Today I lunch with  Mohammed Hanif and Nimra Bucha and thankfully they come to the reading in the evening  at  The Second Floor – T2F –  in the heart of Karachi.  It’s a contemporary art space and it’s  packed with young and old. The event is  moderated with skill by columnist and writer Bina Shah.

I loved it. They showed exerpts of Internal Flight and  followed with a Q and A. The  audience included  a naval aviator and a commercial airline pilot and four pediatricians!!  The venue is world class and would sit comfortably in any of the great arty cities of the world.   It was a magical and powerful reading, unscripted ‘cept for the poems.  An eighty year old man came  to me afterwards and whispered  “I’m eighty years old and you opened a new door in me”. here are two reviews that followed in  Tribune and Dawn

I’m loving my time here in Pakistan.  The news at home of this  complex beautiful  country is often fuelled by fear.  Fear is  petrol  poured into packages and lobbed into our homes. These flammable cocktails burn rapaciously through the minds of Britians and Americans. But all I feel here is warmth. Undeniably there is a sense of siege. Ideas and language are under threat here in Pakistan as they are in America exemplified by  K’naan.  In England if you say the wrong words you can be imprisoned.   It’s at times like this that  artists and creatives truly come into their own. Support by The British Council.