If your office is located near I I Chundrigar Road (or Zia-uddin Ahmed road for that matter)and you are meeting friends for lunch on a working day, then choosing a place which offers quality food at a reasonable price, yet has a cosy ambiance where one can catch up on gossip, yet get back to office on time, can be a quite tricky.

An eatery like Elbow Room does the make the task easy. It is a small café tucked away on the lane adjacent to Faysal Bank on I I Chundrigar Road and is easy to miss if you take the wrong turn. Replete with flower beds under the windows on the brick wall and Victorian-style street lights, it also offers valet parking and WiFi. Stepping inside, the décor and ambiance were a pleasant change from the hum and drum of the nearby fast food joints. The café offers continental and Pakistani food items on the menu which can be viewed here.

On April 7, 2008 Siti Aisyah Hamid, a 42 year old woman from Perlis, Malaysia’s northernmost state, received an SMS giving her the good news that she had just just won an all expenses paid trip to Singapore. She is currently in the Karachi Jail since April 28th after the Customs officials found 950 grammes of heroin in the bottom compartment of a bag given to her by the an African man and woman who had picked her at the airport

The 42-year-old woman claimed she was the victim of a vicious syndicate that promised her a trip to Singapore but had in the end ferried her to Pakistan, locked her up for two weeks and made her a drug mule.

Jaafar Noor, her husband was blamed by his in-laws that he had sold his wife to a drug trafficking syndicate, an allegation he denies. Kijang Care, a welfare organization, started a fund to mobilize a team of lawyers to save Siti. According to them, there are currently 5 Malaysian women in Karachi Jail, all for drug-related offenses.

Source: Malay Mail

The Karachi Zoo, once quite popular among the children of this city for its various species of animals is in a horrible state!! Growing up in this city my childhood memories consist of frequent visits to it to feed the ducks at the pond or take rides on the elephant present there.

I recently tried to impart the same joy on my child but was shocked to see the conditions at the zoo. Most of the cages are empty, the animals having died or are in the process of dying, the shetland ponies present earlier which would give rides to children are also gone. Upon my inquiries i found that the male had passed away upon separation from the female and the female was also sick and being treated.

Worst of all even the cages with animals in them are so dirty that it amounts to cruelty to keep animals in this way. If the Zoo has no resources to import animals why cannot local varieties be introduced? Why can’t the services of sweepers and cleaners be acquired to at least spruce up the place a little?

I appeal to our local government to please see that the Zoo is restored back to its original state. The citizens of Karachi have little in the means of family activities options as it is, please do not take this away from them as well!!!

Karachi beat Lahore in ESWC qualifying match at Expo center. Karachi will represent Pakistan for the Electronic Sports World Cup finals set to take place in San Jose, California.
(more…)

Pigeon-holed Billboard on Shahrah-e-Qaideen Bridge

The first time I saw this pattern being made on a billboard near Marriott (on the Emirates-wala Billboard) I wondered what new marketing campaign was being planned for Karachi, but it wasn’t long when we started seeing the same pattern being cut away on a large number of billboards across the city. It must be an attempt to make these billboards lighter, while at the same time be better designed to withstand the gale force winds that Karachi saw a year back. Good move, though I would still have preferred a billboard-free Karachi

The Jam Sadiq Ali Bridge was closed to traffic for an indefinite period when cracks developed Wednesday evening on a portion of the bridge.
Traffic between the Koranagi Industrial Area and Qayumabad had been diverted to the Korangi River Road.
(more…)

I wasn’t going to post this up until later, but then I saw Afreen’s post on “Wake up and Smell the Rubble”… These were photographs I snapped when I was so frustrated trying to drive through the inner roads of Defence (the Green and Clean), where every major road was dug up.

You may want to argue that we live in a post-military dictatorship or in a crazy democratic state of mayhem, but the sad state of affairs is this – we’ve got more holes in the ground than the surface of the moon, and we seem to be okay with it. There are rallies and walks and protests to release the judges and make god knows what else right, but not one little picket when it comes to the stink and filth that is created around us. Not one worker, not one working bulldozer, and certainly not one protester screaming his frustration with what our streets have become. (more…)

Photography Credit: Jawad Ahmed

This entry could be about any of our localities, where we spend our days and nights. The same path we trudge regularly to get home after long hours in school/university/office.

In Karachi especially, when we build/buy our houses, there’s always that personal touch, some extravagance on our part done to be different from the rest of the houses around the area. It is when we like to extend our lawns a bit more by encroaching outwards; make stretched parking slopes taking main footpath’s space. In such fervor some forget that they are building on the land which is not really theirs.

Then KDA comes in and during their drive of amnesiac building/re-building of roads and you see nothing but rubble when you wake up one fine morning. I found a live example in North Karachi, Sector 8 to 10. I investigated to discover that the concerned authority had issued prior warnings and were instructed to shift their electric & gas meters but nobody paid heed to the notice and on 31st May at 6 o’clock sharp, bulldozers came and did what they are made for.

(more…)

 I had no sleep the night day before yesterday as KESC kept flipping the electric supply on and off all night long, yesterday KESC was a bit merciful as the total duration of the load shedding did not exceed the six hour mark but today we experienced a three hour long power outage in the morning then an hour long in the evening and a five hour long load shedding from 10:30 pm to 3:30 am bring the total to an exact nine hours of load shedding. The long hours of load shedding has slowed down everyone’s progress, it has an impact on peoples output, small industries are facing hardships and students have turned to the oil lamps to study for their exams. 

Around ten days back when we had moved our clocks an hour ahead we thought, for all the confusion the Day light Saving Time may cause at least there will be a relief in the hours of load shedding but it turned out that the shortage of electricity we are facing today was far beyond anyone’s expectations and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this time around next year we get no more then four hours of electricity for the whole 24 hours in a day. 

We have food crises, people are waiting for several hours under the baking sun in queues for a single sac of flour, rice is beyond a poor man’s reach, so is flour. Inflation is hitting the common man hard while there wages remain almost the same, people don’t have money to feed them selves let alone educate their children. Can a nation prosper in such circumstances? I am afraid not and if our policy makers don’t realize the seriousness of the situation soon and proper steps are not taken to control it and if these downward trends continue in the same fashion I am afraid our coming generations will be carving tools out of stones and will be living in caves.