I am starting a new series where I will post things that we spot on a day to day basis, that dont seem right. A lot of people see things that should not be happening but we usually end up turning our eyes away from it. In order to improve the country, it is important that we keep an eye out for people who seem to be breaking the law and using unfair methods. If we keep highlighting these things in the media then the authorities are forced to look at correcting themselves. If we turn a blind eye, we give more freedom for corruption to flourish.

With this series, I will provide a platform for you to help change things in Karachi for the better. In the rapidly upcoming tradition of citizen journalism, I will keep this series open to everyone. Since it is our responsibility to make our city a better place, you can go do your own reporting and send me your photos/videos. I will publish a good selection every week for the benefit of the readers (Submission guidelines are at the end of the post).

TODAY’s SELECTION:

Ibex being transported

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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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Just to share the news…

Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain Friday announced to step down from the party leadership.According to media reports, Farooq Sattar read a letter from Altaf Hussain to the General Workers body meeting.

According to reports, the party chief said the party leaders failed to contain the violence on April 9 in Karachi city… read more.

Jawwad Farid, CEO of Alchemy Associates writes about how saturday’s emergency declaration has affected the reality on ground here in Karachi. He paints a not-so-depressing picture of the situation  for the financial and work fronts for citizens of Pakistan(to which i also agree). The internet is still on (as the posts and comments on this blog are testament to), mobile and SMS services are still on and our link to the outside world has not been severed.

Life in Karachi has not come to a standstill. While there is tension and apprehension in the air, life still goes on.

For us life goes on, this is not the first time we have gone through this experience. It is now a part of our national psyche. We have seen these so called national events of monumental significance all the way from 1953 to 1999. At least once every decade, sometimes even more.

Read more at Jawwads’ post – Emergency – a guide for our non-local friends, and our local friends who are no longer local…

Here at the Karachi Metroblog we’ve talked fairly frequently about the elusive dream that reliable and inexpensive broadband is for most of the city’s citizens. But a measure of just how elusive mere 24×7 internet connectivity is, let alone broadband, can be seen in this post at Wired Pakistan where KO narrates how despite installing no less then 8 different types of systems, including but not limited to Dial Up, DSL, Wifi, GPRS, Wimax and others, he’s rarely a satisfied customer:

My office is in the beginning of Korangi, which is Karachi’s (and hence Pakistan’s) premiere industrial area. Email and the internet are a essential part of any business, and thus to ensure reliable internet connectivity we’ve got eight different internet links.
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An AISECer from singapore recalls her first day of arriving in Karachi, terming it as a time of many firsts. The one passage which got me was number six, titled, Karachi HEALTH induction

The food is good, but can be deceiving and deadly sometimes! I ate
something contaminated last week or the week before. And for many days
I’ve just been crapping water. Any food goes in then out like an
express train. So finally yesterday went to the hospital for treatment.
Joined the IV-Drip Club [we had another intern who got the same
treatment for dehydration] Spent over 2500 Rs. [ouch!] Doc diagnosed it
as gastro-intestinal infection

It got me thinking into how do you avoid these kind of problems when coming here from abroad? Bringing your own water (a guest lecturer we had from US did that) and being super careful about what you have to eat/drink is one solution, but not a viable one for most people. Having a ‘vaccination’ consisting of Immodium as soon as you land is another option, an option my cousin and his wife opted for and which worked on them.

How many other ways can you defeat the stomach flue?

Last year, i proposed we setup Independence Day resolutions.

Every year, on the eve of January 1st, we setup our new year resolutions to better ourselves for the coming year.

This year, i propose we setup resolutions to better our selves as Pakistanis (no matter where we are) and to both make stronger our communities and our country!

All we need, is one resolution each.. the spillover effect theory would take care of the rest!

For readers who remember it, and had setup some themselves, let us know how successful were you in them. For everyone else, please let us know what you intend to make this year.

Read on for how i did on my own resolutions
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The City of Lights (or rather UPS’s and Generators as my friend Ghafoor put it) has been in the news quite frequently for the past couple of months. Unfortunately most of the coverage has been negative, and I don’t think the saying “Any publicity is good publicity” applies in this case.

Other than the countless protests by the lawyers, PPP, PPPP, MQM, MMA…. (and the list goes on and on), the city has also been lashed with the tail-end of a tropical cyclone. The overflowing gutters, uprooted electricity poles and strewn billboards suggest that the city is just not suited for rain. Add to that the fact that an extremely popular shopping mall in the vicinity of the teen talwaar (Continental Trade Centre-CTC) suffered from a horrible fire and is all but finished, and you feel the city is going through a rough patch.
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Karachi is a proof for the existence of God. Without a merciful, compassionate, caring, and forgiving Lord, Karachi and Karachians would have long disappeared.
[No, not in the rigorous, logical sense of “proof.” Karachi and its people are beyond logic.]

Its always interesting to note what how visitors perceive are city as. The above observation is that of Shyakh Faraz Rabbani, a researcher in Islamic law who answers religious questions and teaches at the popular website Sunni Path. He is in Karachi these days learning under Maulna Taqi Usmani’s guidance and maintains the regularly updated blog Seeker’s Digest. What he suggests isn’t exactly a compliment, but you can hardly deny its accuracy, can you?

What javeria has written, i’ve also seen happening. She writes about how enlightenment about quran, about the teachings of islam are spreading at a grassroots level among the women of the so-called ‘westernized society’ of karachi’s posh localities. Adnan Siddiqui, when commenting on a previous blog here, wrote that he was indebted to US and their war on terror, for it made him want to learn and understand what Islam was truly all about. Here, things are not so different, for i suspect that all the targetting has made people want to learn and understand it’s teachings better.

I have seen sleeveless wearing girls and women change and take up the full hijab. I have seen filthy rich fashion conscious ladies change and become simple and veiled and beautiful practicing Muslimahs…I have seen the rich donate money and their entire houses for the spread of deen.