Karachi Day Two Evening

There was a taxi rank outside the Avari Towers and, for some reason, I had gone outside and got talking to one of the drivers. He spoke very good English and he painted a chilling picture of daily life in Pakistan. He told me that police officers demands RS10 from each taxi driver every day just to allow them to park at the Avari. If drivers refuse to pay there were 'big problems'. My journal doesn't say what those were!
This driver regularly chauffers 'big wigs' around the city and he scoughed at the demeaning way they treated them whilst contrasting this with showing gifts on the rich and wealthy. The driver told me there were three things which were tearing Karachi apart. They were corruption, ethnic tensions and sectarian issues. My reading of the press whilst there could confirm all three reasons were correct. The province of Sindh (where Karachi is) has special tensions between the native Sindhis and the Muhajirs, or people who migrated there after the partition of India in 1948.
At the time big trouble was just beginning to brew up between the majority Sunnis and minority Shias in addition to tensions between different groups within Sunni Islam. Someone told me, says my journal, that one Shia group had changed the Pakistani flag to add religious text in order to make it more Islamic. This may or may not have been true. It was probably something the taxi driver told me? My journal says that it was the Prophet's sunnah to wear a green turban so this group started to do the same.
The taxi driver did relate that in Pakistan all the various groups worship in their own separate mosques which have their own separate (and different) prayer times. He related how the adhan (call to prayer) can be heard at varying intervals. I could contrast this with Egypt where all the mosques began their adhans at roughly the same time.
The driver, fluent in five languages, then told me how corruption is endemic in Pakistan from the top right down to the bottom. On the airport run the security police demand bribes from the drivers just to enter the airport area.
He related how a small number of very powerful families had virtual control of everything that happened in Pakistan.

On the subject of women, he otld me there was a saying in Karachi :Women are like the soles of your shoes. When you wear them out, throw them away and get a new one!
He did relate how the role of women was changing and that they were then taking on more major roles in society. He told me he admired Benazir Bhutto for her cutting intellect.

The night previous my journal tells me I had been watching PTV and Benazir was in Qatar speaking about Pakistani-Qatari cooperation and related how, by the will of Almighty Allah, her government was rooting out corruption and nepotism at all levels. After listening to her speaking I concluded that there was a woman of immense intellect attempting to deal with chronic and endemic situations in her homeland.