The Biggest Fountain in South Asia Unveiled at Bahria Town, Karachi

Neo

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The Biggest Fountain in South Asia Unveiled at Bahria Town, Karachi

23rd March saw the unveiling of South Asia’s biggest fountain at Bahria Town Karachi – the ‘Dancing Fountain’ which provides a captivating water, light, and music spectacle.

Malik Riaz, Founder and Chairman of Bahria Town, described the spectacle as a Pakistan Day gift to the nation, in his Facebook post.

The dazzling spectacle included more than 180 individual fountains, with the water reportedly reaching a height of over 150 feet. It is also accompanied and supported by laser lights and a fire show.

Bahria Town officials believe this can become a major tourist attraction that could draw thousands of visitors each day.

The Dancing Fountain has been launched for the public, although, it is set for a formal inauguration on April 15.

You can take a look at its demonstration on March 23 below:


About Bahria Town

Bahria Town Karachi, which spans over 44,000 acres, is currently Pakistan’s largest private real estate project. Upon its completion, Bahria Town Karachi claims that it will host several other attractions and landmarks, including Pakistan’s largest cricket stadium, Pakistan’s first Hyatt Regency Hotel, one of the world’s largest mosques, a 36-hole PGA standard golf course, a night safari, and a private member club called President’s Club, among others.

Bahria Town is the largest private real estate company in Asia whose housing societies are also present in Lahore, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi. The company owns several shopping complexes including the Mall of Lahore and the under-construction Mall of Islamabad, a chain of cinemas under the brand of Cine Gold, and a chain of supermarkets under the banner of Green Valley Hypermarket.

https://propakistani.pk/2017/03/24/biggest-fountain-south-asia-unveiled-bahria-town-karachi/
 

vinuzap

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https://www.dawn.com/news/1176095

8 to 1: Karachi's shrinking Hindu Gymkhana
AKHTAR BALOUCHUPDATED SEP 16, 2015 06:32PM
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In the past 100 years, several government departments have been allotted the Hindu Gymkhana's land.
Akhtar Balouch, also known as the Kiranchi Wala, ventures out to bring back to Dawn.com’s readers the long forgotten heritage of Karachi. Stay tuned to this space for his weekly fascinating findings.

Back in 1921, at least 47,000 square yards of land were leased to the Hindu Gymkhana for a 100 years in Karachi; that’s almost 8 acres. The lease ends in the year 2020.

I often frequent the gymkhana for various events. On one such occasion, I was there with my friend Ashraf Solangi who also happens to be a landowner. As we stood there looking around, I told him that I didn’t quite think the gymkhana land amounted to eight acres; it just did not seem possible.

To my surprise, he stated the gymkhana stood on not more than an acre.

This was later confirmed by my friend, famous vocalist and sitar player, Nafees Khan sahib as well. He teaches music at the National Institute of Performing Arts (Napa), which is hosted by the Hindu Gymkhana.

So, where had the remaining seven acres or so of land gone?

Also read: Temple run: Searching for the lost Guru Mandar

The construction of the gymkhana was completed in 1925. Back in the day, it was named Seth Ramgopal Goverdhandas Mohatta Hindu Gymkhana. There is also currently a Goverdhandas Market on Bandar Road in Karachi.

Mostly forgotten, the gymkhana became news once again when General Pervez Musharraf handed the building over to Napa in 2005. This proved to be nothing short of a fortunate turn of fate for the gymkhana.

The Hindu Gymkhana proceeded to become a centre of fine arts in Karachi. The once desolately vacant rooms inside the gymkhana now echoed with Nafees Khan’s sitar chords and the thump and tap of Bashir Khan’s tabla.

Here stand Rahat Kazmi and Talat Hussain teaching young students to act.

Here stands Zia Mohiuddin correcting students’ pronunciation and presentation. The annual International Music Conference is an added attraction.

Interestingly, however, almost nine out of 10 students and visitors to the place are non-Hindus. The spiritual importance given to music and dance and other forms of arts in the Hindu religion is not an unknown fact. Yet, even all the teachers here are non-Hindus.

Also read: In Karachi: Bombay, not Mumbai, meri jaan

After its inception in 2005, Napa transitioned into a stable institution. In 2009, however, things took a turn after Napa was asked by the Government of Sindh to vacate and return the possession of the Hindu Gymkhana.

It was all said in a letter (dated September 3, 2008) to the Chairman of Napa, Zia Mohiuddin. The reason stated was that Napa had violated the lease agreement from 2005 by illegally commencing the construction of an auditorium on the gymkhana premises. This, as the letter stated, was a clear violation of the Sindh Cultural Heritage Preservation Act, 1994.

Arshad Mehmood, a famous vocalist and a representative of Napa said that the lease agreement was never violated. He claims that the gymkhana is still intact, in its original state as was handed over to Napa and that the eviction notice by the government carried no legal weightage.


The writer with Arshad Mehmood and Nafees Khan.
Rumour, confusion and provocation

That’s what news channels appear to have as their philosophy, it seems. As soon as they discovered about the correspondence between Napa and the provincial government, headlines depicting Napa’s bleak future were inevitable.

Today, we’re in the month of April 2015 and Napa still exists. The address too is still the Hindu Gymkhana, Karachi.

According to a news report in 2009 by Riaz Sohail, a journalist friend, Sassi Palijo, Sindh’s Culture Minister in those days, said,

“The building is the property of the Hindu community and they have no place in the city to celebrate occasions and festivals. General Musharraf had acted on his relatives’ advice and gotten the gymkhana vacated forcefully, handing it over to Napa. The Pakistan People’s Party had opposed the move on the house floor.”

She also said that fragile historical objects were carelessly handled while being transferred to the Hyderabad Museum. She claimed it was not a political comeback only because Musharraf was involved since the PPP did not believe in payback politics. “The building will be reserved for activities of the Hindu community,” Palijo said.

Also read: Karachi's 'Yahoodi Masjid'

The records of the Sindh Assembly sessions can prove whether Ms Palijo was right in claiming that her party had opposed it on the house floor. It is a tedious task to go through all that jibber jabber of politicians indulged in a make-believe democracy in an elitist house, claimant champions of the representation of the will of the common people. Three lines in and one is already reminded of clichés and jargon.

Eleven years later, on February 17, 2014, the All Pakistan Hindu Panchaet wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of Pakistan on the subject of the problems faced by the Hindu community. The letter asks His Honour to take a suo moto on the Hindu Gymkhana issue.

I can never understand why people like the Hindu Panchaet would ask the CJ to jump in for a gymkhana when all else that has even a fragment of Hindu culture in its identity is in danger in the republic of the pure. My friend Wusatullah Khan wrote well about it:

“Sindh Government says the historical Hindu Gymkhana is to be vacated by Napa and handed over to the Hindu community for their activities. This, certainly, is a praiseworthy deed. What sweet bliss would it be if the said government, in continuity of the sympathy and concern for the minorities that it shows, begin trying to know what happened of the 400 something temples, dozens of guruduwaras and one lonely synagogue that existed in Karachi in 1947? Did the Gods residing in these places of worship migrate along with the sacred buildings to countries where their religion was held a majority?

Each of the few remaining temples that still stand in the city is an interesting site. The Narayana Temple is now a storage area for some Qureshi businessmen. The Naag Naath Temple is a soap factory now. The temple by the Preedy Police Station is turned into a little den for the land-grabbers’ that occupy it. The Darya Lal Temple is now the office of a successful goods transport company. The Bhaag Naari Temple is occupied by a transport and courier company. Last but not the least, the Pinjra Pol Temple was sold by its trustees.”

Also read: Gandhi’s exile

Sassi Palijo’s ministry administration referring to the Sindh Cultural Heritage Preservation Act, 1994 can put the PPP in a very dangerous position. If we take it as is, since it is the law, no additional construction is legal within the premises of any historical site. The matter has the potential of escalating to heights of communal madness.

You see, some of the ‘additional construction’ already done at many other such sites is not so easy to bring down, in accordance with the law. For example, inside the premises of the Victoria Museum building, currently hosting the Supreme Court of Pakistan in Sindh, a remarkable mosque was constructed only recently.

Similarly, in the backyard of the Khaliq Dina Hall, there are government offices and public residential quarters. The Sindh Assembly, a historical monument in itself, has recently witnessed both a construction of a mosque and whole new Sindh Assembly building in its premises. I could go on...

The Hindu Gymkhana, plot RB1/5, held a total of 47,000 square yards of land in 1925. In 1978, almost 60 per cent of its land was given to the Police Department. In the same year, another 6000 something square yards were given to the Federal Public Service Commission. Almost 3,500 square yards were given to the Ali Garh Muslim University for which the University paid a sum of 173,050 rupees. A gentleman by the name of Abdul Majeed Khan received almost 400 square yards of land as an allotment. Deduct all those square yards and the gymkhana is left with a measly 4,500 square yards of land to itself; literally 10 times smaller than what it originally was.


The section of the Hindu Gymkhana's land which has been allotted to the Aligarh Muslim University.

The Civil Lines police station also stands on the Hindu Gymkhana land.

The Artillery Maidan on the Hindu Gymkhana's land.
According to Advocate Michael Saleem, there are at least 17 cases relating to the Hindu Gymkhana pending in various courts in the country.

Everyone fighting to own the Hindu Gymkhana should at least have the sense to not just try to get back the 4,500 square yards that it is currently left with. Instead, they should fight for the entire 47,000 square yards. That ought to clarify who gives a darn tuppence about heritage in the government.
 

vinuzap

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(Pak Destiny) After the Supreme Court’s decision to restrain Bahria Town from undertaking any development activity on the state land allotted measuring over 9,000 to it by the Malir Development Authority (MDA) illegally, the property price of Bahria Town Karachi dropped to more than 50 percent. Besides, a sum of Rs27 billion people invested there is at stake now.
“Who will recover my money from Malik Riaz, owner of Bahria Town, after this development,” Malik Qayyum said who invested over Rs150 million in Karachi Bahria Town. “The estate agents offer me Rs50m against the plots which I had bought against Rs150 million over a year ago,” he said, adding Malik Riaz collected Rs27b from in a few days after launching Bahria Karachi. Now Riaz spending millions on advertisements to hoodwink the people about the Karachi Baharia project.

The SC has given two months to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to complete its investigation into Bahria Town scam and submit report to it. The land in question involves the under-construction Bahria Town project located about nine kilometres from Toll Plaza on the Karachi-Hyderabad super highway. The NAB prosecutor general filed an interim report in a sealed envelope along with a copy of the survey report prepared by the Directorate of Survey of Pakistan, Ministry of Defence, which was taken on record.
According to the survey report, the total land consolidated by the MDA and handed over to Bahria Town measured 9,385.185 acres. In the survey report, the portion marked in pink as “A” showed that Bahira Town had developed 386.276 acres of land which was not yet consolidated by the MDA.
The survey report also showed some other portions of state land that had been developed by Bahria Town despite the fact that they had not been consolidated by the MDA. The total land developed/under development but not consolidated by the MDA came to make 2,771.79 acres.

The bench inquired of the chief secretary, senior member, Board of Revenue, and the advocate general of Sindh to satisfy it under which law the MDA was competent to exchange private land with the land falling in the area reserved as corridor. The three officials, however, could not offer any explanation and submitted that no such powers were available with the MDA to allot or exchange the private land with the state land.

The MDA was also restrained from consolidating any further portion of the private land for the Bahria Town or any other private enterprise under the garb of exchange of land in exercise of their powers conferred on them under the MDA Act or the rules framed thereunder. The SC also restricted the Board of Revenue from dealing with the land of the MDA or any other Authority which was the subject matter of these proceedings in any manner whatsoever.

Meanwhile, chief of Bahria Town Malik Riaz Hussain claimed that the Supreme Court had not imposed any restriction on development of his projects. In his tweets, he called it “misreporting of facts” by the media and vowed to continue the development of the mighty project. “Misreporting of facts regarding #BahriaTown #Karachi absolutely malicious. SC didn’t put any restrictions on develop work by Bahria Town,” he said.

Let’s see how the people’s money of billions of rupees is saved.
 

vinuzap

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this is how they dupe there innocent polulation on state land by grabbing village and destroying hindu and buddhist stupas just for a housing society not even development work

Stealing from Karachi’s scarce resources
Acquiescent government officials have not only smoothed the way in land acquisition for the project: they have also colluded with Bahria to provide facilities, such as water, to the vast township, so that its road dividers, parks and golf course continue looking lush and verdant.

“Four three-inch diameter connections have been already given for the benefit of BTK from the Dumlottee intersection,” revealed a deputy managing director at the Karachi Water and Sewage Board.

This is Karachi’s water, and its diversion to BTK will cut into the already inadequate supplies to the 20-million strong city, where residents are either dependent on exorbitantly priced tankers to get water – yet another mafia – or stand at communal taps to obtain and store water for their daily use.

Destroying heritage sites and the environment
The 23,000-plus acres so far ‘acquired’ by BTK are also home to scores of historical sites, including tombs similar to the Chawkandi necropolis near Thatta, as well as Buddhist stupas, rock carvings etc.

Every tomb in the path of construction has been ruthlessly scooped up by bulldozers and cast aside like trash.

Their centuries-old symbolic markers and motifs have not stayed the juggernaut of ‘development’ and bottomless greed.

According to historian Gul Hasan Kalmati, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai – the revered Sufi mystic widely regarded as the greatest poet of the Sindhi language – had stayed in this area. “His takia (shrine), which was located here, was also a resting place for jogis on their way to Hinglaj Mata [the Hindu temple in Makran],” he recalled.

Today, on the spot where the Shah’s takia was located, say locals, stand the toilets of BTK’s Grand Mosque.

In this real-life game of Monopoly, the topography of the area is also being reshaped. This is an undulating landscape with many perennial streams and nullahs that fall into the Malir river. Many of the hills are being ground down in keeping with BTK’s commercialisation requirements.

Future plans reportedly include altering the course of at least some of the streams and nullahs, which could pose catastrophic risks to the environment besides adversely impacting the area’s wildlife.

Mohammad Sharif Burfat, security supervisor for Bahria phase 4, who lives in a nearby village just across the Karachi-Jamshoro border, told Dawn that development in his phase may still be several months away.

On March 9, 2016 a NAB representative informed the SC bench hearing the Karachi unrest case that at least 104,000 plots have already been sold by Bahria. Most of the investors in BTK belong to the middle and lower middle-classes of Sindh, especially Karachi.

For those in the know, the reality is that the red-hot speculation in BTK is being deliberately driven by a strategy similar to that which major players in the stock market employ when they manipulate share prices.

Raheel, a real estate agent, explained how the prices of BTK plots are manipulated. “Small investors are periodically offered ever higher prices, knowing full well that those who have put in their limited savings would hope to make a considerable profit in the long term and will not want to sell,” he said.

"Instead, they would be happy to know that their property has already appreciated reasonably. This also induces genuine investor demand.”

He added that prices are crashed at opportune times by flooding the market or by merely generating adverse rumours. “This is part of ‘satta’, a tactic used to set new price benchmarks and generate quick premiums. It’s also an extremely effective marketing strategy.”

“The price of a plot in BT Rawalpindi which a friend of mine bought for Rs5m is currently down by half, but there are no takers,” comments Brigadier Iftikhar, an old hand at the game.

Notwithstanding the sordid reality behind Bahria, it seems that those who can, and should, take urgent action against such scandalous land grabs are choosing to look the other way.

Several residents of the area, however, say that is not surprising. “When Malik Riaz can boast with impunity about the bribes he has paid to some of the most powerful in the country, what hope of redressal is there for the dispossessed and the toiling masses of this land?” asked one of them dejectedly.
 
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Bornubus

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Slaves are progressing. Karachi also happens to be the home of biggest slum of Asia.


And make sure to never post any source like ABC news point lol Pakis love to make fake news websites and then claim Pak Army no 1

Raheel Sharif no 1 COAS, Islamabad is the most beautiful capital in the world :pound:
 
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Mikesingh

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Pakis trying to copy their Arab masters from Dubai.
There'll soon be a Chinese dancing fountain too made by and for the Chinese at Gwadar!! The Pakis will be made to dance to Chinese tunes (As if they aren't already!! Lol!)
 

Dark Sorrow

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@vinuzap,
Sir how are your post related to the topic?:confused1::confused1:

I request members to stick to the topic and if they can't contribute something positive to the topic refrain from commenting.

I have observed this trend that just because some Pakistani or Chinese members post something good about their country, Indian members derail their thread by posting some unrelated negative aspect of their society or country.
 

I am otm shank

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Good to see Pakistan doesn't have a water shortage problem and india can get back to utilizing waters in the Indus.
 

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