Exploring Modern Pakistan 🇵🇰

An evening at Port Grand, the modern waterfront leisure strip in Karachi, on Harry’s birthday and at the suggestion of a local friend of Mac’s who takes them round with her family. His own framing is that it is a side of the city a visitor wouldn’t find alone and wouldn’t expect: lit boats on the water, restaurants along a walkway, shops, street performers and rides, closer to an open-air mall in Dubai than to anything else he has filmed that week.

The observation that outlasts the evening is about time rather than place. It is ten at night and the place is full of families with small children, and the family he asks tells him they go to bed around three. He contrasts it directly with British habits and leaves it there.

Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles, which are garbled in places; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified. The kebab restaurant is not named because the transcript never renders its name.

Itinerary

Port Grand entrance → a mangrove boat trip across the water → the walkway, shops and performers → Turkish ice cream → pani puri from a stall → a kebab dinner for six.

Key moments

• [01:38] A mangrove boat, the alternative being a speedboat. The ticket was 350 rupees, and Harry notes the price had been 250 until they arrived — he wonders aloud why it changed and doesn’t accuse anyone.
• [04:14] What the trip is actually like: calm water, smoke on the horizon, a heron somewhere in the distance and swamp on both sides. He thinks the water looks too polluted to swim in.
• [05:46] Port Grand itself — a small pedestrian strip of restaurants, clothes shops, an ATM, rides and performances, which he compares to going out to a mall in Dubai except that it is outdoors.
• [06:17] Entry is 200 rupees, about $1.30, with rides charged separately.
• [06:48] Ten at night and full of small children. The family he asks says they sleep at around three. It is his first clear look at how late Pakistani family life runs, and he says it plainly as a difference rather than a problem.
• [07:49] The Turkish ice cream routine, performed on him at length and finished with a scoop on the nose.
• [09:53] Pani puri: a crisp shell filled with chickpeas and chutney, dunked or poured full of spiced water and eaten whole before it collapses. He compares the shell to a poppadom and rates it, with the caveat that eating it fast enough is the hard part.
• [11:57] Dinner at a kebab house — malai boti (chicken cubes), beef, parathas, chapatis, salad and chutney. About $25 for six people.

Extracted pages

• Karachi
• Pakistan
• Mac