said Karachi was not a social or cultural entity anymore. Cultural spaces, she said, were shrinking and funding was becoming hard to come by. She said that I am Karachi was a socio-cultural entity imbibing a multi-sectoral approach encompassing civil society.
Its objectives, in a nutshell, could be described as: regaining public space (intellectual and social); bringing civil society together by bringing down social barriers; cultivating democracy and awareness; and helping the cultural and social fabric of the city to survive.
The director of the State Bank of Pakistan’s museum, Asma Ibrahim, said Rumana Hussain’s was a very profound and thought-provoking book, giving a complete insight into Karachi with all its issues and problems.
She described the conference on Karachi which featured aspects of the city dating two million years back in history, into the Stone Age, and the discovery of an underwater city in the Indus Delta.
Finally, the author spoke on her book which is a compendium based on interviews with all the trades that are to be found in the town and whose practitioners, with the sweat of their brow, eke out an existence, often far removed from their families in other cities.
There’s the human angle to these interviews. There are profiles of and interviews with milk sellers, rickshaw drivers, women who vend small wares and get back home at the end of the day with a wage that is more of a mockery. There are women who sell dry fruits, who sweep the roads. There are rag-pickers.
Rumana, throwing aside the veneer of class superiority and the rich-poor-divide, has talked to them in detail to know of their travails and joys (if any). There’s about 60 people interviewed. Through these interviews, Rumana has brought home the pivotal role these people play in the functioning of the city and how they are spurned, to finally die immersed in a sea of anonymity, totally unsung. Aliya Iqbal compered the proceedings.