Citizens highlight Karachi’s history

The city’s Frere Hall was the venue of an enlightening conversation on Karachi on Friday highlighting some of the highly positive aspects of the city that we all tend to ignore in our “one-sided” criticism of the city and our discontent with the umpteen civic problems that continue to dog the citizens -- problems of civic utilities, street crime, insanitation, and problems which all the same are very real but in their wake we just forget to see the positive aspects.

Arranged by the ADA (Architecture, Design, Art) which started out as a journal but is now a civic forum, speakers traced the history of Karachi from 230 BC and all through the pre-British era India, the British period, and the post-1947 scenario.

Noted architect and town planner Arif Hassan, with the help of slides, traced the history of Karachi since 1729 onwards and showed the site of 29 Hindu temples. He said that before Partition, Karachi was a predominantly Hindu city.

He showed slides of the Ram Mandir where, as legend has it, Ram and Sita stayed the night on their escape from Ceylon on their way to the Hinglaj temple in Balochistan. He even showed slides of a Jewish graveyard and the umpteen Muslim shrines in town.

It was almost a refresher’s course in history as he narrated how 200 people in the city were exiled to the Andamans for their part in the First War of Independence in 1857 by the British and were left to die there. He also showed slides of horse-pulled tramcars along MA Jinnah Road.

Talking about the inhibiting factors, Hassan cited unbridled immigration into the city. He said that another decade and Karachi would need four million jobs to bring about calm in the city and mitigate the cycle of violence which resulted to a great extent from joblessness.

He wondered where these jobs would come from. He totally disapproved of the hush-hush behind-the-scenes planning whereby the citizens’ groups and stakeholders were not taken into confidence and were just “presented” plans without being consulted.

In this regard, he mentioned the 80 million dollars that had been received from the World Bank for Karachi’s uplift but none had the slightest of idea as to how that was going to be utilised. Sixty-two per cent of the citizens, he said, lived in informal settlements while only 23 per cent lived on residential lands.

Durriya Qazi, head o the Visual Arts Department, University of Karachi, read a highly informative paper on the Karachi of yore, made all the more interesting by her style which engendered a very sentimental narration.

She mentioned how in the days immediately following partition, one could easily get a Steinway piano from Hayden and Company on Elphinstone Street (now Zebunnisa Street), Steinway piano that nowadays costs something like five million rupees. She spoke very nostalgically of all the entertainment joints in town and how they contributed to the pulsating aspect of the city.

Roland deSouza, a noted figure in civic affairs, notably Shehri (Citizens for a Better Environment) spoke about the Christians in Karachi and their contribution to the civic life and social uplift.

He narrated how the Goans came to Karachi in Dhows because in Goa there were hardly any jobs. With the help of slides, he showed various Christian landmarks that came up in Karachi, like the Holy Trinity Cathedral on Abdullah Haroon Road, The St Patrick’s Cathedral, Karachi’s Anglo-Indian School in 1847, St Lawrence’s Church, and the Karachi Goan Association.

He narrated how the Christians had contributed to the city’s life as teachers, doctors, academics, medical personnel, police and army officers. Azhar Zaidi of Grohe, an organisation specialising in water technology gave a talk on the way water was becoming a really precious commodity in the city. He said that most to blame was the citizens’ apathy.

He warned that by 2025, there would be a crucial shortage of water. He cited the case of Jamia Darul Uloom of Karachi where, he said, GROHE had installed 106 Euroecocompatible faucets which switched off automatically after the person stopped using them, to avoid wastage.

A noted architect and one of the founders of The Citizens’ Foundation (TCF), Shahid Abdullah, just debunked all the negative talk about Karachi that seemed to have become fashion and with the help of slides showed what a philanthropic city Karachi was.

He said that it all resulted from donations from the public and today with the blessings of The Almighty, the TCF had 1500 schools countrywide. He said that Karachi was known to be the most philanthropic city of the world.

He said, “We did not go out to any foreign organisation asking for funds. It was all

on the basis of self-help by our compatriots and we managed one of the most philanthropic organisations of the country.”

He narrated, with the help of slides, how the TCF had converted the most dilapidated quarters of the city into suave parks for the recreation of families and how those were being by the residents of the areas where families were going for relaxation and recreation.

He outlined plans whereby they would soon be turning the Nehr-e-Khayyam in Clifton’s Boat Basin area into a clean waterway and rid it of the sludge to make it an attractive recreation spot.

The tenor of his talk was that instead of just lamenting the umpteen drawbacks in the city, we should also look at the brighter side of things and do our bit to exploit the tremendous potential.

He also narrated how the TCF had rebuilt houses in the upper reaches of the country ravaged by the killer earthquake of 2005 and provided running water in there, something that previously was not there. Earlier, Maria Aslam, at the outset, dedicated the function to the memory of slain architect and social activist Parween Rehman, and said, “We are so unaware of the gems among us.”