KARACHI: A celebratory spirit tinged with a bit of sadness marked the launch of a book titled Street Smart — Professionals on the Street by Rumana Husain at the Arts Council Karachi on Thursday evening.

The sadness was largely due to the killing of 45 members of the Ismaili community on Wednesday morning, which is why it was thoughtful of the host of the programme, Alia Naqvi, to request the audience to observe a minute’s silence for the departed souls and for rights activist Sabeen Mahmud, who was killed on April 24.

Giving a detailed presentation on her book, Ms Husain said it was penned to acknowledge the role of each one of the blue-collar professionals in Karachi. She asserted that people could not imagine their lives without them and dedicated the book to all those men, women and children who spent their entire lives working in the streets.

Ms Husain mentioned certain professions and contraptions which were once an integral part of Karachi cityscape but had now either disappeared or were hard to find. For example, she said, there used to be a cotton-fluffer who had a bow-like contraption to “re-fluff lumpy cotton wool in pillows and quilts”. Similarly, gone is the candy man who used to have a pole around which candy would be twisted and he would give the candy whatever shape the sweet-loving children wanted. These days some new professions had entered city life, such as scavengers, armed guards and courier service providers.

Ms Husain said the book contained stories of 64 professions and professionals; it was the same number of stories in her first book Karachiwala, launched in 2010 at the same venue. She then showed slides of, and talked about, a number of professionals — cap hawker, fried liver seller, tea seller, milkman, newspaper vendor, dried fruit hawker, scavenger, knife sharpener and a parrot fortune teller who was on the cover of the book. She said among them an 80-year-old woman, a potter in Ranchhor Line, was her favourite because there was respect for her independence among her friends and acquaintances with whom she mingled on a daily basis.

Journalist Ghazi Salahuddin, who has written the foreword to the book, began by reminding book lovers and Karachiites that every time we tended to celebrate something, a tragic event would precede it. He said when the I Am Karachi campaign planned its first big function at the Frere Hall on April 26, a couple of days earlier Sabeen Mahmud was killed. And now that a book on Karachi was being launched, 45 members of the Ismaili community had lost their precious lives.

Mr Salahuddin said the event reminded him of his salad days when he used to roam around the streets of Karachi. He commented that a city could only remain alive if its streets were alive. But for that, he reasoned, one needed to befriend the streets. Our citizens had lost touch with their streets and alleys, he lamented. “People have been alienated from their city.” Highlighting the diversity of yesteryear’s Karachi he recalled the time when on the night of the ninth of Muharram he with his friends would visit Mithadar where a diverse group of people would be part of the regular gathering. He bemoaned the fact that today he often met people in the city who had seen Eiffel Tower but had never been to Lea Market. He pointed out that Ms Husain’s book painted a picture of Karachi where people from the underprivileged sections worked hard to earn a living, using innovative methods.

Dr Kaleemullah Lashari said Karachi’s streets were an indicator of a parallel economy. Going back in history he claimed civilisations came out of streets. In that regard he mentioned the ancient Indian text of Panchtantra and also one of King Darius’s street smart men, a student of geography, who helped the king connect Persia to India.

Dr Asma Ibrahim apprised the attendees of the genesis of the Karachi Conference Foundation. She said in 2011, she and her colleagues realised that there should be a platform for research and publishing, as a result of which the foundation was formed. The book Street Smart was its first publication, she added.

Maha Arshad spoke on the I Am Karachi campaign. She said it had three objectives: reclaim public space, bring civil societies together, and advocacy and awareness of matters related to the city.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2015

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