Ali Fehmi

“Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History

“This fragmentation of public authority went even further in Pakistan than in India. In Pakistan, state power never permeated society as deep and far as in India, as the dissemination of highly technological forms of violence within society and the inability of state authorities to enforce a national system of taxation exemplify—two developments that have no parallel in neighbouring India. The evolutions of Karachi’s society over the past four decades bear testimony to this. The proliferation and ever-increasing power of these non-state sovereigns, claiming for themselves the right to discipline and punish but also to protect, tax and represent local populations, has turned the city into a ‘zone of unsettled sovereignties and loyalties’,122 where the access to arms has become the privileged if not the sole venue towards power and wealth.”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

“Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history’s most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and most importantly, without parents. But that’s just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“the population of Karachi increasing by 369 per cent between 1941 and 1961, possibly the fastest rate of growth ever registered for a city of that size in world history.25 By 1951, according to the first Census of Pakistan, the composition of Karachi’s population had drastically changed. In 1941, 51 per cent of the city’s inhabitants were Hindu and only 42 per cent Muslim. Ten years later, 96 per cent of the city’s total population was Muslim, and only 2 per cent Hindu. According to the Census, refugees from India now accounted for 55 per cent of the total population of the city,”
― Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City