Mustafa Qadri

I’ve been a runner for over a decade now. Owing to my physiology I find middle distance, from 5kms to 15kms but no more, to be my optimal range. Nevertheless, even when I’m running, stretching and exercising regularly, the first ten minutes is always an intense struggle. My lungs gasp and legs tense up. My [...]

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I haven’t had many opportunities to write recently due to the lack of internet access. It has shown just how dependent I am on the technology. In my defence, without internet, small scale writers such as I would not be able to contribute very much. The cost of constant phone calls and transport, which I [...]

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Pakistan is an incredibly divided society. Most of those divisions relate to class. Even within a class there are several different subclasses. Here’s one example. The neighbour’s servant, who’s a top bloke, came over today to give me some yummy desert. I offered him most of the food in my fridge because I’m leaving for [...]

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Today I did a preliminary trip to Hyderabad, the next biggest city in the province of Sindh after Karachi. The purpose of the visit was to speak to a representative from the local branch of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The major issue covered by the HRCP in Hyderabad is the abuse and enslavement [...]

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I had my first-ever Pakistani beer yesterday. Okay, I lie. I had my first four. The first was after lunch with a local newspaper editor. We went to a bottle shop near to where I live. You couldn’t tell from the outside however, because the place was largely boarded up. You drive up in your [...]

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Sorry for not posting more travel diary entries of late. Or perhaps that’s a good thing? I’ve been a little flat out putting some stories together. The decision to impeach Musharraf didn’t help either… in terms of my workload. I’m still way behind on some non-Pakistan stories including one which is oh, just around 2 [...]

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Dad left yesterday evening and the apartment has been noticeably quiet ever since. I’ll miss the old fella’s company. It was good to have him around for three weeks, even if he had five pet subjects he mentioned frequently every day. In other news, the taxi driver who threw our money back at us returned [...]

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It was an eventual day yesterday largely for uneventful reasons. The highlight was when the taxi driver we were using for three hours between nine and twelve at night asked for an exorbitant fee. When we paid him the usual amount we pay taxi drivers he literally threw the money back at us. After a [...]

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Today I had some yummy pancakes with a cousin and his family. It was good to have a chilled out late Sunday chat and a big feed. There was another bloke there, around my dad’s age or possibly older. He was an interesting character. Quite knowledgeable and it seems he’s had a lot of life [...]

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Today and yesterday I visited Karachi’s Hindu community at two different ‘mandirs’ or temples. One was in the Lighthouse district of the city. From the main road you would be forgiven for not knowing it exists because it is surrounded by markets. The only entrance to the tempe is through a small alleyway covered by [...]

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The default mind frame for negotiating transactions in Karachi is suspicion. Occasionally suspicion spills over into outright hostility. Today I visited the bank to open an account. I was a little exhausted owing to the heat and while I patiently waited for all the formal things to get processed a gentleman sitting with another bank [...]

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Tonight I went to the ‘haq-eqa’ of one of my cousin’s first child Asad. The baby was all of eight days old and very cute. It was a good opportunity to meet a number of my father’s relatives whom I haven’t seen for some time. I asked a bunch of blokes at the event whether [...]

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Pakistan has some of the best natural produce I’ve ever sampled. The eggs here are just superb and the fruit is second only to that which I ate in Morocco and Palestine. Perhaps that makes it third best. You can tell the produce is much more natural than what you get in developed countries because [...]

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The electricity has been shut down in Clifton, the part of Karachi where I’m staying, for two hours now. With it, most everything I do has ground to a halt. Almost everything. I started reading, ‘Torture Team’ by Philippe Sands, a book I’m meant to be reviewing but the heat eventually got to me. I [...]

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Everytime I leave for a long overseas journey I’m confronted by a rich mixture of emotions. I generally lose my appetite, a function of being a little anxious about the impending experience. Due to the nature of my work, there is always a fair degree of uncertainty about what precisely I’m meant to be doing. [...]

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