Cosmopolitan Karachi
Rasheeda Bhagat , HINDU
In many ways Karachi reminds you of Mumbai… .and as many cricket fans who crossed over the border to witness the first one-day Indo-Pak cricket match found, the people of Karachi bowled them over with their hospitality. The place is a haven for shopping and holds out immense promise on the food front for hard-core non-vegetarians.
When Time magazine put Karachi on its cover last year and called it a “megapolis of mayhem” and a “dangerous mess, with terrorism breeding in enclaves across the city”, ending the article with: “Karachi isn’t safe at night, not even for a killer with connections”, there was a howl of protest from Pakistanis, notably Karachiites.
That was in June 2003. Predictably, there were several articles in the Pakistani media pooh-poohing the Time story. Nine months have gone by and yet Karachiites are still smarting under the insult of being called “Asia’s roughest, toughest town”.
In the last few years, not too many Indians could comment on the city or its people as Indo-Pak relations took a new dip and all transport links were snapped. But the Indian Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee and cricket has changed all that. As the winning Indian team got appreciation at Karachi’s National Stadium, some media reports recalled the Chennai audience’s sporting behaviour when Pakistan won a test match here in 1999.
So what did Indians who travelled to see the match think of Karachi?
But before taking that up, let’s look at what die-hard Karachiites have to say of their city. “Our biggest problem is that we’re our worst enemies and keep cribbing all the time. And Karachi definitely has an image problem,” says Siraj K. Teli, President of the Karachi Chamber of Industry and Commerce. “You’ve been here for a few days now. Do you feel unsafe on our streets?”
One hastened to assure him that the Karachi of today is definitely a much more relaxed and safer city than the one I had visited a few times in the last decade. At least one was not constantly being asked to take care while travelling around the city and not to be out alone on the streets late in the evenings. Or to take extreme care while coming out of a bank or a moneychanger’s office… and so on and so forth.
This time around when one visited Pakistan’s commercial capital, the city had sprung back to life after a few years in the wilderness when the crime rate had touched a new high; car snatchings and kidnappings were passé, parents were restive until their children returned home from school, and one never knew when or where the next bomb would go off or the next spell of sectarian violence would erupt.
Though one cannot claim even now that Karachi has become a haven of peace — it hasn’t as can be seen from the huge walls enclosing palatial houses in upmarket localities like Clifton or Defence — Pakistan’s commercial capital has begun to get back a lot of the sheen it had lost over long years due to factors such as the Indo-Pak tension, sectarian violence and an increasing anti-West phobia.
The result, as Wasim Mirza, the Karachi-based Managing Director of Swiss Specialty Chemicals Pvt Ltd, points out, is the city springing to life in the evenings. “The marriage season is just over and we’ve hardly seen such ostentation and festivities in a long time. There is not a decent restaurant in Karachi where you can get a table for dinner without prior reservation.”
One could see that fancy cars had returned to Karachi’s roads. Hardly a couple of years ago, a Karachi businessman had told me that even those who owned S-class Mercs, BMWs, Honda Accords and the latest from the Nissan stable, preferred to leave these cars at home and travel in their battered and bruised Suzuki Khyber (a much older version of Maruti Zen) or ancient models of Toyota cars.
This time around the shopping malls were bustling with activity and whether it was upmarket shopping malls on Tariq Road, Clifton, or the value-for-money markets like the Bohri bazaar, money was indeed changing hands. Here’s a tip for the compulsive shoppers. While visiting Pakistan, make sure to get hold of their cottons — particularly lawns — and footwear. The English Boot House and Fitrite on Tariq Road are excellent places to buy shoes and sandals that are absolutely light in weight, high on comfort and once again, relatively light on the pocket considering their excellent quality.
In many ways, vibrant Karachi reminds you of Mumbai and it has much more on offer than shopping, as the Indians who had travelled to it to watch the first one-day cricket match of the Indo-Pak `friendship’ series found. If you have a friend, neighbour or colleague who crossed the border and travelled to either Karachi or Lahore to watch a cricket match, he/she must still be gushing from the experience.
Sample this e-mail sent by an Indian professional to her friends in India and which was forwarded to me by a friend from Karachi: “It was an overwhelming experience at Karachi’s National Stadium where the Pakistanis were throwing chocolates at the Indian fans cheering their team. Quite a few were carrying the flags of both countries imaginatively stitched together. The guy on the street selling bhuttas refused to accept money from us and so did some restaurant owners saying that we were their guests!”
She was amazed by people on the streets wanting to shake the hands of Indian visitors and “asking us to come home for dinner. Everybody we met had some relative staying in India. Star Plus is Karachi’s most favourite channel. Shops gave us 40 to 50 per cent discount and again it was the India factor. Taxis, autos, army guys… the list is endless… everywhere we got loads of courtesy and respect; more than we would get in our own country. It is really sad that we consider ourselves `secular’ and yet have such a negative perception of Pakistan.”
Lest you think this was an odd e-mail, India Today Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie, who travelled to Lahore to see the two one-dayers, found the experience “exhilarating… What impressed me was the amity between the fans on both sides. After India tied the series at 2-2, I saw a gang of noisy Indians riding motorcycles through the narrow, crowded streets of the old city of Lahore waving a tricolour, celebrating their victory and the locals sportingly cheered them on. It was truly a heart warming sight.”
His colleagues, who travelled elsewhere, including Karachi, were “bowled over by the hospitality and the welcome given to the Indians.”
Returning to Karachi, what does this mega city mean to a hardcore journalist like Asif Noorani, a senior editor from the Dawn group of newspapers?
“The first thing about Karachi is that it’s a truly resilient city. There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the musclemen of an ethnic party had made certain areas very difficult to live in. They were like Shiv Sena, except that they didn’t believe in any division on the basis of religion. People thought that Karachi was doomed but the mega city bounced back in a big way.”
He admits that bomb blasts and killings often vitiate the atmosphere but these have come down, as have sectarian killings. “There is no animosity in the city. The minorities are safe too, but women don’t go alone at night, like they do in Mumbai but can’t in Delhi.”
That the Bush administration’s love for the Musharraf era has paid huge dividends, along with 9/11 compelling Pakistanis living in western countries to remit their foreign currency savings back home to create a little nest, can be seen from the economic revival.
Once again construction activity has started in Karachi — roads, flyovers, residential and office blocks are all coming up. “Every week you hear of the opening of a new restaurant, if not a new shopping mall. There is no other city in Pakistan as cosmopolitan as Karachi,” says Noorani proudly.
If the Food Street of Lahore is a gourmet’s delight, Karachi’s eating joints are awesome too. The juicy lamb chops in Pakistani, easily the best restaurant at Karachi’s Sheraton hotel, just melt in the mouth; the tandoori fare on offer at the Bar B’Q at Clifton is nothing short of heavenly. Of course, meat eaters would have a much better time here and those with stronger stomachs should dare to try out the fare at roadside restaurants. On offer is a huge range of delicacies… from mutton kebabs to chicken and beef specialties.
“But we also have a multinational flair in our cuisine and goras have now started returning to the city. Hotels that were struggling with a barely 30 per cent occupancy, are now averaging at 90 per cent. And when the Indian cricket team was here, it was impossible to get a hotel room in Karachi,” adds Noorani.
He adds that not only can you now see more women behind wheels but their visibility has also increased in the corporate sector. “Though not in the same proportion as in Mumbai, they are more active in conferences, symposia and what not. The curator of Mohatta Palace Museum is a woman, the chief executive of Unilever in Pakistan and Oxford University Press are both women. Most artists and fashion designers are women.”
Interestingly, Noorani was born in Mumbai in 1942, migrated to Pakistan in 1950, lived for two years in Lahore and settled down in Karachi from 1953. “I have grown up Karachi and seen it develop from a sleepy town to an insomniac city. The multi-ethnic mix can be imagined from the fact that there are more Pathans in Karachi than in any city of the North-West Frontier Province. Also, 95 per cent of all Parsis, Bohras and Memons in Pakistan live in Karachi, as also 80 per cent of all Urdu speaking migrants from India.”