The “Karachi Relief Trust”:http://www.karachirelief.org/ has 10 camps managed from a central location in Sakhrand. So my team got here today, liasoned with the old team we’re replacing, the people on the ground, than made our way around all the 10 camps distrubuting food and here we are in Benazirabad waiting for some food ourselves now.
Nawabshah is now called SBAG – Shaheed Benazirabad Abad District something. The benefit of naming your town after her, and all other towns should follow this great idea is that everyone you can imagine a sign you have a sign. This is a great relief for people like me who can’t find places without signs.
The only problem is that every place is called SBAG now and depending on the photoshop skills of the signmaker there are pics of Benazir in all sizes, ranging from Madame Tussad wax quality pictures to horrendous pale faced caricatures the likes of which are only seen in horror movies.
There has been some hue and cry in the twitterati, facebooking and bloggy circles about a billion rupee monument being build to Benazir somewhere or the other, but they missed out on the multi-billion signage being put up everywhere else!
Benazir’s son, his name slips my mind as apparently he’s never been to Pakistan, besides appearing in blurry facebook photos, is now paired with his mother and some other male in every billboard in SBAG. Sadly, his name slips the signage makers as well as the only readable name in SBAG is Benazirs – which is fitting, considering it is her very own town, to fit her matching set of all the other towns in Sindh named after her. The poor Nawabs must be turning over in their graves, to be robbed of their very own town though, and no one in Pakistan seems to be thinking about them anymore.
What a life – to be imprinted in the minds of millions of poor Sindhi’s everywhere. I hope he is taking some pyschology classes whereever he’s going to University.
This is some digression, given that I’m here in Benazirabad doing volunteer work for one week for KRT, but given that there are more Bhutto billboards than IDP’s it’s only fitting that I get the really needy people out of the way first – the Zardari family – who’re begging for votes everywhere, than move on to the IDP’s in the next post.
to be continued…