Where are you, Mister Prime Minister, when your people need you?
Headlines, juxtaposed, stare back at me in the morning paper. I am reading it, still shaken by the events of the Abbas Town Blasts. The sky on this Tuesday morning is tinted a strange reddish strain. Maybe it’s just in the minds of traumatised Karachiites who cannot get over the blood spilled in Abbas Town – blood that has still not dried. Fumes of that blood are now being breathed in also by residents of the hitherto protected upscale neighbourhoods of Karachi who live in fear of their daughters and wives being kidnapped. We are talking about the blood of ...
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Abbas Town blasts: Will we wipe our tears, keep silent and carry on?
It’s 1:20am on March 4, 2013. As I write this, at least 40 or so families are feeling a searing, soul-wrenching pain, which most of us can’t even imagine and some of us can perhaps relate to. I am trying to imagine what they are going through. I don’t want to live it, but I want to somehow feel something other than anger. When they have a moment of stillness, family members are probably painstakingly recreating and reliving the last moments of their loved ones. When you lose someone you love, you think of how their last few minutes were. Was it ...
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When the victims are buried in mass graves, it’s genocide
When they need mass graves to bury the victims, it is time to start calling it a genocide. I have seen gut-wrenching images of poor Hazara men and women mourning their loved ones who were killed simply for being Shia. I saw horrible images of the scene of violence of the bomb blasts this past weekend in Quetta. But nothing moved me quite like the picture of the mass grave that was dug last month to bury the 93 victims of anti-Shia savagery. To my mind, nothing encapsulates just how low we have sunk than the fact that we now have ...
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The more they target us, the louder I will say ‘I am Shia’
Over 90 of us perished on January 10, 2013. I don’t mean Pakistanis, I mean Shias. As much as it pains me to identify myself as something before a Pakistani, this state seems to have left us little choice. Since the age of 15, when my parents decided to let me be and decide for myself how far I wanted my religious identity to go, I have been attending fewer and fewer majaalis every year. In some part, it has to do with the fact that I got busy building a career for myself, but in some part it was also because I ...
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Of tattoos and ‘foreign hands’
We frequently lend ears to a clichéd line by government representatives every few days – it starts with ‘we condemn the incident’ and ends with ‘a foreign hand’. In a recent incident that killed at least 15 people and wounded more than 46 in Peshawar, it seemed that the only object of interest was the ‘un-Islamic’ tattoo of the Uzbek suicide bomber. A tattoo that was alien to ‘Muslim’ identity. While every newspaper showed pictures of the attacker’s dead body bearing the Boris Vallejo sorcery character image, the government seemed strangely relieved. It was perhaps satisfied that for once it won’t ...
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DHA blast and the drug addicts of the future
For decades now, Pakistan has been known to be a hub for the production and smuggling of heroin and hashish but as of recent years, more psychotropic drugs have also surfaced to challenge a nation already struggling with a handful of troubles. With Muharram’s blast alerts, which raised immense levels of security, there was an explosion in my ‘supposedly’ safe neighbourhood of Defence in Karachi. The blast was a result of criminals and their makeshift lab for the drug crystal methamphetamine. During the investigation, it emerged that children from elite families from surrounding areas were buyers and users of the ...
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Maybe you should resign Mr Vice Chancellor
It was the last thing we were expecting; after last year’s deadly blast in which ten students were injured the we hoped their thirst for violence would be satiated. But the beatings, clashes and stoning just wasn’t enough -they were still not satisfied. Being a student at the University of Karachi, we, the students, are used to certain disruptions, but that day in December when while we got ready to leave our respective houses for a scheduled exam, the news even came to us as a shock. The news of a blast at Karachi University crashed down on us with a burst of ...
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How schools can cope with increasing violence
Living in Karachi is no mean feat. And the recent bomb blast that targeted CID police official Chaudhry Aslam Khan’s house in the Defence Housing Authority and claimed eight lives is a recent reminder of that. It is unfortunate and rather alarming, that the area is home to many schools. The CAS, being one, suffered heavy damage because of which the school was closed for a few days. Considering the current scenario, it is pertinent that children are made more aware of what to do in an emergency situation and for this, schools should offer first-aid workshops and make attendance mandatory ...
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Children died in Karachi today
Today’s bomb blast at SSP CID Chaudary Aslam’s house was a rude awakening. Suicide bomb blasts are common place in Karachi now and have made us all dangerously thick-skinned. In the aftermath of such news, I for one am usually thankful that I don’t live near the area under attack and am glad to see my family safe, but beyond the immediate effect it has on my life, I am completely undeterred from and do not let it affect my day’s activities. This is to some extent a necessary approach to take, for if we ...
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Peshawar: City of death and hope
There was a blast in Peshawar Khyber Supermarket on June 11, 2011 at approximately 11:45 pm, killing 40 and injuring around 100. It was supposed to be one of those peaceful weekends when I’d be chatting with family over a meal or engrossed in an inconclusive talk-show on television. I recall sitting at home, watching television with my family when the sudden sound of an explosion shook us all. It was terrifying and distressing at the same time. Who was at the blast site? How many lives might have perished away in this blast? Many questions rose in my mind but were silenced by ...
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