Amina Jilani at Cowasjee's place. I started reading her columns when she wrote 'Jaywalker' for the Dawn. She is currently writing for the Express Tribune.

Karachi looks very orderly from the air. Here you see the Seaview township, the Seaview road, Dolmen City, and Boat Basin. You can also see the Mai Kolachi Bypass.

Manora and Kemari. The geographical features make Karachi a natural seaport.

Leaving Dubai (earlier this year)

Amir Khusro wrote poetry when Urdu was in its very early stages of evolution. Writing in a mixture of Sanskrit and Persian Amir Khusro was doing the very experiments which would ultimately make a 'mixture language' (Rekhta/Urdu) come into being. Hamida Banu Chopra, a Bay Area Urdu teacher, and her team remembered the life and work of Amir Khusro in a program held on Sunday, July 25, at the India Community Center in Milpitas. Here you see Deepti Warrier (at the podium), Hamida Banu Chopra and Dr. Nazeer Ahmed.

Over thirty people listened to Abid Hassan Minto describing his association with Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Minto's views on Pakistan's current political situation.

The staged-reading was followed by a talk given by Abid Hassan Minto, a prominent lawyer from Pakistan.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz was a natural poet who innately knew how to use words in the most rhythmic fashion, and to coin new expressions when he would find the bag of conventional terms empty. Year 2011 is Faiz's birthday centennial. Faiz's centenary celebrations are taking place in Pakistan, India, and outside South Asia in Urdu understanding Diaspora. On Saturday, April 16, Friends of South Asia (www.friendsofsouthasia.org) celebrated Faiz's centennial by hosting a short play and a talk by Abid Hassan Minto.
A clever staged-reading--clever because the pages on which Faiz was presumably writing his poetry during his incarceration were used by the actors to read their lines from--of the short play "Dear Heart", written by Munib Anwar and Sam Lathem, featured Kashif Maqsood (as Faiz), Jessica Risco (as Alys) and Abbas Zaidi and Hemukumar Joshi as the two jailers. The play was directed by Saqib Mausoof and produced by Ijaz Syed.