A screen grab of Mohammad Umer Lasi from the film played at the event on Saturday.—White Star

KARACHI: Friends, colleagues, admirers and members of the family of noted social worker Mohammad Umer Lasi shared their memories of the late community activist at an event titled ‘An Ode to an Unsung Hero: Mohammad Umer Lasi’ organised at the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist) on Saturday evening.

Researcher and teacher at the Lahore University of Management Sciences Dr Nida Kirmani set the tone for the programme by speaking about Umer Lasi, who passed away in February, in an affectionate manner. She said she was in India when she received the news of his death. She said only a few days earlier she had dinner with him where he looked to be in good spirits. She recalled that it was three years ago that she had met him for the first time and interviewed him about Lyari. She said she wrote an article on him after his death which got published in an English daily in Pakistan and read out a couple of paragraphs from the write-up. In the article, she focused on the point that it was only after meeting Umer Lasi that she began to understand the richness of Lyari. He became her mentor and guide devoting countless hours of his time to helping her understand the complex history of the area.

Dr Kirmani said he used to have answers to every question that she would put to him on the history of Karachi. If he didn’t have a reply to a query, he would phone someone to look for the correct response. “He never forgot his roots despite shifting from Lyari [to Gulshan-i-Iqbal],” she remarked because he was an “organic intellectual”. He may have obtained a master’s degree, she said, but his knowledge was vaster than that. She then played an audio clip of his interview for a few minutes.

Aquila Ismail said she had heard about Umer Lasi through her sister Parween Rehman who was associated with the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) and murdered in 2013.

She told the audience, comprising largely Lasi’s friends and family members, that initially Parween was involved in some work in Lyari as well. She said her sister was working for the people who had been living for 60 to 70 years in areas such as Bin Qasim, Baldia and Gadap. She proved the existence of goths as living neighbourhoods (jeeti jagti bastian), Ms Ismail said, adding that there were people in Lyari who wanted to follow the OPP model.

Chairman of the Lyari Resource Centre Habib Hasan said it was in 1985 that he and his colleagues started to educate children in Lyari and Lasi was the first one to render his services. The deteriorating law and order situation in the area between 2003 and 2010 hurt Lasi and he urged everyone that it was a lack of education that was causing all the trouble. Therefore, he put all his energy into trying to make people realise the importance of education. The late social worker used to work in a bank and live in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, he said, and in spite of that he played a very proactive and positive role in building organisations and institutions that could help impart education to people.

Illahi Bakhsh, Lasi’s colleague and friend, said society needed Lasi in every nook and cranny. He was a self-made person who was consistent in whatever he did. The young generation should follow in his footsteps, he advised.

M. Awais spoke on Umer Lasi’s 20 years of association with the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee. He said that in two decades Lasi was able to ‘solve’ more than 2,000 cases.

Umer Lasi’s son Sohail and daughter Moomal also spoke on the occasion.

Sohail called his father superman, arguing that if he (Lasi) put his mind to something, he would make sure that it was properly done. He laced his emotional speech with narrating some touchy incidents from the community activist’s life, highlighting his various phases of his struggle.

Moomal thanked the attendees for turning up in a big number.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2015

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