KESC, burn it! Break it! Kill them! OH MY GOD! 86 Rs/lit Petrol! Bus Fares to 15 Rupees till 1 stop! How the hell did they snatch a person’s cell phone, burn him alive! Kill them, shoot them, throw stones at them, blow it all up. Government sucks! New Government sucks, Oh the past Govt messed this this and this up! He’s bad, he’s worse, he’s stupid, what’s that, why is that………….

YEA YEA YEA!!!! SHUT UP!

It is valid to say that people of Karachi have lost and are continuously loosing their sanity over the depressing problems in their home town - and for this, it is not them to blame.

Keeping all the problems in mind and giving each, another viewpoint, I would say that apart from the prices of food, fuel and utilities etc, we have yet another problem. The problem we are having are the PEOPLE themselves. Everyone and everything has problems, but finding a solution to a problem requires something of a mind, heart and wisdom. Let this post not be taken against the people of Karachi, but I’m just not satisfied by the way people (we) are handling their (our) problems!

What is a problem? A problem is an outcome of acts in the past creating an unfavorable vision of the future or partially blocking it.

So, the question is NOT “who did wrong in the past”, the question is… WHO sees the FUTURE! Its people who see the future, if the people are not in a normal state of mind, heart and wisdom, they are unable to identify the future. If you are unable to identify the future, how would you be able to walk on a path that actually leads to a better future.

I always give this example, lets say “Mr. X” had an accident and X is lying on the road. X is thinking damn! What just happened, Oh It hurts so bad, it wasn’t my fault… The next second X get squished by a truck that says “Baloach Taiyyara”, and tomorrow headlines reads “noa-jawan halak, truck driver farar”.

If you don’t get up, don’t drag yourself to the corner, or don’t get yourself to the hospital you are actually ignoring the worst that is yet to come. You will have a life time to think about what ‘just’ happened, so its better to stand up and get yourself fixed so that you can have a life to live and deal with the memories later.

This is a typical scenario of our situation, we have just been hit by a car and we are lying on the road, thinking about what “just” happened. We are just crying about and thinking over and over about the things that are going wrong. My friends worry about the drunk truck driver with his Baloch Taiyara coming right at you.

To maintain mental stability is of the utmost importance in the time of crisis!

I’m not sure how many of you would actually consider the people as a problem to the problems of people. Lets hear it from you in comments and based on our comments I will be proposing actual solution of each and every problem.

Usually, in this series, we tend to pick up the topic discussed in other blogs that are relevant to Karachi and expand on them but the following description of the North Nazimabad Town by Owais Mughal in All Things Pakistan is worthy of being reproduced in full. Enjoy!

In April 2008, we had a post on Eight Bazaars of Faisalabad, and we presented it as one of the best examples of town planning in Pakistan. We would like to develop this topic into a whole new series about the best planned localities of Pakistan. Among many examples of fine town planning in Pakistan are North Nazimabad Karachi, Model Town Lahore, Faisalabad’s 8 bazaars, Federal-B-Area Karachi, Islamabad Master Plan, Wah Cantonment, and many more in other cities. In today’s post we will cover North Nazimabad, Karachi.

The satellite image below shows North Nazimabad’s 20 residential blocks bound in red polygon. East of NN is Federal-B-Area where as North of NN is North Karachi and Buffer Zone.

Whenever the aesthetics of Civil Engineering and Town Planning Projects is considered; it is an accpetable fact that curves and gradiants are considered more natural than squares or rectangles. Cities planned in rectangular grids, though easy to navigate, don’t have same aesthtics as brought out by circular roads and curves. If you look at North Nazimabad’s map above you can clearly see how aesthetically the curved roads and plots have been designed within mostly rectanguar grids. Atleast to me this is the town planning of highest aesthetic order.

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This is not a picture warped by a bad cell phone camera or a flash, i just took this picture at 9 pm at the Regent Plaza signal on Shahrae Faisal with my 8 mega pixel camera. The glare you are witnessing is from the insanely giant LCD screen installed right across from a major 4 way traffic signal at Regent plaza in Karachi.

Suffice to say the screen has the effect of a major distraction in the day time on this busy junctio,n and at night it acts as a mini sun. Imagine what the drivers vision is exposed to it this is what a camera gets as input? then we complain about traffic accidents in Karachi, here is a hint stop blinding drivers!!!

No, i have never seen the famous Taj in all its actual glory, but i did see a vision of it recently on Sands Pit Beach here in Karachi. I could not bear leaving this behind for the waves so i tried to preserve it through my camera. Hats off to the unknown creator, whoever they are. I do not think even the actul Taj Mehal has this lovely a backdrop!!

“Nazre takhleeq se dekh tu ye ret bhi Taj ban jati hay”

Yesterday, January 29, 2008, The Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), in collaboration with the National College of Arts (NCA, Lahore), launched “Salahuddin Mian, Retrospective” exhibition of Pakistan’s first modern ceramist Salahuddin Mian.
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46: LUMS Protest Rally: Students gather outside the PDC, originally uploaded by bluangelo.

I’ve been watching with interest and fascination the news coming out of our sister city Metroblogs in Lahore and Islamabad. Moving images of students taking peacefully to the streets of their campuses and registering their disapproval of the so-called ‘emergency’ imposed by General Musharraf have made be both proud as well as inspired. Proud because it made be glad that if not me, at least my fellow citizens some where in this country have shown the courage that I truly lack, that they have been willing to put their lives and securities at a certain degree of risk to make them selves heard. And inspired because it made me hopeful that if they can shed the culture of cynicism and indifference that has become the hallmark of Pakistani civil society, perhaps so can others.

The most reassuring thing about these protests by students in Punjab is how they’ve been structured for the cause of a principle, above the petty politics of personality and party, above any ethnic, religious or political alliances, for the just cause of supremacy of law and order. But along with this pride and inspiration, has been the uncomfortable realization about our own inaction. Why are Karachi’s students still silent? Does their silence mean they endorse what is happening? Or are they just too apathetic to bother?
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I would like to extend all our readers here a very warm Eid Mubarak, enjoy the festivities to its fullest but at the same time take a moment to reflect on the sufferings of the poor, and the hundreds of innocent lives being lost in the North Waziristan offensive

Please also pray for Pakistan that it can come out of this politcal mess and maybe embark on a vision for a progressive Pakistani nation.

Ameen

Though this team is based out of Lahore, their selection earlier this year in Karachi along with the fact that I have followed the story for some time, perhaps qualifies it to be “local news”, Regardless - the story is an inspiring one for those IT Grads that think there is no hope for them - A story of how 4 students from LUMS came to Karachi to win themselves a chance to represent Pakistan in the International Imagine Cup competition in Korea -

And so the story begins…. When Microsoft Corporation announced the 2007 Imagine Cup’s theme for students to “imagine a world where technology enables better education for all” students around the world rose to the challenge, and Pakistan was no exception.

University students around the country put their heads together and searched for the solution that would win them a chance to compete in the World Wide Finals in Korea this past August. According to Kamal Ahmed, Country Manager for Microsoft in Pakistan, “there were hundreds of teams that immediately displayed a keen interest in participating in the competition.” But then, because of the strong link that Microsoft has with Universities around the country through their technical education programs, the Imagine Cup was just another window of opportunity for students.
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I’m sure we’ve all heard about Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, a flim which tells the story of the kidnapping of the American journalist, Daniel Pearl, in Karachi in January 2002. We all have our fair share of problems with this city, insecurity of your life and property, civic dis-functionality, absence of law and order, traffic, you name it. As citizens, we live this reality every day. Yet some how, despite the overwhelming nature of some of these problems, we still feel that the image of Karachi that’s sometimes portrayed in the Western media is prejudiced. Exaggerated to a degree that it fails to represent true Karachi as it is. Ananya Vajpeyi, a write based at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has wrote an excellent review of The Might Heart, which mirrors this sentiment. First published in The New Statesmen, the article was syndicated today in The News, I’ll strongly recommend every to read this:

What I found shocking about this film, however, was its vision of Karachi. The city is depicted as a frightening and incomprehensible palimpsest of urban chaos, poverty and Islamic terrorism, teeming with Muslim men who are scarily numerous, devoutly religious and horrendously violent. Even the sympathetic “Captain” Javed Habib, chief of the Pakistani CID’s counter-terrorism unit (played impeccably by Irfan Khan), who is sensitive to Mariane’s agonising circumstances, tortures a man almost to death and then, directly afterwards, proceeds to the mosque for morning prayers. It seems we can expect nothing but cruelty in this hellish, baffling place.

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March this year when Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz performed the ground breaking ceremony for Sofitel Hotel Plaza, yet another addition in this establishment’s growing facade of so-called “developmental projects”, I wasn’t the least of a pleased spectator. Mideast Hospital, at whose site the plaza would be constructed, was a corner stone of some of my most cherished childhood memories. Hospitals aren’t exactly meant to be places children are fond of, but for a multitude of reasons, Mideast was something different. I was born at JPMC but my family pediatrician practiced there, and trips to his clinic, if not always specifically anticipated or welcomed, were at least worthwhile; an alleviator of pain I saw him as, and the big aquarium in his office, a cause of much, much fascination.
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