IDEAS 2006 is finally over! Life should be coming back to normal.. but just a little. They took down the extended lighting and im pretty sure the 25k strong force is definately halved now, but the effects can still be seen on sh-e-faisal. Ranger deployments are there, and a couple of the rental corollas still patrol the streets.

The next international event to come to karachi is the 5 day Pak Vs. West Indies test match being played in National Stadium from the 27th, barely a two days after the mega even of IDEAS.

Seems like the ranger patrols and security details will continue…. but atleast now we get to enjoy some cricket. Anyone willing to go cheer on the team?

In the spirit of holiday season, (Thanksgiving, Xmas, and Eid), the cities across the metroblogging network are giving away 7 gifts to the world.

Each day, starting from November 26, Karachi metroblog will disclose one gift, something that is truly unique to Karachi. One week later, all 7 gifts would be known to all.

It’s a small effort from us to show that despite all its shortcomings, we still love this city and cherish the little things that Karachi has to offer.

I hope you would enjoy reading these posts as much as we would enjoy posting them.

“Car toh achi hai per aik haftey ke liye hai sirf “was what my friend had to say when I was taking this pic. “Shukar hai aik haftay ke liye hee hai, purzay nikalney ka time nahi milayga “was my reply.

You can spot this one these days, thanks to IDEAS episode. Good car. Our police must have felt differently driving it. Unlike their normal 19th century antique mobile type vehicles this one does seem to belong to a Modern police force car. Traffic police or otherwise. Even for few days but its good one. So this week’s achi car is this Toyota corolla. Can easily be seen near Expo or Shahra-e-Faisal.

Everytime I eat at KFC, I wish I had gone somewhere else. Then after few days, I crave for that zinger again and regret eating it afterwards. And so goes the cycle.

Why has KFC degraded so much? Is it worth going anymore when you have so many other options? Do they still have something good, something worth eating there?

Dengue fever cases are finally on a decline due to the cold weather which discourages the mosquitoes… But we are not out of danger yet. The Pakistan Medical Association fears that even though the number of cases have subsided now, they’ll be back with full force next year. The dengue virus present here is identified by AKUH to be of Sero-type 3 and is characterized by symptoms like acute head and body ache and high-grade fever but the virus mutates and the next mutation could be even deadlier, where a patient would not suffer fever but rather go directly into dengue-shock.

The best way still to prevent the fever from occuring is still going after the mosquito. But how does one find out if there are dengue mosquitos in the vicinity? I received an email attachment today, issued by PSO on how to do just that, and i thought i’d share it with all of you.
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Leaving politics aside, among all notables who has given what to our city in the last ten years ? and why ?

Tuesday night, while passing in front of Peer Pagara’s house, I thought of taking the picture of the house all lit up by lights. But the security outside did not let me do that.
I thought Peer Pagara would have invited the delegates visiting IDEAS on a dinner.
Today while going through a news paper I found out, it was Peer Pagara’s 78th birthday and the first birthday of his daughter Aamna on Wednesday, 22nd November.

So, the celebration and the lighting was all for a reason.
(I wish I could have taken a picture)

Yeah, this one’s pretty easy but still, where in Karachi is this ?

Almost a year back i saw this and was happy to see some work being done.

A year later, i saw it again.

We will wait for that tomorrow, and hope it will come.

At the Pearl Continental Hotel on November 21, the much anticipated Dawn-Aurora Marketing conference kicked off with at almost 10 pm, surprisingly only a 30 minute delay and amidst an air of intense networking in progress from the very start. This was scheduled to be a 2 day conference, which apparently was crammed into one long, excruciating day, when this was announced a lot of participants were quite surprised!

The seminar was titled “Y is for Youth” and was aimed at addressing and discussing the challenges that marketers were facing in communicating their message to the youth.

At first glance, the schedule made sense, though a couple more breaks in between would have helped, people do, after all want to network and unwind. after listening to hours of talking. The sponsor probably forfeited his/her address at the event and after a typically interesting expression of thoughts by Mr. Hameed Haroon (CEO, Dawn Group), the event was formal inaugurated.
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