Windmills of My Mind: Karachi's Pride comes home!

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Saturday, September 02, 2006

Karachi's Pride comes home!

"The W11 is Karachi's most famous bus route because of its spectacular decoration. For the Commonwealth Games 2006, in Melbourne Australia , a team of of W11 decorators from New Karachi, led by Nusrat Iqbal, were invited by Mick Douglas, to decorate a Melbourne tram in the style of W11. The tram ran a free service during the games and some 80,000 people rode on it. It was voted the most popular cultural event of the games. The public response was so good that the tram is scheduled to continue to run as a weekend service. People said that after Pakistan won the world cup in 1992, this was the first time that so much praise was showered on Pakistan. The national and international press has carried the project all over the world. The entire project was filmed by Wajid Ali, a fine art graduate of the Department of Visual Studies, University of Karachi, from its beginnings at the New Karachi workshop to the inauguration and duration of the project in Melbourne.

Please come and see the street screening at Allahwali, the last stop of W11, New Karachi.

Date: September 3, 2006 Time: 8.30 PM BE ADVENTUROUS ... BE THERE!

You can get there by taking a ride on the W11 from any of its stops, starting from Keamari near the entrance to the Docks.

September 7-22: a photographic exhibition of the project and a repeat of the screening will be held at the VM Gallery, Karachi. (Mick Douglas has come from Australia for the two events and will be there to give you more information about the project's aims and achievements.)"

[Text adapted from the e-mailed circular]

Labels: Events, News, Pakistan

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: Name: Zakintosh; Location: Karachi, Pakistan

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Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have scrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that the saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought and, though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

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The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Noam Chomsky

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Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

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With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

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