We here in Karachi simply love a little rain (but hate a downpour), over the past two days Karachi has had overcast clouds which on occasions has treated us to a drizzle here and there, but today it started to rain !!!!! albeit only a little till now, but everyone in my neighborhood was celebrating.

Happy Rains, Karachi

Update: Its sunny outside …. whatever happened to the rain…..?

Video: By the time I got done uploading this video – it was bright and sunny, I enjoyed the drizzle while it lasted

On Wednesday morning, March 12, from 9.30am to 12.45pm, the Family Educational Services Foundation will be organizing a free Benefit musical concert and clown show for handicapped and underprivileged children. More than 4000 children will be attending from over 60 different institutions and schools in and around Metropolitan Karachi. These children include those who are Deaf, physically and mentally handicapped, orphans, and from underprivileged schools. The goal of the program is to provide a fun and memorable event for 4000 disadvantaged children, teachers and caregivers; ultimately providing encouragement, hope, motivation, and increased self-esteem.

The concert will be held at the Karachi Parsi Institute grounds, Saddar (next to St. Patrick’s School) – Special guest artists include Shehzad Roy and Saleem Javed and comperes include Anoushey and Mani.

Family Educational Services Foundation, a non-profit volunteer organization, are the show organizers.

For more details, you can visit FESF at fesfpk.org

Please take some time out of your schedules, visit the event and show your support for a noble cause. You can also enlist as a volunteer to be a part of this cause.

Thank you Rabia Garib for sharing this information with us.

Nadir Nasir is wondering when would would Karachi have a Times Square of its own all done with digital outdoor advertisement gear.

Maybe some one might like to take a crack at finding this easy location …

Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), but what does that term mean? While a lot of us know that March 8 is commemorated as “Khawateen ka din,” not many are aware of how this tradition initially started.

History:

In 1907, Clara Zetkin organized an International Conference of Socialist Working Women where participants, including Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, discussed ways to publicly support a struggle for women’s equality and liberation.

The strength gained from this discussion fired the Socialist working women in New York City to act on this discussion in 1908 by holding a mass meeting on women’s suffrage on March 8.

Around 15,000 working women marched to ignite a long drawn out struggle for gender equality and an end to oppression on the working women of the planet both at work places and within the soul wrenching confines of their kitchens – dominated and suppressed by a steel hardy patriarchial family system which left them tottering in the confinment of their kitchens working
for the men within the family household.

The next year the American Socialist Party instituted an annual “woman’s day.”

In 1910, Zetkin proposed an International Women’s Day at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, and European socialists began to celebrate The International Working Women’s Day 1911.

What does IWD mean today?

A friend of mine, and a member of the CMKP, Comrade Ali Jan, wrote out an excellent piece on this. He called it “The Corporatisation of Women’s Day,” or “The ‘other’ Women’s Day”. I’m quoting it here:

In ‘The State and Revolution’ Lenin highlights the ability of the ruling class to vulgarize and empty revolutionary teachings of their revolutionary content. It must be said that this ability becomes even greater under capitalism which seeks to commodify entire histories and cultures of people for the purpose of obtaining a surplus. The International Women’s Day is one such event which signifies the extent to which capital blunts our ‘revolutionary memory’ in its thirst for a surplus. While the original inspiration of the women’s day was working women’s solidarity, the inevitable contradictions of capitalism have created two separate women’s days; The Women’s day of the bourgeoisie, and of the proletariat.

The women’s day of the bourgeoisie represents the very decadence of the bourgeoise order itself. The Bourgeoise women is only satisfied with consumption; freedom for her is equated with expensive gifts and objectifying love songs. The Corporatization of women’s day is the process by which the bourgeoise woman becomes the ideal for all women; it represents her hopes, desires and habits. The Bourgeoise woman is ‘free’ which is why Women’s day is celebrated as a feast involving conspicuous consumption.

The true history of Women’s day however, is that of the working class woman. The International Women’s day was actually a commemoration of the struggles of working women of the Capitalist West, as well as the Socialist East (to use crude binaries!) who sacrificed their lives for the cause of women’s liberation.

Liberation/ freedom for them did not constitute an acceptance of traditional gender roles; it did not mean freedom to enjoy luxuries of all kinds on the backs of the exploited masses. These women constituted the most oppressed section of society and they demanded, more vehemently than any one else, an end to the relations of explotation that had kept them subjugated. These women included such great revolutionaries as Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Sylvia Pankhurst and Alexandra Kollontai. The memory of these women has been suppressed by the Bourgeoise which is more than happy with the consumer housewife or ‘working woman’ (corporate Executive, manager etc) but NOT the peasant woman or the proletarian woman, who bears exploitation both at the workplace and inside the home.

The legacy of IWD therefore belongs not in what we’re led to believe — Women’s Day was meant to commemorate and pay tribute to the legacy of all revolutionary women who worked hard to stop the subjugation, as well as the objectification of women.

Happy International Women’s Day, everyone!

 Today at the Arts Council  Oscar Wilde’s comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest” was brought alive by a group of incredibly talented young performers. It was a very well directed and an excellently presented play, with such great performance by all actors that not for even a second one would feel that the actor has come out of his character.

The play provided a good two hour entertainment with audience completely spellbound by the characters of Oscar Wilde who are playing on a plot which is laid to shed light on the social issues reflecting the assumptions which reflect the conventional preoccupations of what the  Victorian respected people for, that is their social position, income and character. The play also highlights how hypocritical we get at times for our own interests. The play revolves around the importance of being “Earnest” which for the writer is a notion of fabricated truths, moralities and shallow persona we all live in to prove our selves to be respectable.

The play is an incredible work of fiction which the K.B Thespian Productions has Brought to life for the people Of Karachi to see.

For those of you who want enjoy this amazing play and performance, the play is showing daily till the 9th of march, 2008 at The Arts Council Karachi, starting around 7:00 pm.

Tickets are available at the venue. 

Asad was just another child until at school he started to trip off and fall down too often, a few visits to the doctor revealed that Asad has Friedreich’s Ataxia a hereditary disease which causes progressive damage to the nervous system. At the age of 20 Asad was told he couldn’t walk any more and has been dependent on a wheal chair ever since.

But asad is a brave man, and he refused to give up on his dreams, he decided to beat his disability. Today, Asad is the head of the corporate social responsibility department for a technology company. He is also working to change the mindsets of people towards people with disability and has been giving speeches and holding talks in social gatherings, Schools and educational institution. He was present yesterday at a local café t2f where he shared his story, the difficulty he faced in the beginning and those he face today with a small group of people gathered at the venue.

When Asad was first put into the wheel chair, he says ” The wheal chair felt like a prison to me”. It took some explaining from the doctors and motivation from friends after which he decided to accept and learn to carry on with his disability.

During the session Asad pointed out that Pakistan is not very friendly to the wheelchair-bound people, as physically challenged people need to socialize freely, he said there is a need to improve their accessibility by changing the mindsets, changes which are required at hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, educational institutes and even at clinics as most of these places almost never have ramps that would allow such people to enter their premises. He further emphasized that laws are needed to bound builders and commercial shops and businesses to facilitate wheelchair bound people.       

Present among the audience one of the team members at CMPHR added that her organization too is working for the issue and students of a certain school constructed a wooden ramp to allow people in wheelchairs to enter the school, the students also donated another wooden ramp to a nearby medical clinic.

It was also mentioned at the event that The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol was adopted on 13 December 2006 at the UN headquarters in New York which was open for signature on 30 March 2007. The Convention adopts a broad categorization of persons with disabilities and reaffirms that all persons with all types of disabilities must enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms. At present there are 119 signatories to the Convention but sadly our country is not one of them. CPHR has a petition available to sign here in this regard.

Also present at the event was Sabeena Jalal who is running a facebook based cyber support group called Beat Disability. The group is open to anyone who is either taking care of some one with disability or is living with any kind of mental, physical disability her/him self.

The session although a brief one was sure an eye-opener as 10% of our total population consists of people who are cooping with disabilities but they are almost never seen around because usually they are kept confined to their houses as they cant get on a cab, or board a bus on their own, they cant even enter any restaurant or park without someone’s help. They feel like they are not welcome in society. We should facilitate for them, we should keep them under consideration when building parks or clubs so they can socialize and do some of their daily tasks independently.

The city is without power. AP is reporting the issue which, according to the KESC officials, is unprecedented:

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) – A massive power outage struckPakistan’s commercial hub of Karachi early Thursday,leaving the entire city of more than 15 million withoutelectricity, an official said.

Supplies from the state-run Water and Power DevelopmentAuthority were suddenly cut, prompting the city’s entiredistribution network to shut down, said Sultan Hassan, aspokesman for the Karachi Electric Supply Corp.

“The power supply has come to zero. That isunprecedented,” Hassan said. “We are trying to find outwhy the power supply from WAPDA was discontinued.”

A spate of power cuts and shortages also of natural gasand wheat flour angered voters in the run-up to Feb. 18elections, when supporters of President Pervez Musharrafwere routed.

It seems that the KESC has lost its capacity to provide electricity after WAPDA cut off power supply to KESC. It is reported that all feeders and grid stations in Karachi tripped sequentially after the WAPDA supply was cut. WAPDA was supplying about 225-250MW of power despite an agreed 300MW. This amount is roughly 20% of the city’s needs.

At present, KESC owes over 35 billion to WAPDA. The outstanding debt is pre-privatization, and from from the looks of it, the government sold KESC and expected it to just cough up a massive amount of money and settle the dues.

The power supply was cut with the approval of the Federal Government.

Last time I checked, Karachi was the economical capital of the country and home to over 10% of the country’s population.

Also in related power reports, the Private Power Infrastructure Board has disallowed KESC from purchasing power directly from wind farms that are being planned along the coastal belt.

What is going on here?? Would the real government please stand up??

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Update at 11.20: Power has started returning in some areas…..hopefully things will be back to normal soon…

There is much about this city’s culture that reflects in its largest university, the University of Karachi. Approximately three months ago when I formally stepped into its terrain as an undergraduate student, I did so with no shortage of warnings about its unpredictable and potentially volatile nature. Ex-graduates I had spoken to narrated with a mixture of fondness, nostalgia and pessimism adventure tales of point rides, stories of sudden violence and blatantly open shows of political strength between opposing parties. The journey will be interesting, I was told, often even fun, but anything but simple or smooth. How apt, I thought, just like rest of Karachi then. (more…)