The recently held Pond’s Miracle Journey Gala proved itself to be inspirational for various reasons. Firstly, it successfully completed its third year of annually celebrating 100 iconic women who have worked tirelessly to be where they are today.
The Noori brothers took the stage to entertain the audience with their hits such as ‘Manwa Re’. While their performance
was brief, it was heartening to see Ali Noor and Ali Hamza reflect on how strong women truly are.
The PMJ Gala, held in Karachi this weekend, celebrated the accomplishments of
100 iconic yet unsung women.
The recently held Pond’s Miracle Journey Gala proved itself to be inspirational for various reasons. Firstly, it successfully completed its third year of annually celebrating 100 iconic women who have worked tirelessly to be where they are today. The ten mentors this year were Aatiqa Lateef, Dr Fehmida Arif, Naheed Mashooqullah, Naila Alladin, Naz Khan, Ronak Lakhani, Safinaz Muneer, Samina Ibrahim, Sana Hashwani and Zeba Bakhtiar who then nominated 10 women each to be Pond’s Miracle Women of the year. What one can ascertain by the list of names is that Pond’s isn’t just focusing on well known celebrities but on other real and inspirational women who come from many different fields, such as medicine, business, art, culinary, fashion and media. Their stories deserve to come forward.
The evening was hosted by an eloquent Sarmad Khoosat, who is known to show sensitivity to women through his cinematic work such as Manto, and attended by Pond’s Miracle Women from the last three years. Other well known faces seen at the event were Academy Award winning film director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, ex supermodel Vaneeza Ahmed and singer/songwriter Zeb Bangash. It was quite a crowd!
Also interesting was the fact that the Noori brothers took the stage to entertain the audience with their classic hits such as ‘Manwa Re’ and ‘Paar Channa De’. While their performance was brief and concise, it was heartening to see Ali Noor and Ali Hamza reflect on how strong women truly are. This is the kind of recognition that is needed from other men as well.
There might be many who feel that female musicians should have been chosen to perform at an event that was all about empowering women but we beg to differ. The entire point of feminism and the highly globalized dialogue around it is to give women equal footing with men in all areas of life. Which means women cannot be isolated from politics or economics or even something as basic as education. It is this very concept of isolation which needs to change; women need to be integrated with the rest of the world. We cannot create a separate space for women and expect that to be the solution to patriarchy which is why they have to work alongside men. And men need to be a part of this dialogue because they obviously contribute to patriarchy.
Look out for a detailed review of the Pond’s Miracle Journey Gala in Instep on Sunday.
