Building a Pakistani icon

An article by the Associated Press of Pakistan which was published in major English dailies last week listed a host of shortcomings of the capital city, chief of which was that it did not have a notable landmark. Hailing London for its tube system, Venice for its canals and gondolas, New York City for its Statue of Liberty and Kuala Lumpur for its Petronas Twin Towers, the article pointed out the lack of any such well-known and recognized landmark for Islamabad.

A landmark is a thing with historic, social, cultural, architectural or aesthetic significance to a city or a nation. It is a thing which people identify a city or nation.

Based on this definition, major cities in Pakistan, including the federal capital, do have landmarks. Lahore has the Minar-i-Pakistan, Karachi has the Quaid-i-Azam's mausoleum, and Islamabad the Faisal Mosque. It is a different thing altogether that these landmarks are hardly recognized beyond Pakistan's borders.

The K-2 is one landmark which has put Pakistan on the map of world fame, but this natural landmark, like its competitor, Mount Everest in Nepal, is not the ordinary traveller's cup of tea. No doubt K-2 provided the inspiration and the setting for the Hollywood movie, Vertical Limit, but the latter did not become a blockbuster like The Entrapment, which featured Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers.

Most of the famous man-made landmarks in the world are old ones that have been there for decades, if not centuries. However, two modern landmarks that have only been completed within the last decade but which have shot their Muslim states to instant fame are the Petronas Twin Towers of Malaysia and the Burj Al Arab (The Arabian Tower) of Dubai, one of the seven kingdoms of the United Arab Emirates. A closer look at how the idea of these two landmarks were conceived may give us an insight into how to go about building a similar kind of landmark that would make the world associate Pakistan with.

The masterminds behind the Petronas Twin Towers - named after Malaysia's oil company which has its headquarters in one of the towers - were a Malaysian business tycoon T. Ananda Krishnan and former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The charismatic politician wanted a building on a site in the heart of the capital that would be identifiably Malaysian, that was of world class standard, and which Malaysians could be proud off.

When the Petronas project, developed as part of the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC) project, was on the drawing board in 1991, the twin towers were supposed to be distinctive and unique but there was no plan to upstage the then tallest building in the world, the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Story has it that one day in 1994 when construction was already well under way, a question was casually put to the architect by Dr Mahathir: How many more metres would it take for the Petronas Twin Towers to get the tallest building in the world tag? It was back to the drawing boards and after some frantic mathematical recalculations, it was deemed possible.

Upon completion in 1997 at the cost of $1.2 billion, the Petronas Twin Towers quickly became a Malaysian cultural icon, symbolizing Malaysia's soaring economic success and ability. Images of the Petronas Twin Towers began popping up in the most unlikely places like a Made-in-Japan jigsaw puzzle and the back of a London bus. The hit movie, The Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, in which the distinctly unique Petronas provided the setting, had also helped to make this Malaysian building world famous.

Petronas became a landmark not only because it was the tallest building in the world (it held this title for about seven years before it was upstaged in 2003 by the Taipei 101 building in the capital of Taiwan), but more so because of its unique architectural features. It is a striking combination of glass and steel with floor plans based on an eight-pointed star, a geometric principle typified in Islamic architecture.

The design's piece de resistance is the 58 metre-long double decker skybridge at the 41st and 42nd floor. The bridge was not only meant to serve the functional purpose of facilitating human traffic between the two towers, it also symbolized the gateway to Malaysia's Vision 2020.

The Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, with its unique billowing sail-shaped structure is symbolic of the kingdom's desire to be a leader in tourism and financial development. With its oil and gas reserves running out, Dubai embarked on a flamboyant and ultra modern multi-million-dollar project to establish itself as a leading tourist/vacation destination and offshore financial centre.

The crown prince of Dubai had wanted not just a hotel but a signature building; one that would announce "Welcome to Dubai". He wanted a dramatic statement with imagery that would immediately conjure up images of the city, in much the same way the Opera House does for Sydney and the Eiffel Tower does for Paris.

Within six years from the initial presentation of the design, the building was completed and fully fitted for operation by the beginning of 2000. Burj Al Arab become a landmark because it is the tallest, largest and most luxurious hotel in the world, possessing a strikingly modern architectural design, an extravagantly opulent interior design where everything that glitters is really gold, and most significant of all, a sophisticated multiple state-of-the-art technology in management that has earned the Burj Al Arab the status of the first seven-star hotel in the world.

After the Burj Al Arab, Dubai has come up with another iconic development, namely, The Palm, the largest man-made island in the world which is shaped like a palm tree. This luxurious resort has been described as the eighth wonder of the world and is said to be visible from the moon.

Based on Malaysia and Dubai's experience, the major ingredients for building an international famed landmark are a charismatic leadership, an inspirational economic vision, loads of money, and ability. Do we have this winning combination to deliver a landmark in Islamabad that would become a Pakistani icon? After all, if parliamentary as well as sheikhdom Muslim states like Malaysia and Dubai can do it, why not Pakistan? Provided we can get rid of the terrorism tag first.

A tale of women, lucky and unlucky

Peshawar: Islamabad's decision to grant nationality to two Indian women has brought to an end their long ordeal of seeking citizenship and avoiding extradition to India.

Dr Hafsa Aman and Mrs Aqila Durrani, both married to Pakistani men hailing, coincidentally, from Mardan, fought a nerve-breaking legal battle to thwart bureaucratic moves to extradite them for overstaying in Pakistan. However, before the Peshawar High Court could pass judgments on their identical writ petitions, the interior ministry in Islamabad, in a belated move, accepted their requests for the grant of citizenship.

Dr Hafsa was extended Pakistani nationality on Sept 25 last. Mrs Aqila Durrani's right to become a Pakistani citizen was acknowledged through an official pronouncement by the interior division on Oct 8. Interestingly, both the ladies got their voice heard at a time when the federal ministry of the interior is headed by a man from the NWFP - Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao from Charsadda, near Mardan.

People across a wide range of the political divide had put their weight behind the two women's right to Pakistani citizenship under the Pakistan Citizenship Act (PCA), 1951. Legal experts believed that the refusal to grant them citizenship was against the PCA and violative of judgments passed by the country's superior courts in different cases in the past.

Their counsel had submitted before the Peshawar High Court that the denial of citizenship to their clients was against the spirit of Section 10(2) of the PCA. This says that women married to citizens of Pakistan, whether or not they have completed 21 years of age, should be given Pakistani citizenship.

Like politicians and human rights activists, the clergy had also lent its support to the two ladies and a group of ulema of Mardan even issued an edict declaring un-Islamic the authorities' move to extradite the two to India.

The two Indian women appear to be luckier than the two Pakistani girls who received harsh treatment in their bid to seek Indian citizenship after marrying Indian nationals. Ishrat Sultana, 26, a native of Karachi, was arrested in August at Warangal, 150km from Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, for overstaying. She had gone to India on a tourist visa and married Zahurl Haq, a resident of Kazipet, near Warangal. Her attempt to seek Indian nationality remained unsuccessful and two applications filed in this respect were rejected by the Indian authorities.

Her parents, hailing from Kazipet, had migrated to Pakistan and settled in Karachi, 57 years ago. She had married Haq on June 24, six days before the expiry of her visa on June 30. Earlier, Tasleem Murad, also from Karachi, was deported from India after her husband, Mohammed Azmat, of Hyderabad, was arrested in the United States on suspicion of links with terrorists.

This shows that the two countries need a much greater effort to come closer and shed the mistrust of decades.

Will the Hindutva juggernaut march again?

Electoral politics in India on most occasions works like an erratic pendulum. In other words it is unpredictable. The general elections in May proved everyone wrong except the dogged few that stuck their necks out to predict defeat for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Most of those who were wide off the mark in May were proved wrong again in the Maharashtra assembly elections, where factors like "rebel candidates" and "Dalit card" were posited as reasons for a possible Congress defeat. Nothing of the kind came in the way of the Congress-led alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) winning the polls.

Anyhow, having got the predictions wrong, the pundits then embarked on the next presumptuous mission, to interpret the unexpected mandate thrown up by the very people about whom they did not seem to have any inkling.

What the gurus will not tell us is what everyone in any case knows: for example, that the verdict in the May general elections was anything but an endorsement of economic reforms. It was not only a pro-poor result but also one that advocated a secular dispensation in India as opposed to the BJP's rank communalist plank.

The Congress, momentarily humbled by its own triumph, set about listing important tasks that sought to ease the sufferings of the poor who voted for it in unison. One such measure was the proposed employment guarantee act, which would cost the government around Rs 300 billion but provide state-sponsored jobs to millions of rural poor for at least 15 days in a year.

True to form, last week some Congress representatives were back to the business of cribbing about the lack of funds to carry out the scheme. The elections thus, yet again, threw up the traditional dichotomy between India's poor and the party that claims to represent them but on crucial moments sides with the urban middle classes and the rich farmers who did not necessarily always vote for it.

Just as much as Sonia Gandhi's links with the backward constituencies of Amethi and Rae Bareli give her the halo of the pro-poor messiah, it is equally true that it was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's economic priorities as finance minister that had dispatched the Congress to its longest period in exile after the 1996 polls fiasco.

Clearly, he was the last man on the people's minds as their candidate if he was to persist with the economic theme that had prompted the BJP's electoral humiliation. Much to the chagrin of the pro-reforms media, the Indian poor feel more secure with Gandhi-Nehru populism. On the other hand, during the 1991-96 Congress rule, BJP leaders would describe Dr Singh as the right man in the wrong party.

In other words the BJP-led opposition encouraged the pro-rich reforms inaugurated by Dr Singh but only to reap the benefits of his unpopularity with the masses. Likewise if the BJP lost the elections in May it was in no small measure because of their economic policies, which were rooted in Dr Singh's reforms.

The fact is that no one seems to have been able to woo the electorate in India on the plank of economic reforms. Part of the reason is that these policies are perceived to be anti-poor even if their final objective is said to be economic growth and poverty alleviation. The pundits are naturally shocked and scandalized that the voters are happy with Laloo Yadav and the Left Front who are perceived as keeping a discreet distance from Dr Singh's brand of reforms even if the facts suggest otherwise.

And yet, how are the elections in Maharashtra being interpreted by the poll pundits?

"India's ruling Congress party, fresh from an election win in the state that is the heart of finance and film, will now be better armed to deal with its demanding communist allies," concludes one rent-a-quote analyst.

The victory in Maharashtra, India's second-most industrialized state with 100 million people, spelt good news for flagging economic reforms, the analysis relentlessly goes on to say.

However, the only incontrovertible facts in the state polls were the stark figures. Congress and NCP won 141 seats in the 288-member assembly. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its hard-line Hindu ally, the Shiv Sena, jointly picked up 117 seats, with the rest going to independents.

That's the key point. India's first past the post system of parliamentary democracy very often masks essential social and political variables. The analysis that poll punters have scrupulously shunned is that the BJP is down but not out. It is barely lagging behind the Congress, very marginally so.

The BJP holds sway in large chunks of India, including most of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, parts of Karnataka, Orissa, Haryana and of course in Uttar Pradesh where despite its recent rout it holds more seats than the Congress.

So the pundits who are today seeking to drive a wedge between the Congress and its leftwing supporters are doing so in the knowledge that the Congress comprises rightwing elements who are ideologically close to the BJP, and it has leaders who still subscribe to Nehru's Fabian socialist ideals.

Periodically its right-wingers, who had plotted even with Rajiv Gandhi's unprecedented majority in parliament to overthrow him, have betrayed the Congress.

It is these right-wingers that the BJP's new president Lal Krishan Advani would look to for help in his agenda to bring the Hindutva party back to power. It is the closet allies in the Congress who would have secretly applauded when the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh called last week to send the Congress party's leftist allies into exile. The left-right battle is earnestly underway in India.

Dr Singh's instinct is known to be to pander to the right. At some point, sooner than later, Sonia Gandhi would have to intervene to tilt the balance back to the poor who voted her to power, before the Hindutva juggernaut gains steam.

Accepting his presidential crown last week, Mr Advani said: "In my long political life, I have lost count of the number of obituaries of the BJP and, earlier, of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, that were written in the past. After almost every setback, our party has staged a comeback."

****

Precisely when a few journalists from Pakistan were visiting Jammu and Kashmir and later New Delhi, I got a call from an official of the Pakistan hockey team that was visiting India. His lament was that the Indian government had refused to give visas to Pakistani sports journalists who wanted to cover the matches here. Apparently this was a retaliation for Pakistan's delay in giving visas to Indian sports journalists who had applied to go to Pakistan for the hockey fixtures played there. Now that's not cricket.

'Are we doomed?'

October is the month of the second summer for Karachi. It is also a time when one is reminded that a healthy mind is as important as a healthy body, for the world mental health day is observed in this month. In Karachi, the Pakistan Association for Mental Health devotes a whole week to this cause. It holds seminars, walks and a free mental health clinic. Anything to create awareness among the people.

The PAMH focussed on two things this year. One was the stigma attached to mental illness. The other was the relationship between physical and mental health. It was underlined by medical experts as well as others that a lot of stigma is still attached to mental illness as a result of which many people fail to seek treatment or suffer a sense of ignominy in silence. Why should this be the case? The widespread belief is that lack of knowledge and awareness of mental illness - especially its causes and manifestations - creates the stigma.

But what Rakhshinda Talat Hussein, head of the psychology department at the University of Karachi, disclosed about the findings of a survey she had conducted, disproves this thesis. The stigma factor was most pronounced in the upper classes which also happen to be the most educated. But probably again it is the class which cherishes its "honour" more than anything else.

Equally bad is the close link between some physical diseases and mental illness. The experts gathered one afternoon to discuss this issue. What emerged was an eye-opener. Nearly 40 to 50 per cent of patients who visit their doctor for some physical ailment are actually suffering from mental/emotional stress and their illness is psychosomatic. There is also, it was said, a direct link between cancer, heart problems, and diabetes on the one hand and mental illness on the other.

Each exacerbates the other. Take the case of heart disease. One in two people with a cardiovascular problem has an episode of major depression in his lifetime (when it is one in five in the general population). Conversely, those suffering from depression were 70 per cent more likely to develop heart disease.

Someone asked, "Are we doomed?" How can one keep one's sanity in a world that only knows violence, bloodletting and killings? On a typical day the newspapers carry only bad news on the front pages - murders, bomb blasts, honour killings, robberies, car snatching, and of course power breakdowns, water shortage and pictures of garbage spilling all over and choked gutters.

A journalist friend who visited a free camp set up on the mental health day was informed by a technician at a pharmaceutical stall that his blood pressure was high. When he asked the technician what he should do, he was advised to avoid stress. "How?" the journalist inquired. "Don't read newspapers!" pat came the reply.

Letters from yesteryear

Reading a newspaper that is several years old is a wonderful exercise in nostalgia. You get to compare things as they were ages ago with what they are now. When The Times of India completed 150 years some time in the late eighties, it published several volumes, one of which was a selection of letters sent by readers to the editor that were published in the century and a half. Quite naturally, one looked for those written by the people of Karachi. The first to appear was a letter from an irate reader who complained that the "Victoria" drivers were quite rash. They drove so fast that one could hardly get time to get out of the way. It seems there were no pavements in Karachi in the early 20th century.

A letter, published in the early 1960s in Dawn, by an angry car owner makes interesting reading. Cars were very few in those days and just as few were car owners. The writer said that street urchins stole his car from outside his house in Civil Lines and went for a joyride in Clifton. They drove it all over the locality until the car ran out of petrol.

They then deserted the vehicle on what was then the only road that linked Clifton with Saddar. "How inconsiderate of them. The boys should have left it somewhere near a petrol pump. I had to hire some labourers to push the car all the way from Clifton to the nearest petrol pump, which is at least one mile, in Saddar. I had to extend a helping hand to the labourers while pushing it to the top of the Clifton Bridge," wrote the gentleman.

A letter published in the early 1960s in Star lamented that the law and order situation in Karachi couldn't have been worse. The writer was shocked that the hubcaps of a senior police officer's car were removed. "If his car's hubcaps are not safe, whose is?" were the final words. Today let alone hubcaps, no one's car is safe.

Turtle time

This is a busy time for Fehmida Asrar Ghauri, project officer for the Marine Turtle Project. She hardly gets any sleep, for she's patrolling the beach most of the time. Untiringly, she goes about transplanting eggs laid by the green turtles and sees to it that the young hatchlings make it back to the sea.

The nesting season for turtles begins in September and ends by November. And so you will hardly ever find her in her uninspiring, dusty old office, stuffed with old files, dog-eared yellowed maps of Karachi's coast on the walls and some trophies and plaques strewn about at the Sindh wildlife department.

During the day she holds lectures in schools around the city, explaining to young ones the rights of the turtles and how their survival is linked to ours. In the night she takes kids to the beach so they can see for themselves how the turtles lay eggs, around a hundred or so at one time. To her goes the credit for creating what little awareness that has come about among young Karachians regarding protecting the endangered species.

Fehmida has been awarded a PhD for her thesis on "Bio-ecological studies of Green and Olive Ridley Turtles along Karachi's Coast", making her the first Pakistani to have tackled the subject. She does not have enough manpower to manage the hatcheries, and has to go to a corner shop to check her emails as her office does not have an Internet connection. She at times has to hitch a ride or even take a rickshaw to the beach as the official vehicle is out of fuel. In the circumstances, little wonder if Fehmida feels she's been unable to encourage students from the university to work with her.

Iftar parties

As a rule, political parties are loath to initiate mass campaigns in Ramazan. But this doesn't mean that political activity grinds to a halt in this holy month and leaders fast by day, pray at night and shun the cut and thrust of public life. Far from it. In Ramazan, political meetings are replaced by iftar parties where, when after every morsel of food has been polished off, the discussion often turns to temporal issues.

And the most debated subject at iftar parties this season is the president's uniform and his decision to keep it or doff it. While a bill passed by the National Assembly has allowed the president to be army chief simultaneously, it has brought together the secular Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy and the religious Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal which vow to take to the streets after Ramazan. Other favourite iftar topics are the price-hike, law and order and the military operation in South Waziristan.

In keeping with the religious mood of city parties, Sindh Chief Minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim, who is known for his affiliation with the Tableeghi Jamaat, held a Dua-i-Maghfirat on Thursday. The function was attended by many high-ranking officials of the Sindh government, including the chief secretary and the inspector-general of police. Religious scholars gave sermons at the function and offered prayers for the prosperity of the province. But most invitees were unable to figure out why the chief minister had organized the prayer meeting.

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com