meethapani

  Design is often considered a luxury, yet the reality is that nothing can be manufactured without first being designed. It can be as simple as an envelope or pencil, or as complex as a car or space rocket. While some designers such as Charles Eames, Milton Glaser, and Zaha Hadid, have become household names, the vast majority of products we use every day are anonymously designed down to the shape, colour and location of the tiniest screw on a laptop. No one knows the name of the first craftsperson who designed the stucco muqarnas of Nishapur, Iran in the 9 th Century, a style that spread across the Islamic world, or the very first woven paradise carpets or illuminated Qurans.      Design is the purposeful fashioning of something, usually products, architecture, or graphic design. It is also the design of systems, from the structure of how a bank functions, education systems, government structures or the design of roads to manage traffic flow. At a more subtle l...

  Last Sunday a day long festival was held at the recently renovated Khalikdina Hall in the heart of the old city of Karachi. While Karachi’s public spaces are coming back to life as seen with the attendances at the Arts Council’s World Culture Festival, the performances at the National Academy of Performing Arts and the All Pakistan Music Conference, and new fringe cultural spaces like Nani Ghar, Meher Ghar and Kitab Ghar, seeing an abandoned heritage building once again milling with people of all ages from across Karachi, is a moving experience. The handsome portals of the Palladium building, for many years dark and silent, were filled with light and life as in the past. Arif Hasan, in his article, The Changing Face of Karachi, explains in great detail the circumstances that ‘orphaned’ the inner city. Karachi has awakened after three decades of fear. Much has changed in these decades. The culture of cinema which started with the Star Cinema on Bunder Road in 1917, has vanishe...

  Much like the waves of Karachi’s coastline – sometimes overwhelmed by Monsoon seas and sometimes stretched out alongside winter’s gentle ripple, the stories of this city appear and disappear with few traces. Who were the community of people whose flint tools from 2 million years ago were found on Mulri Hills opposite the University of Karachi, now buried under an apartment block? Why were stone megaliths erected in circles on the outskirts of Karachi? And more importantly, how have they survived for so long? Why was such a harbor so perfectly sheltered from the Arabian sea by the Manora peninsula not a thriving sea port in ancient times? Or was it? Mentions of what is today Karachi go back to at least the 3 rd C BC Krokola, Monrontobara, Kharacchi,   Rasal Karazi, Kaurashi, Karachar, Kalaiti Bunder, Ramaia, Kolachi, Kurrachee. But tantalizingly no more than names remains, except for the famous story of the seven sons of Aubhayo six of whom were caught in a whirlpool o...

    The Titanic was a magnificent luxury passenger ship that sank in 1912 , after hitting an iceberg. The First Class had luxurious suites, servants, French cuisine, private decks and a ballroom with an orchestra.   The second class was comfortable but not luxurious. While the third class, most of whom were seeking a new life in America, were housed on the lowest level, with simple food and shared cabins. Yet, they all faced the same fear and the same death in the icy waters of the Atlantic. The Titanic has since become a metaphor for human society. Some see it as an indictment of human hubris, others reflect on the class divisions and the unequal value of human lives between the privileged and the poor. One can move the telescope further away and look at the inequality of nations - divided between the highly developed and those much lower down the rung. Yet every so often nature makes short work of such differences. Celebrity homes were gutted alongside those of ...

  A whale shark was pulled ashore onto a beach in Gaza on October 17, amid great cheers. Raed Elwan, one of the fishermen who helped bring the creature to shore, said “We felt the sea sent us a great blessing, as people in the camps had nothing to eat”. Whale sharks are only found in tropical waters and it is speculated it may have entered the Mediterranean from the Red Sea via the Suez canal.     The Gazan fisherman saw it as help from Allah, and soon parallels were made with the Expedition of Fish which took place in another October in 629 AD. The Muslim forces were suffering from famine, forced to eat leaves to survive, until a whale came ashore that fed them for several days. Signs and miracles are a part of all religions, a reassurance of divine presence. This is especially true of Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam: the parting of the Red Sea, Moses striking a rock to cause 12 springs to gush forth, Jesus multiplying loaves to feed 5000, the...

    The Sumud Flotilla of some 40 boats with 500 people on board from 47 countries, including Pakistan, attempted to get to Gaza in a symbolic gesture to highlight the need to get aid to besieged Palestinians. “When the World Stays Silent, We Set Sail” states the Sumud website. The participants were everyday people—organizers, humanitarians, doctors, artists, clergy and lawyers. Sumud is a Palestinian term for steadfastness. This was the latest and largest of several flotillas from 2010, during which many lost their lives, were imprisoned or deported by Israeli authorities. The heroic nature of sailing fragile boats across the Mediterranean Sea to save a people in impossible conditions, is not lost given the legendary history of this sea traversed by heroes like Odysseus, Theseus and Jason with his Argonauts.   Is this a new generation of the Sea Peoples of 1177 BC that brought down the powerful empires of the Bronze Age? Fanciful speculation aside, this attempt s...

  No Man’s Land is a monograph of Amin Gulgee – a sculptor, a performance artist and a curator. That should be a comprehensive description, but it’s not. The more one hears and reads about Amin Gulgee the more the mystery deepens. No Man’s Land suggests that in between space of uneasy peace in a zone of conflict, a space in which Amin gathers the fragmented, the wounded and the heroic.   Sometimes he is Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and sometimes his space becomes Théodore Géricault’s Raft of Medusa. The book has twelve essays by a wide range of curators, novelists, artists, academics, critics from Pakistan and across the globe. Amin asked the contributors to consider the book an invitation to a party. They could write whatever they felt like. A good place to start is in the middle with the interview by Maryam Ekhtiar, curator at the Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her neutral prompts offer an unmediated narrative insig...