KARACHI, Oct 7: Around 30 concerned citizens gathered at the Second Floor café on Saturday night to discuss ways to protest goings on in the country. The open meeting is part of a series of “Compelling conversations” the owner of T2F —which is a project of a non profit called PeaceNiche — has started. The idea is to get a conversation going and then brainstorm on ways to translate that into action.

As such Saturday night’s conversation was just that: talk. However talk is an important step for it allows people to come together to share ideas. People are able to move out of their living rooms and discuss things with new people as was witnessed on Saturday. Conversation centered on “protest” but had various digressions: from someone talking about their inability to exercise their political interests because of work schedules (and then suggesting they protest to their companies) to whether protests outside the Karachi Press Club had lost relevance the conversation surprisingly flowed. And as eager as everyone was to get their two-bits in there were no rude interruptions or screaming to get heard.

I asked what would people in the café want to protest and got surprising responses: people who break red lights (met with a lot of agreement); people who use unlicensed plates on their cars; women’s issues; law and order and the most popular issue was the National Reconciliation Ordinance. This was the one winner that had people riled up. So much so that the idea of lodging a petition in the courts was discussed with a lawyer who was present at the meet. The idea wasn’t whether the petition would succeed in abolishing the Ordinance as much as the move was just another way of registering a protest.

Did the evening succeed in launching a movement – irrespective of size – or action plan? No but I don’t know if that was on the agenda. Instead ways of protest were discussed; a slide show on other mediums of protest were shown: K.B. Abro presented a slide show of his mixed media (some very powerful imagery had the audience enraptured) while Attiya Dawood read equally powerful poetry and finally the group was treated to Joan Baez’s inspirational music. To the cynic this is hardly the stuff revolutions are made of but to the hopeful this is exactly the stuff that “ignites a fire within” as one participant said to do something.—Muna Khan