Karachiwala - A Subcontinent Within a City

Byline: Aquila Ismail Cities express the endless possibilities for human creativity. They are expressions of human culture and organization. Each city instantiates or represents a certain universal property that all cities share to some degree: the tension between the way things are and the way these are seen, between disparity and unity, similarity and difference, between progress and decay and indeed even between monotony and beauty. This is, perhaps, what Rumana Husain set out to do in Karachiwala: A Subcontinent within a City, laying out, through photographs and, in the main, interview-based narrative, all of the possibilities that the mega city Karachi represents. Through the book she asserts, as well, her appreciation for the diverse possibilities of human creativity by combining the power of memory of the sixty or so protagonists and their dreams of what was and what could be. The three hundred and thirty pages of this book reveal to the reader myriad new and perhaps, to many, yet familiar worlds.