Those the city lives by die unsung

Karachi
If you want to know a city, explore its streets, its alleyways. Today the link of the citizens of Karachi with the streets has snapped; hence the alienation of one segment of society from the other. There’s utter apathy and nobody is bothered about the travails of the others. Today in this city we are all strangers to one another; hence all the senseless killings and mayhem.
These views were expressed by noted journalist and columnist Ghazi Salahuddin at the launch of Rumana Hussain’s book, Street Smart, at the Arts Council on Thursday evening.
He remarked that it was a sad irony that whenever we celebrated some aspect of Karachi, it was followed or preceded immediately by a gory occurrence. He said that while we were busy planning celebrations of an event on April 22, T2F director and social activist Sabeen Mehmud was gunned down on April 24.
“Today we were supposed to be celebrating the launch of Rumana Hussain’s book, Street Smart, and just a day earlier comes an event that perhaps could be defined as the most bloody in the annals of the city’s history, the mowing down by gunfire of 45 members of the Aga Khan Ismaili community by terrorists.”
The director of antiquities, Kalimullah Lashari, lamented that the governance of Karachi had become a “Thekedari Nizam”.
“We take massive loans from the
international donor agencies for the
social and physical uplift of the cities, yet nothing seems to translate into action and we just cut a sorry figure,” he said.
He said that as the title of the book suggested, the street was once an institution. People gathered there, exchanged ideas and learnt so much from each other; it was a forum outside one’s house; it made one understand how things worked. “Today the street has been taken over by the mafias and encroachers.”
He said that unfriendly governments were far worse than corrupt ones.
Maha Arshad 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.