whoosh

suzy-x:

This past Sunday, February 19, 2012, something new happened at Bagh-e-Jinnah. Women, hundreds of thousands (by some estimates close to a million) of them, poured into the park. They came from all the nooks and crannies of Karachi, from the fetid slums where sewage gushes between tiny hovels, from cramped apartments in teeming suburbs, from stately mansions by the sea. They came in black burkas, some with full face veils, in jeans and t-shirts, in bright-flowered shalwar kamiz, toting babies and bespectacled grandmothers. They came for a women-only rally organized by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the party that controls the city and represents what is now the fourth generation of migrants who arrived from India at Partition in 1947. The women came in such great numbers that the BBC declared the rally to be the largest congregation of women ever organized in the world.