By Mansoor Khan

A resident of Karachi still remembers his journey home from work on an October 2008 evening. “When I reached an area between Ancholi and Sohrab Goth, I saw scores of armed activists of rival groups engaged in a gun battle on the main road.” According to him, the exchange of fire, in which heavy weapons were used by both sides, continued for several hours.

A similar incident took place in Sohrab Goth on Thursday, November 26, two days before the riots. The indiscriminate use of firearms in the clash blocked the Super Highway for several hours and paralysed adjoining localities. The gun battle also left three people dead, including a young girl who was hit by a stray bullet as she stood in her balcony.
 

PASSING THE BUCK

MQM denies a role in the eviction of Pakhtuns from Karachi while the ANP refuses to concede that the violence was a result of ethnic conflict

By Maqbool Ahmed

“It was almost midnight and I was on my way home, thinking about dinner,” Akhtar, a resident of Saudabad in Malir, tells the Herald. “I had no hope of finding anything to eat at home since my family was away. Suddenly I saw a hotel across the road, opposite al-Shifa Welfare Clinic, which to my surprise was still open.”

Akhtar says he walked over, ordered two naans and asked Adamzada, the owner, why the hotel was still open. “I want to make as much money as possible before I go back to my village in Chaman, Balochistan,” Akhtar quotes Adamzada as telling him. “After Eidul Azha the hotel will not reopen.” On Akhtar’s probing he explained that a few young men of a political party had visited him and inquired if he was going home to celebrate Eid. When he nodded his head they asked him not to return as the city might not be as hospitable for him as it had previously been. Today the broken oven opposite the welfare clinic stands witness to Akhtar’s account.
 

Top: "Quotes of 2008"

“Agreements with the PMLN [Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz] are not the words of the Holy Quran and the Hadith and can be modified if circumstances change.”

— Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan Peoples Party co-chairman, during an interview on August 24

“Who the hell bloody Indians are to arrest our people!!! Off this line!!!”
— Sheikh Rashid,
before hanging up on an Indian news channel on December 10, in reaction to an anchor’s insistence that Pakistan
hand over terror suspects to India

Six Degrees of Separation

It has been conclusively proven. By studying billions of electronic messages, Microsoft has confirmed what we already knew, that any two people on this planet are connected by six links or less. In the case of Pakistan’s incestuous political and social scene we sometimes don’t even have to go that far to join the dots. Here the Herald presents the drawing room that is Pakistan.
 

Altaf Hussain the chief of MQM	The party against which Naseerullah Babar carried out an operation	At the time when Dr Shoaib Suddle was DIG Karachi	During whose tenure Murtaza Bhutto was murdered
During whose tenure Murtaza Bhutto was murdered The wife of Asif Ali Zardari the president of Pakistan Who has appointed Rehman Malik also part of the operation, as adviser on interior affairs

If the Prados, golf courses, 5,000-rupee dinners and 100,000-rupee paintings that have become an integral part of life for the affluent are any indication, Pakistan’s rich have been doing very well for themselves. Now that the exuberance of Shaukat Aziz’s era of rapid but illusory growth has evaporated, this growing economic divide is more apparent than ever. As Karachi’s Zamzama Boulevard, Lahore’s M.M. Alam Road and Islamabad’s Blue Area are flooded with shockingly expensive goods and services, three poverty-stricken sets of parents from Korangi’s Bilal Colony abandon children they can no longer support. As students from O- and A-level schools pay millions of rupees for college degrees from the UK, US, and Canada, more and more young people from less prestigious schools find themselves unable to afford Pakistani universities. And as the rich spend thousands of rupees on each microdermabrasion and acne laser treatment, polio resurfaces among the working classes despite decades of eradication efforts.

British royal family watchers, those diehard fans of the world’s longest-running soap opera, will no doubt be familiar with the romantic goings-on of Prince William, the apple of their isle. William has been enjoying an on-again, off-again relationship with untitled ‘commoner’ Kate Middleton. Speculation is rife as to whether it would be appropriate for the royal family to assimilate someone of Middleton’s class. An avalanche of public scrutiny followed Middleton’s mother’s “non-U” (U being that of upper class) usage of language, including such gaffes as “toilet” (instead of the more upper crust “loo”) and “pardon?” instead of “what?”.
 

If Pakistan’s rich and poor seek completely different film and television entertainment, can we even talk about a shared popular culture?

By Madiha Sattar

Anecdotally, at least, traffic was thin on the streets of Pakistan’s major cities on the nights that Pakistan Television’s (PTV) “Tanhaiyan” aired back in 1985. The series is also said to have led to a run on Pink Panther toys after Marina Khan’s Sania made one her constant companion on the show. There is no hard data to verify the cultural impact that PTV plays once had but the fact that “Tanhaiyan” and other Pakistani television serials of decades past – including “Khuda Ki Basti” and “Fifty Fifty” in the 70s, “Ankahi”, “Waris” and “Dhoop Kinaray” in the 80s and “Sitara aur Mehrunnisa” in the early 90s – have spawned urban legends indicates that these serials captured the country’s imagination.

If the darkest hour is indeed just before dawn, then 2009 ought to be a good year. The year we take leave of, has, to say the very least, been eventful. We have seen a national election, a dictator’s departure, rising inflation, and increasingly fraught relations with our neighbours. We have faced the enemy within and without. Now comes the time to survey the debris from the year past and take stock of 2008.

So we present to you some of the highlights and lowlights from this year, a parade of achievers for good or for bad, people we love and those we don’t, some who are no longer with us, and some who are on their way to becoming household names. All of them, however, had a unique contribution in making 2008 what it was. Borrowing a page out of the Germans’ book, we intend to move on by moving through the past year: Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) as the Germans so pithily put it.