Monday 25 July 2011

Karachi has more stories than New York: HM Naqvi


Amidst the relentless din of media attention, speed of rising fame and whirlwind city-hopping tours to promote his debut novel Home Boy, Pakistani author H M Naqvi is a composed man.

Thirty six-year-old, Naqvi’s book has won the DSC Prize 2011 for South Asian Literature and he is naturally caught up in the flurry of activity that follows award-winning authors. But the author is at an unhurried pace of life, relishing every bit of the success, in slow motion.

Home Boy traces the story of three young Pakistani men in New York City, who embark on a road trip after 9/11 in search of a compatriot, who has disappeared into thin air, in an America that is changed and charged after the attacks.

Naqvi, who lived in New York for two years and also taught creative writing at Boston University, while working on his book, however, is hesitant to share his geographical coordinates at the time the attack happened, when asked if his book was heavily inspired from his personal experiences in America, at the time.

“Home Boy is a book of fiction, though the characters do draw from my personal and experiences. But there’s a lot of research that went into the book, besides that. I ate, slept, and lived the life of a cab driver in New York, to flesh out one of the characters in the book,” he offers.

The self-confessed, “recluse”, Naqvi says he led a nocturnal life, where he would write through the night, every day for almost three years like a “robot” to churn out Home Boy.

“I love to inhabit what I am writing and writing is also the only thing that I love,” he smiles. Besides, being a wordsmith of honour, Naqvi has also had an eight-year stint at the World Bank, a job that helped him make ends meet in New York. “It made a man out of me. Working in the real world gives you minute insights into life,” he confesses.

Among his other accolades are the Phelam Prize for poetry, IWP residency at the University of Iowa (renowned as a hotspot of creative writing) a smattering of appearances at book and literature events at Brooklyn, Dubai, Jaipur and others.

Nursing a flourishing writing career now, backed by a cool US $50,000 from the prize money for Home Boy, Naqvi is already on to his second book, which has his hometown Karachi as the backdrop. He’s also devoid of any mounting pressure, even though his debut book has the world’s attention now.

“There’s already so much on New York that it doesn’t excite me as much. On the other hand, Karachi is pulsating, but has never been as much written about, so I think I have more to explore there,” he explains. Truly a Home Boy, we say.

New York Story, Karachi Style

 
Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar looks every inch the hip New  Yorker as she munches on a hummus sandwich in a Manhattan café. She is cool and chic and talks animatedly—in rich, accented English.The Karachi-born television and film  director has lived in New York for the past eight years, and it provides the  backdrop for her latest project, a 20-part series for Pakistani television  called “Neeyat,” which means “intention” in Urdu.
The serial’s New York locations, including parts of her own Brooklyn neighborhood, “are a little foreign for people [in  Pakistan],” says the 39-year-old director. The show’s characters wear sport coats and knitted winter hats, not hijabs, as they move among New York’s  glinting skyscrapers, wintry parks and frenetic streets.
But viewers will easily recognize their countrymen in the foreign city’s streets, says Ms. Jabbar. “Everyone knows there are Pakistanis in New York and that’s how they’re going to take it,” she says.
Ms. Jabbar grew up in Karachi, the daughter of author and former senator Javed Jabbar. She says she was shy as a kid and that  being behind a camera was her way of telling stories. “It allowed me to communicate,” she says.
After completing a two-year program in film, TV  and video production at UCLA in 1993, she returned to Pakistan for the next  decade. She made serials including “Kahaniyaan” (“Stories”) and short films,  including “Lal Baig” (“Cockroach”), which earned her a loyal following in her  home country.
In 2002, she attended a screening of her short film “Beauty Parlor” at the I-View film festival in New York. She fell in love with the city and  decided to relocate..
Her 2008 film “Ramchand Pakistani” (starring Indian actress Nandita  Das), which is based on the life of a family separated by the Indian-Pakistan  border, won an honorable mention at the London Film Festival and was also  screened at Tribeca Film Festival.
“Neeyat” is her 12th TV series and is scheduled to begin running on Pakistan’s ARY cable channel on Friday. It is one of several projects she has set in the U.S., including TV series and TV films. For fans of her earlier work, which often revolve around troubled relationships, betrayals and sexual  politics, there is much that will seem familiar.
In the series, a visa-less New York-based Pakistani banker and his  fiancée (played by one of Pakistan’s most popular male actors, Humayun Saeed,  and former MTV Pakistan veejay Mahira Khan) offer to pay a Pakistani-American  acquaintance for her hand in marriage in an effort to gain a green card.
The woman (played by Los Angeles-based actress Deepti Gupta, whose husband Larry Pontius wrote the story) initially declines. “I’m not for sale,” she protests. But the money is too good to pass up, and she relents. And that’s when things begin to fall apart
“It’s a story about good intentions going bad,” says Ms. Jabbar.
Could “Neeyat” be a metaphor for the strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan? Ms. Jabbar, who plans to become a U.S. citizen, acknowledges her fellow Pakistanis have mixed feelings about America. But viewers, she suggests, will see “Neeyat” simply as a love story.
The director says despite living in the U.S., she still finds herself drawn to stories set in Pakistan. “I really want to talk about what that country is going through,” she says. She is in the early planning stages for a Karachi-based serial featuring a village schoolteacher, and she is working on a new feature film set in Lahore called “Shehir,” or “city.”
But she also relishes the thought of doing more work in her adopted American home. In October, she is set to begin filming “Jackson Heights,” another tale of Pakistani immigrants set in the Queens neighborhood of the series’s title.
“I came here and I saw the world in New York,” says Ms. Jabbar. “I continue to stay because I love the opportunities that this city provides me, and it keeps me on my toes.”

Gorgeous Salwar kameez Summer Collection 2011 In Karachi








Eid ul fittar Shalwar Kameez Collection 2011 In Karachi




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