Karachi: the beautiful and the ugly

The sun is relentless on this side of the world. I  wake up to blinding sunlight and crows cawing and when I check the time, it's only 7am. There isn't much to do here, say the more fortunate of my friends, home for the holidays, visiting from Canada or Australia or America, conveniently forgetting where they were born, where they started out from. Yes, I admit there isn't much to do in our city. We go to school, or we go to university, maybe get a job if we're lucky. We eat. We sleep. We blame the government for the target killings, the sectarian violence, our houses, our selves getting robbed, the power outages, the cars that stubbornly drive the wrong way on a one-way street, and the cricket matches we lose to India. We parade our faith on the streets when its threatened two continents away, and we will fight to the death to prove a point. We will bathe our city in blood to show our enemies what we can do, and we will bathe it in green for the same reason. We are slaves of our past, though we don't remember it, we are slaves to the blood-heat that courses through our veins, helpless in the wake of its selfish desires. When it wants something, we must obey. This city will always be too full of people and emotions and trampled dreams, we made you, Karachi, and you made us.