British left too many structures in our city. The main reason is that they loved Karachi for its wide sea and no-nonsense attitude towards life. Already, they’d converted it into a large shipping base for their goods to arrive. Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to preserve
lot of those wonderful buildings. And to top it all, corrupt politicians and land mafia has been very busy these days chopping good old buildings.

It is very clear that a nation which needs to understand its past needs to preserve the artifacts and structures from that past. If those are not preserved, there is no way of educating young people about the shared heritage. As a result, today lot of Karachi wallas are simply unaware of their rich heritage. They, at best, know something about KMC head office or maybe Quaid’s house at Kharadar.

Discuss below the ways in which common citizens may help preserve these beautiful and enduring heritage.

If Metblogs is a city, hub.metblogs is the playground. We kept hearing from people that one of their favorite parts of Metblogs was meeting and interacting with readers and writers from other parts of the world, as well as getting requests for more ways that readers could be involved besides just posting comments. We thought about this for a while and decided that with a network like this, a giant community area where folks from all over the world could hang out, post photos and videos, talk with each other, form groups, play games, send messages, and do about a million other things was probably a pretty fun idea. The Hub is that.

If you have any tech ideas or suggestions join this group and speak up. See you on hub.metblogs!

KMB made a post almost a month back about the recently released Google mapping system for general utilization in Pakistan, since then I have been addicted to this tool and have seen the Karachi area being extensively mapped.

I share a screencapture of the mapping done in the regions of Shahrah-e-Faisal and one is definitely impressed at how much work a collaborative team can pull together in a short span of 30 days, this areas was barren a month back and is now peppered with accurate roads maps across the city and it continues to grow

We definitely need YOUR input as well, take a look at an area you know well and contribute in some way by adding one or two (or more) points of interests [road, name of mosque, school, shop or anything]. In all honestly it just takes a little getting used to but once you are in swing then its quite addicting. Do keep in mind that these images are a few years old (3-4) [taken before the development of Shahrah-e-Qaideen flyover] but even then, most of the city can be accurately mapped.

Join the Karachi Mapping effort here on Google Map Maker

Every new advancement in technology opens new opportunities and new ideas immerge but some ideas are so fascinating that they make it to the history. One such amazing idea was experimented a few days back simultaneously at a Hotel in Delhi and at a local café ”The Second Floor” in Karachi

The café was relived of all its furniture for the event and a floor seating was arranged. Seated in the corner on a slightly elevated stage were the Farid Ayaz and Abu Mohammad Qavvaal Party faced with a web camera and another web cam was aimed towards the audience.

On the wall were a large plasma and a projector screen showing a live views of the place where audience has to be seated in Delhi and the stage where the legendary Shubha Mudgal with her husband Dr. Aneesh Pradhan and other musicians were to perform shortly. (more…)

“A breeding ground for terrorists.” ,“University of Jihad.” Those are just some of the phrases used to described the Pakistani madrassa system, a network of Islamic schools where children as young as six are taught to memorize every verse and phrase of the Koran. The Karachi Kids takes the viewer behind the shrouded curtain of a Pakistani madrassa to show a world of abuse, loneliness and transformation into radical Islam. Read more

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1V3bB_BxQ4[/youtube]

A key witness of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has been shot dead in Karachi yesterday on Khy-e-Bhukahri

DAWN: Khalid Shahanshah, the chief security officer of PPP co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari, was assassinated on Tuesday afternoon outside his Clifton residence, police and witnesses said. They said that gunmen on a white car sprayed him with a volley of bullets while he was stepping off his double-cabin vehicle in front of his house at Khyaban-i-Bukhari.

(more…)

It seems that the administration has woken up finally to the woes of small investors in the stock market.  A fund of Rs 20 billion has been created by the government which will be managed by the NIT and will inject liquidity in the market when there is panic selling. This fund will go into action as early as next week.

Responding to this positive step many people are now returning to the stock market to cover their losses which has increased the trading levels and helped the market recover around 650 points since yesterday. This obviously does not help the people who have already had their life savings wiped out, but at least it will help the future investors to make more “secure” investments.

Karachi sports an empty, but clean look, as all transporters are on strike protesting against the fuel hike and demanding an increase in fare prices. The transporters are negotiating for a Rs. 2 increase in their fare structure….. which will in turn most definitely impact the poor. One then has to wonder how long can a minimum wage person can survive this economic crunch, is there truly an economic plan somewhere beyond this chaos or are we simple destined to ride this never ending curve? The only good thing I see from this strike today is less chaos and I suspect less pollution.

I found this image on Flickr originally uploaded by *abro*, a well known Karachi photographer. I was extremely moved by this image to see the small gesture of generosity that it gives me hope that there are still a few good people out there who are still willing to take care of the poor. It is said that Pakistanis could easily be ranked as a nation with the highest level of philanthropy in terms of GDP. Abro writes the following words describing the image

Every Sunday, poor people, women and men gather at the commercial Area in Defence Karachi to have free breakfast (tee, paratha) and Rs.100 in cash. On Sunday 6th July early in the morning after returning from walk I found the streets were filled with men and women having free breakfast from two hotels of area. I estimated at least 800 to 1000 people was gathered there, especially women were more than men. After asking some people I come to know every Sunday poor people gather here and have free breakfast and 100 rupees in cash from this person. It means he distributes 100,000 every Sunday!

Credit for Image and text *abro* on Flickr