KARACHI: The Sindh Sea Festival sponsored by the Sindh Culture Department started at the Beach Park on Thursday. A large area around the Beach Park was reserved for the festival, which has become a regular annual feature. The theme of this year’s festival is “Rising to greater heights.” There three sub-themes ‘human trafficking,’ ‘women empowerment’ and ‘preferring national interest over self-interest’.

Hundreds of stalls covered a huge area. They varied from those put up by the armed forces to those put up by civilians. The military stalls included guns along with their ammunition. The peoples’ counters were all about food and clothing. Visitors showed keen interest in traditional Sindhi sweetmeat, pickle ajrak and bangles.

The Sindh pavilion attracted the largest crowds. Visitors strolled around, asking the vendors about their homemade products.

The local music composers and performers were there to entertain the people and enthralled their audiences.

Among the more prominent vendors included Karim Solangi who has been into miniature model making for quite some time and owns his name thanks to his tradition. He set up 12 handmade artefacts all incorporating Sindh’s culture and her heroes. He said he had brought there here not to sell them out but to introduce such a great personalities to those who had little knowledge about Sindhi music and culture.

The models include thoseof Allan Faqir, Jalal Chandio, both famous singers of Sindh. Then there were alghoza maestros Misri Khan Jamali and Allah Bachayo Kashkheli.

Sitting at another stall was Zameer Ahmed Khan, a chipboard artiste with only one hand makes models of the popular constructions concepts. He was a former footballer and was also included in the football world cup squad for the disabled when the team made it to the finals in 1997.

“I couldn’t go because I did not have Rs15,000 which each player had to pay before leaving,” he said. Khan was a worker at a textile factory and lost his hand in a fire there.

There was a stall by special children. Visitors showed immense interest in purchasing the handmade items being sold there.

Other events of the festival in the next three days include a cultural village, sports village, fishermen’s village, health village, naval village, army and rangers village and a business village.