ABSTRACT
When one thinks of Karachi, one thinks of a very violent city. And, on the whole, one would be right to think so because violence of all types has been rampant in the city more or less since the mid-1980s. In many ways, it has become the natural order of things, something the residents of Karachi have not so much come to accept but have adapted to (Gayer 2014b: 4). Of course, it was not always like that. In the 1940s, Karachi was referred to as the ‘Paris of the East’; it was the cleanest city on the subcontinent (Verkaaik 1994: 33). And in the early 1960s, Jackie Kennedy, flanked by Pakistan's president, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, drove through Karachi in an open top convertible, an event which today is almost impossible to imagine actually happened. Unfortunately, all this has changed beyond recognition.
