SMOKERS’ CORNER: KARACHI’S REACH
On October 9 this year, the website of the British tabloid Daily Mail ran a piece on a street robbery taking place on Limestone Street in Ipswich — an urban town near the state of Queensland in Australia. The website also posted an accompanying video in which two very South Asian-looking (and shalwar-kameez clad) men can be seen robbing another South Asian-looking gentleman at gunpoint. The report claims that two members of a ‘vicious’ Asian gang mugged another Asian man on Ipswich’s Limestone Street.
However, the website’s comments section was almost instantly flooded by remarks wondering why Limestone Street looked “so shabby”. After one commenter finally realised that the street was not Limestone or, for that matter, the footage not even from any street in Australia, he quipped, “Maybe it is Bali (Indonesia).” Truth is, it certainly wasn’t Australia and nor was it Bali. It was Karachi. It was CCTV footage of a street crime unfolding on a street in Karachi’s Gulistan-i-Jauhar area. Australia’s popular TV news show Media Watch confirmed this in its episode aired on October 16. So what happened?
Well, according to Media Watch, Daily Mail bought the footage from a news agency called Newsflare. The latter buys footage from the pubic and then sells it to media outlets. Media Watch reported the footage that Daily Mail used was originally titled, “Limestone Street, Ipswich, 22 September, 2017”. Most probably the person who sold this footage to Newsflare was from Ipswich. According to Media Watch, Daily Mail ran it without bothering to check exactly which side of the big bad world the footage was from, believing it was of a crime taking place on Limestone Street in the Australian town.
The only Pakistani city which continuously figures as a street name in faraway countries is Karachi
A friend of mine now residing in Brisbane, Australia, had shared this story with me. But he wasn’t entirely convinced by Media Watch’s explanation. In an email, he told me that it is highly unlikely that Daily News did not check the exact location of the crime. Instead, it did so in a rather “amateurish” manner. My friend wrote that whereas the raw footage is titled ‘Limestone Street, Ipswich’ (as Media Watch also reported), on Newsflare’s own site there is an additional caption that mentions Karachi as well.
So by “amateurish” my friend meant that Daily Mail simply Googled the two titles and came up with “Karachi Street, Crestmead, Queensland, Australia”.
Karachi Street? Yes. My friend apologised for not clarifying that there actually was a street called Karachi in Crestmead — a suburban area in Australia’s Queensland state. Why? He did not know. What’s more, he added that there was also another street called Karachi in Midway Point area of Hobart in Australia’s Tasmania state. Midway Point is a suburb. According to my friend, the mentioned street here was named Karachi because some of the first people from South Asia who travelled to Australia were from Karachi. They arrived on ships which sailed out from the port of Karachi during British rule in India during the Second World War (1939-45). They had settled in this area. However, there are hardly any South Asians living there now.
Some further research on my part discovered that the only Pakistani city which continuously figures as a street name in faraway countries is Karachi. I discovered a wonderful little piece on this by one M. Ayaz Abdal (penned in 2010). He names at least seven streets called Karachi (including the two I have already mentioned).