Word: karachi
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...partition, most of Karachi's 440,000 population of Hindus had left and were replaced by 1.2 million Mohajirs, or Indian migrants. They had followed the dream of Pakistan's founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to create a nation for Muslims. But the Mohajirs were in for a rude shock. Many of the local Punjabis, Sindhis and Pathans regarded them as unwanted trespassers. They still do, except nowadays the Mohajirs have earned wary respect by carrying out vicious ethnic warfare in Karachi throughout the early 1990s. The Pathans and the Sindhis retaliated but the Mohajirs matched them murder for murder...
...Like so much of Central Asia, contemporary Karachi is also a product of the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the jihad declared by much of the Muslim world in response. To fund their campaign against the Russian occupiers, Afghan warlords used Pakistan as a transshipment point for heroin and Karachi as a major point of export. Paid for in part by those narco-dollars were the vast shipments of small arms and Stinger missiles passing the other way through Karachi before being loaded onto trucks bound for Peshawar and eventually camels headed for Afghanistan's interior. Those...
...Karachi, like Pakistan itself, also suffers from an identity crisis. Aside from Israel (though Pakistanis hate to be reminded of this), Pakistan is the only modern nation forged primarily out of faith. The problem plaguing Pakistan remains that its founders never agreed whether it should be a relaxed country whose citizens happen to be Muslims or an austere Islamic state adhering to Shari'a law. This ambiguity is responsible for the ongoing tug-of-war between the country's religious extremists and Westernized moderates; Karachi embodies these contradictions. As sociologist Arif Hassan of the nongovernmental organization Urban Resource Center puts...
...rich and influential live in the Defence and Clifton suburbs, in the latter along a wide, crescent shore, in faux Grecian- or Californian-style mansions. Every few years their walls grow taller?concrete evidence of the rising tide of instability that engulfs Karachi. The latest fad among the very wealthy is to have a lion cub or a Siberian crane (an endangered species), which clacks loudly when a stranger approaches, roaming in the garden. In a country where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, many of the wealthy believe in enhancing their status...
...life genie: "A Russian hooker who looks like Pamela Anderson? Ecstasy? A bottle of Black Label? An AK-47, or a 40-carat diamond? It's all here?just a phone call away." In his sleek, black outfits and his silver bracelets, Amin is a familiar figure at Karachi's private parties and rave clubs, which never advertise or display signs and are set back from the street in high-walled compounds beyond the hearing of mullahs or cops looking to shake down a few rich kids. Ecstasy and ketamine are the drugs of choice. Back home in their mansions...