The purpose of city nazim Mustafa Kamal’s on-going trip to the United States has been the subject of much discussion lately. All three major English dailies, Dawn, The News and Daily Times have carried stories on it recently.

On Monday, Daily Times reported he was getting “special treatment” from the State Department because they viewed him as a potential future leader of the country. The report in Monday’s The News was also on similar lines, it quoted CNN’s State Department Correspondent Zain Virje as saying that the mayor of Karachi was a “guest with a mission”. Daily Times also published the full transcript of the interview Kamal gave to Virje, and even though Kamal played down speculation about the purpose of his visit, telling Dawn’s Anwer Iqbal that he had come to the United States to urge American businessmen to invest in his city, speculation is still rife. (more…)

as the number of reconditioned and import cars increase in the city (& country), more and more people are shifting towards automatic transmission cars. earlier, people were mostly reluctant to buy old automatic cars as there were a dearth of mechanics of such gearboxes and also a lack of spare parts.

in today’s traffic conditions, it is becoming more convenient, to the extent of preference, to drive an automatic transmission car rather than a manual one.

we want to know if you prefer a manual transmission or auto?

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Special shoutout to LMB and Hasan Mubarak for pointing out the Vizu website.

Lahore metblogs did a poll on which is the best city for career growth. I thought we’d also participate in the same poll. So here goes.

Which city, out of Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad is the best for Career Growth?

Also, you can give your own list of most popular jobs and average salary of your city.

My apologies: due to a fault in html, the actual poll didn’t make it to the post.

An update to a previous post where I mentioned employment formula for different political parties in Sindh.
This Quota has been changed and a new quota has settled down which was a result of a meeting between CM Abab Rahim and the governor, Dr.Ishrat ul Ibad. According to the new system 80% of government jobs will be given to MQM and the rest 20% will go to PML-Q and other parties. For the rest of Sindh 80% jobs will go for PML-Q and 20% for MQM.
For jobs in education or police departments the candidate must pass an interview test. The appointments in the administrative section of education between grades 5 and 15 will be made directly. In other departments, interview and selection committees will be formed for the selection of candidates.

As they say on slashdot.com:
Don’t complain about lack of options. You’ve got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you’re feeling creative. I’d strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you’re using these numbers to do anything important, you’re insane.

The start of this year has been relatively peaceful and eventful in a positive sense. I went to the Sea Festival over the weekend and it was definitely fun - ethnic chic as I would put it. The best part was how well-behaved the crowd was and smoothly things were going - no overwhelming security that often leaves you more nervous than secure; no boisterous, leering men; and food, music entertainment and handicrafts on sale. The price was definitely on the higher side of things - 30 rupees per adult means that larger families on a tight budget may have balked - but I suppose many people did visit nevertheless.

All of it got me thinking - if the government focussed more on entertainment while things are calmer in the city, the torrid summer months and other times of tension (like the upcoming Muharram holidays) may be just that little bit less difficult to swallow.

There use to be a time when we would get a call by a friend or relative informing us about bad health once or twice in a month. These days it seems Karachiites, due to the mushroomed restaurants all over Karachi, mostly at developed places, are fast becoming ill or facing health issues. One reason being the fast food culture. Not only that we have more people visiting clinics, taking office leave, canceling a meeting or gathering etc. Karachiites understandably live in a fast pace environment. People complain to each other for not visiting them too often for the said reason. One of the important reasons for this is their eating habits. Few years back, eating outside home, except functions, parties, marriage ceremony etc. use to be a NOT A GOOD THING. We would get a lecture if we do that. Now it seems most parents are less questioning their children over it.

( Note : Takeaway/ Home delivery will be considered as outside home)

Interestingly, the health awareness has increased considerably thanks to media & education but why are the results alarming. If we look around ourselves among our friends, family members & colleagues we shall see that visiting a doctor has become a routine thing (not the routine check up, that’s a good thing) due to health issues. And whatever good that was there has been done by ever increasing pollution & contaminated water. There is not much we can do about that but one big reason many of us ignore is our eating habits. Fast food is playing a more role along with our eating outside. Although eating at home too doesn’t guarantee our health. What are Karachiites eating habits:-
Results

From the last QOD, it is clear a lot of different people hold a lot of different views. No wonder the news media industry flourishes so much. To put it into a more quantitative form, lets have a vote on which news source is your favourite.

Happy Voting!

We had a poll here recently on which radio station is the most popular one in Karachi. We had over 85 responses to that poll and here’s what you all had to say.

*please note, the results are only applicable for KMB readers and may not be representative of the city on a whole*

CityFM 89 is the clear all-out winner among KMB readers which over 25 percent of you favoured. Seems like we now know which segment of the population reads blogs. A further 20 percent people simply channel surfed without giving preference to any one particular station. All the other stations combined hold 42% of the vote with Radio1 FM91 leading the pack, followed closely by HumFM 106.2 and ApnaKarachi 107. 12 percent of people do not tune into any radio of which 4 percent prefer to listen to music on their CDs and/or cassette players.

For those of you not in Pakistan and do not know why people seem to prefer CityFM 89, fear not! For you can now tune in to the station over the internet or listen to previous shows via “Citycasts” (podcasts). And they have a blog too!