KARACHI: Let’s hand it to K-Electric for not toying with history. Nowadays the company may be in the news for all the dark (read: wrong) reasons, but when it comes to the historicity of where one of important offices is located, it deserves accolades. How so?

Well, one the K-Electric powerhouse and customer service buildings is situated on Elander Road, which is one of those very few pre-partition Karachi roads whose names have not been changed, thankfully so. Elander Road is a narrow gali off I.I. Chundrigar Road (formerly McLeod Road) right in the corner where the Shaheen Complex intersection is.

But the one pleasantly surprising thing is that if you are on Ziauddin Road (formerly Kutchery Road) going past the PSO petrol station towards the Shaheen Complex traffic signal, you will see on your left a big portal-like gate on top of which ‘K-Electric Elander Complex’ is written. This is a relatively new building where the company’s technicians are found loitering about, waiting for the next order to come their way to fix a ‘tripped line’ or a faulty pole-mounted transmitter. It is interesting that despite facing Ziauddin Road, the name Elander has not been replaced or removed.

On Monday morning, when almost half of the city was writhing in agony because of a massive power breakdown, there was no dearth of electricity in Elander Complex. Ceiling fans were running full speed and light bulbs were on as well.

Some of the staff had dosed off, perhaps after a heavy sahri, and some were moving about purposefully. Three technicians were sitting in the driving seat of what they called a loading truck, listening to songs on the tape recorder of a colleague.

Talking to Dawn, S. Ibrahim, a K-Electric employee, said: “We can’t say why the name Elander has not been changed.

It’s up to our officers. All I can tell you is that in the pre-partition days this used to be the powerhouse area. Back then, in the British era, they had the DC (direct current) supply system. These days we have the AC (alternating current) system. As for where we’re sitting right now, we call it a ‘temporary shed’.”

It is not known who Mr (or was it a lady?) Elander was. When asked about him/her, historians and town planners drew a blank. But if Elander Road has always been associated with electricity generation, and not with vernacular architecture, let’s just keep his/her background in the dark.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2015

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