhabeji falls
…the still functioning mandirs (opp. Kmc, two in solider bazaar area, one near islamia college, at the foot of native jetty, Clifton)
…the synagogue at lawrence road, ranchor lines
...the zoroatrian temple, and across from it adam sumar`s bakery ( and the ford model T)
…the talpur fort at manora island (a rather well kept secret: mainly because pak navy controls the island)
...the old aero club on country club road (now engulfed by various gulshans)


rgds,

t

#11 by ahmedmadani on March 22, 2003 7:39pm PT. L.A. Khan (Mohajir Supremo) was culprit he started campaign aginst ousting over 40% Hindus who were cream of society they were mwecilessly driven in madness to make sure that Indians are filled and LA Khan has secure base politically.

Here is a little tid bit of history that might interest some of the readers.
At the time of partiiton, Khan Bahadur Ayub Khuhro became the first Chief Minister of Sindh. Soon after partition riots started near the Empress Market in Karachi and a crowd gathered to burn the shops and homes of Hindus in the area. On hearing this, Ayub Khuhro took a contingent of police and went to the Empress Market. When he got there, he got out of his car with a revolver in his hand and told the crowd that he would shoot the first man who raised a hand against any Hindu or his property. The crowd took heed and dispersed.

On returning home, he was informed that the Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan wanted to speak to him. Mr. Khuhro called up the Prime Minister and when Liaqat Ali Khan came on line, he asked Mr. Khuhro about the riots in Karachi. Ayub Khuhro told him that he did not have to worry about anything as the riots have been quelled. At this Liaqat Ali Khan said to Mr. Khuhro that that was exactly the issue. He said that you should not have stopped the riots. If we do not force these Hindus to leave, how will we create space for our brothers who are coming from India.

I was not there, but have heard this story from someone who was told this first hand by Ayub Khuhro.

Would somebody like to post photographs of Karachi somewhere here?

Also, I have it on authority that kababs in Delhi are far better than kabas in Karachi.