jugalbandee August 24, 2009
Posted by Xill-e-Ilahi in history, karachi, lahore.5 comments
of all the things that make pakistan what it is, including saleem javed and sohail warraich, perhaps the most fascinating aspect is cultural diversity. we have more languages than the number of uncorrupt officials in the national police force – urdu, punjabi, sindhi, pashto, saraiki, balochi, kashmiri, potwari, gujrati, memoni, brahvi, hindkoh, balti, kalash and burushaski to name a few – and the speakers of each language average at least four to five disparate cultural groups each. compound that impact with the different heritages each group has from the thousand year old warrior culture of some pukhtoon tribes to the generations old gaddi nasheen mystic lineages in southern punjab to the familial agrarian tendencies in some areas of sindh to the settled spiritual lifestyles of the makranis who’ve been settled on the coast since the slave traders dumped them there centuries ago. it goes without saying, then, that there is also a perpetual rivalry of sorts between various regional groups especially since racial bias (and maybe an idle mind) is probably the only uniform national trait shared by all pakistanis.
when one talks of competition, one talks of the olympics, of world cups, of arms races, of national space programs, of wars of succession. it is rare to talk of majid and basit and their rivalry in the epic race for who gets the black dastaar at the end of the semester for best performance in the third grade at their madrassa in chak 57, tehsil shahjehanpoora. and so, while there is a heated debate about whether the kababs in topi are better than those in peshawar the only real rivalry anyone actually cares about in pakistan is that between people talking about whether lahore is better than karachi or vice versa. cyma talked about it in her last post and hemlock has sort of touched on it earlier on her own blog, here and here.
i was born in karachi at a time when partition (both from undivided india and the later loss of half the country) was ancient history. the earth of karachi is now custodian to the remains of four generations of my family. and while my parents were both born in what is now india – immigrant children of immigrant parents – and while i retain in family history and tradition the lore of araby, the culture of persia and the magic of india; it is that very combination of bloodlines and history that makes me a karachiite. dirty, yes. polluted, yes. violent, yes. unsafe, yes. acute power crisis, yes. and yet, karachi is so much more than just that. karachi is where ladies sit on the rooftops sipping chai, comparing the voices of muezzins echoing from all over the city with their dupattas on their heads, minutes before they discuss the latest fashions. it is where you grow up with the smell of diesel smoke and barbecued kebabs and of raat ki rani and rotting garbage. it is where kids learn the difference between the sound of gunfire and the sound of firecrackers before they lose their innocence and where five year olds play safely unchaperoned on the streets. it is where annual conferences on islam and islamic life seem to take place every day - as do concerts and melas and plays. karachi is home to over 18 million people; rich and poor, old and young, literate and illiterate from a thousand different roots and places. the richness of karachi’s tradition is not encapsulated in old buildings and folk stories – it is in the people themselves. in their language, their behaviour, their belief, their dress, their cuisine. the people of karachi claim links to the majesty of the mughals, the bravery of tipu sultan, the religion of the sufi saints, the tales of sassi and marvi, the pride of the pukhtoons, the hospitality of sindh and, above all, the magic of urdu.
for all that – is it the cultural capital of pakistan? no. alexander the great camped here but does it have great historical significance? no. it has a patron saint supposedly protecting its shore from the cyclones that mysteriously turn away just before lashing the coast, but does it have its own culture of mysticism? no. the fragrance of flowers wafts from a million florists’ stalls every evening but does it have its own greenery? no. maybe it could be prettier. better planned perhaps. definitely cleaner.
but its home. do i need more reason to love it above any other place on earth? no.
and yet, does that mean i don’t love lahore? does the love have to be mutually exclusive? i don’t know.
i fell in love with lahore around thirteen seconds after i first stepped on its land. if karachi’s soul is pluralist, lahore’s is as singular as you can imagine. lahore is the city that gives pakistan its share in the history of the subcontinent. supposedly founded over 4000 years ago by a son of the lord ram of hindu mythology, lahore has never witnessed the cycle of rebirth – simply because it has never died. akbar the great’s capital, lahore is the capital of punjab in more ways than just political. it is the city of ali hajveri, of dara shikoh, of anarkali, of iqbal, of faiz. it is of the lawrence gardens and the red fort. it is of the badshahi mosque and of the courtesans and dancing girls who live behind it. lahore is of greenery, of mysticism, of hospitality, of food, of history and of love. the cliche goes that you haven’t lived until you’ve seen lahore. it’s a fact. lahore lahore aye.
if this were a court case, i wouldn’t want to be the jury.
da khwar lasme spogmay July 23, 2009
Posted by Xill-e-Ilahi in arts & culture, lollywood, michael jackson.3 comments
i haven’t been for landhi for several years now. this is a statement which requires explanation. karachi is supposedly spread out over an area approximating 3,700 square kilometres – though every website on the net has its own variant, ranging from 200 to 20,000 – and the fact that the development of the urban sprawl was not planned for the first sixty (post-partition) years of the said sprawl, resulted in what at times looks like a surprisingly well planned city with five or six industrial areas operating in their own cocoons of commercial and residential areas. so, most people do not need to go to the outer regions – i won’t call them suburbs – for the entire span of their natural lives and actually visit other cities more often than they visit places like gulshan-e-hadeed, surjani town or gulshan-e-maymar. or landhi.
i haven’t been to landhi for several years now. at one time if you headed toward dawood chowrangi from the intersection just before the main quaidabad you would see a bulding looking like a world war 2 bunker on your left, below the bridge, with the rather incongrous name of gulistan talkies painted across its roof – with an even more incongruous billboard wth the tradionally handpainted movie posters for the movie of the week which would probably have something like star wars or the godfather or rocky on it. this was confusing. one day, we investigated and found out that the movie on the poster was just for the poster and that what the projecter cast on the screen for a piddling 2 rupees per person was smut of the worst kind (or best kind, depending on your preferences). now, karachi isn’t exactly kabul but it ain’t amsterdam either. you can get anything anywhere but there is a certain degree of fallout that you have to weather with the force of your wallet or your daddy’s clout. so we didn’t bother entering the place - especially having noted the police mobile parked right outside its gate.
we went someway down the road to a more conventional theatre called nargis of all things, to watch something “safer” – like standard fare lollywood dishouts. and it was here that i realised that the film industry of pakistan is capable of dishing out the most ridiculous sequences ever commited to film - and if you haven’t kept yourself updated with modern day crap on youtube you don’t know what a compliment (or insult, depending on your sense of humour) that is. what we watched that fateful day was one of the industry’s more succesful flops of the year 2005, sarkar. consider the following lyrics from one of the songs on the 27th of the obligatory 43 item numbers per movie:
badan badan pey khoya lapaitway
mein tujh pe laitoon
tu mujh pe laitway(wrap [a certain kind of sweetner made from milk] over bodies
i’ll lie on top of you
you lie on top of me)
and if you think the director swayed away from the literal for a minute, you’re sadly mistaken. but at least the movie had a decent storyline, as storylines go in lollywood. it was your standard fare gandasa/kalashnikov culture flick which show a good guy taking the bad route, meeting a worse guy on the way and culminating with him killing a million baddies after having danced everytime it rained with a series of cows masquerading as starlets who had been clothed by the guy who designed the outfit for brothel barbie. like i said, standard fare. if you have not explored lollywood - a sad but enlightening depiction of pakistani culture, shorn of the facade of propriety we maintain - you have to visit hotspot. especially the stuff they’ve got on legendary lollywood flicks like haseena atim bum and international gorrilay.
but i leave you with something more in tune with the times, what with michael bhai jackson passing away and all and the one minute silence in the sindh provincial assembly to commemorate his death (as opposed to the complete apathy towards the hundreds of lives lost in the swat operation).
in the late eighties or early nineties (i can’t remember which – before documented history anyway) i watched a movie which STN aired on thursday night primetime called prince. it starred the “dashing” action hero afzal khan rambo and his wife sahiba with a special appearnace by legendary pakistani folk singer arif lohar as himself. i can’t remember what the movie was about but the opening sequence will remain with me all my life but as their is no guarantee of when said life will end i thought i’d put it down for you to cringe and shudder with shame by ( i know the wannabe cool readership of this blog and their proclivities).
the movie opens with sahiba acting like a spoilt child on her birthday saying she wants michael jackson to be at her party. her brother, being the kind of obligatory idiotic elder brother every girl in pakistan has to have, asks rambo what to do who assures him that he will take care of it. cue to the next scene, a shot of sahiba pouting at the foot of what is more a conference table than a dining table with hundreds of people standing around her trying to cheer her up when all of a sudden her face lights up at the sound of disco music. shee looks up and guess who’s on the table in white socks, leather jacket and tight trousers? rambo, of course. the lyrics are self explanatory.
aap nay yaad kiya
agaya mein
na dikhaye mujh se zyada koi ack-shun
i am michael jaaik-sun
cringing just yet? if its any solace, the period is known as the dark ages of lollywood*
*for a more serious discussion on lollywood and why it is what it is, look up nadeem farooq paracha’s archive in dawn‘s images sometime.
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the title of this post is the name of the pashto version of catwoman. she weighed 350 pounds.
feline, very feline.
i live in… khair choro July 15, 2009
Posted by Xill-e-Ilahi in landmarks, places.8 comments
this is based on a post originally made by the author on the karachi metroblog two years ago to the day:
like all the other denizens of our concrete jungle i know, cannot claim to have seen the whole of karachi. this is both a tragedy and a comedy. it is also largely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. for this post is about the bits of karachi that i have seen. that and the funny names they have. its amazing some of these are actually officially recognized names. sometimes it makes you think how crazy the city planners must be to actually have come up with names like these ones. then again, they’re planning a city which was named after a dancing girl from a fishing village on the coast of sindh. that brings lurid and largely unmentionable images of a makrani gentleman’s club to mind with a plump sheedi girl in a grass skirt and a shocking pink teeshirt that reads baybee gurl dancing on a table to the tune of jiye bhutto benazir… but lets not dwell on that.
dear reader, if you exist, keep this post interactive because there is no way in hell i can cover all the locations with names thought up by a committee chaired by manto’s lunatic from toba tek singh which included the mad hatter and the march hare, among others. feel free to add
any in khi-town which you can think of in the comments section – just stick to the unusual ones please.
1. geedar chowrangi: a place in landhi not far from bhains colony (buffalo colony) apparently so named for the hyenas or jackals or maybe just wild dogs that used to be seen around here when karachi had not sprawled as much as it had.
2. golimar: the unofficial name of gulbahar. golimar (which literally means “fire a bullet”) attained notoriety in the 90s as a hotbed of violence lending some reason to the name it is known by. it is much better known these days as home to one of the largest plumbing products market in the city.
3. nagan chowrangi: a major traffic junction in north karachi, this roundabout which would be called the female cobra roundabout in english, branches off in so many directions its impossible to count them from a moving vehicle. indeed, one story goes that it was actually named nau gun initially, meaning “nine ways”, which later got distorted into nagan. in karachi, everything’s possible.
4. do minute chowrangi: as wierd names go, the two minute roundabout probably has the wierdest of them all. and i haven’t even been able to find a single story for why its named what it is. to further compound the wierdness, to get here you have to cross unda mor (egg turn) and karaila mor (bitter gourd turn).
5. perfume chowk: this is not such a wierd name as it is an interesting story. the perfume chowk person who basically owns or owned an eastern perfume pushcart which was permanently parked at a spot in gulistan-e-jauhar, marketed his business with a can of spray paint and the confidence that graffiti was his right as a citizen of karachi. you can find the words perfume chowk spray painted on walls and shop shutters from gulshan-e-hadeed to surjani town to clifton. the spot has become so famous that bus conductors call out “perfume chowk” to commuters to signal the arrival of the bus stop.
6. chaakiwara: they tell me the name is not actually that wierd. if you’re balochi. or maybe martian.
7. khamosh colony: khamosh (or silent) colony is actually a place in karachi. at least i’ve heard of it often enough to think that it is. now why anyone would to name a place something that sounds so creepy and graveyardy is beyond me – unless – it is actually so named because it is or was near a graveyard. which is a silent place. and this is something truly possible.
8. “san day”: i’ll level with you. this is not really a name of a place. but its what every bus conductor in karachi calls out when his bus passes a place he wants to call “seven day”. which still doesn’t make sense. if, that is, you don’t know that he is referring to the seventh day adventist church behind empress market.
9. “naitee jaitee”: again, this is a mispronunciation. one used by almost every karachiite when referring to the place. the place in question being the native jetty, reknowned as the most enduringly popular spot for comitting suicide in the city of lights (or light bulbs. kesc ensures they’re never lit).
10. chacha chachi park: (uncle aunt park) this is a tiny green patch in district central hardly large enough to park a small skateboard. the funny thing for me is not that it is for some obscure reason named as a tribute to an even more obscure pair of paternal relatives but that it has the grand idea that it is in fact a park – even though there is only enough grass on it to cater to a gandhi-esque goat on an afternoon when he is not in a particularly hungry mood.
this list could go on for ages. but i’d like to hear your contributions. so give us a name and a story to go with it if possible.
(note: i may have gotten some of the geography and most of the history wrong here. being what it is, there is no way some of this can be verified. most of it comes from stories of people who live nearby. but sometimes that adds spice to the local flavour. so don’t kill me if you know something i don’t.)
the fields of laloo July 14, 2009
Posted by Xill-e-Ilahi in places.Tags: debunking the myth, places in karachi
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“kahan ja rahay ho, bhai?” he asked.
“aap mujhe bas nazimabad ki taraf direct ker dijiye“.
“come on, yaar. i’ll drop you” said the guy. i looked at the kalashnikov and considered my options.
wait. time out. i have discovered, over a lifetime of telling stories, that it is not very easy to decide the exact point at which you start an anecdote. spend too much time setting up atmosphere and you lose your audience before you get to the point. jump right into it and your audience loses you before you can call pir pagara a ”najoomi” – though why you would want to do that remains a point of contention. experience tells me, however, that it is best to start at the beginning.
for those of you who don’t know me – and i don’t see why you would read this blog if you did – i’m a karachiite, born and (half)bred. and while i was never your desi angraiz, my influences – for want of a better word – were more joan jett than nayyara noor. so the only way i knew i was passing through lalookhait was spotting the sign which has read “satter saala sinyaasi baba” since as far back as i can remember – and i can remember the days when they showed david hasselhoff’s hit tv series on national tv. admittedly, it was knight rider and not baywatch, but it was something. apart from that, the only time lalookhait would ever figure into conversation was when the fat kid in class, while consuming his third sandwich would burp and some smartass who was already done with his lunch (usually a handsome little kid called abbas) would ask, “yaar, tumhara pait hai ya lalookhait hai?“. that was more or less it. but for the advancing middle class, nouveau riche, bourgeoisie and old money types; lalookhaiti was then and continues to be an opprobrious epithet. this was confusing. a big city kid, i know its slightly demeaning to be referred to as a pastoral type and i would not willingly adopt laloo as a pseudonym, let alone a name, but why the combination of the two was such an insult was beyond the faculties of a ten year old kid.
i suppose that when his parents named the young boy ”lal bukhsh”, they had no idea that his name would overshadow that of one of the founding fathers of a country, a man who would be not only the first prime minister of that great state but also the its first victim of a political assasination. they couldn’t have. if they did they’d have named him something cooler. like abbas, for example. but be that as it may, “lalookhait” (laloo’s field) has survived three generations (i suppose thats how many you might expect in 62 years) and is still the en vogue name for what is now known as liaquatabad town. but if you want documentaries go to the discovery channel. i don’t do that kind of thing. of course i can tell you that the place has 165 mosques but only 6 mandirs and 3 churches. that would mean that minorities have 5.14% representation in the places of worship department which is probably over the national average (and impressive, considering that there is a 99% muslim population). and that each mosque is expected to cater to 2,250 muslims (i’m assuming the women pray at home). but i’m not known for my fondness of statistics. no. this post is about what the word lalookhait means to those who by the machinations of fate have managed to occupy real estate beyond the bridge that connects the karachi of bund kababs and the karachi of burgers. for those living in the cocoon of elitedom there has always been something mysterious, perhaps even taboo, about lalookhait – something like the concept of a grown man’s boxers way above the waistband of his jeans is in a place like, say, federal “b” area (by the way, there is no federal “a” area. f.b. area is f.b. area only because its next to f.c. area – federal capital – which, in case you didn’t know, karachi was until ayub khan decided to bring it closer to home.). lalookhait is more than just a wierd place on the way to the dreamworld (or is it dreamland?) resort. its more than the “dangerous” place you have to go through if you are feeling all desi and want to try that karhai on the superhighway.it is not, for crying out loud, where altaf hussain lives. but even the well informed have got it wrong in the past. the glaring mistake in kamila shamsie’s (a grammarian i think) otherwise superb salt and saffron is the fact that her guy from lalookhait has the kashmiri surname, butt, but is presented as an urdu speaking mohajir*.
i haven’t researched lalookhait – i mean i have read the wikipedia page on the place, but that’s it – so i can’t tell you much about the wholesale gold market (saraafa bazaar) that lies smack in the middle of it. i can’t tell you about the workshops in there that make allegedly japanese electronics out of chinese parts. i can’t tell you about the best metalwork market in karachi. i can’t tell you about the now-almost-extinct qawwali scene that produced pakistan’s greatest exponent of the classical qawwali, the sabri duo. i can’t tell you how their batsmen were about the only ones in karachi who could compete with nazimabad’s “finger” bowlers in the ramzan cricket tournaments everyone seemed to take part in before 1999. in many ways, lalookhait and the nazimabads were to karachi what old dilli used to be delhi – the melting pot that defined the city’s culture and lifestyle beneath the pomp and imagery of the royal courts. for lalookhait is as multiethnic as it gets for an area in which people settle for no other reason than that they can. biharis, rajputs, u.p.-ites, people from andhra, bangalore, madras, calcutta, wherever they could migrate from – found their way into lal bukhsh’s lush green fields near the lyari river and built a base. the ride from refugee settlement to commercial hotspot was shorter than the dupattas of the mid nineties.
and yet it is the part of karachi we love to hate. the dirt swept under the carpet when visitors arrive. the bottom rung on the ladder. the elephant in the room which no one discusses. the place from where no one is really a nice guy and everyone is suspect. because its politically charged? because it has been a victim of ethnic violence? or is it beacuse english is not the lingua franca and their showbiz repertoire consists of omar sharif and moeen akhtar as opposed to vaneeza ahmed and jamal shah? it was the only calm place in the city the night benazir was assasinated. i should know. i dodged mobs and bullets on foot all the way from sharae faisal that night and somehow entered lalookhait en route to nazimabad. there were kids playing in the street. women shopping for groceries. men buying those 5 rupee seekhs available throughout karachi on pushcarts that i have always supected are dogmeat (the seekhs not the pushcarts). and then this guy comes up on a chinese harley imitation with a kalashnikov on his lap, sees i’m exhausted and terrified, and offers me the ride.
i took it. i’m alive.
i’m still not naming any of my kids laloo.
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*now this blunder may not seem so significant but you have to consider that liaquatabad is the only area in pakistan that i can remember where the mein tay honda hee lay saan campaign billboards read mein to honda hee loonga.
Xill-e-Ilahi
Halai
cymarizwankhan
Mystic
