Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says

Karachi Central Jail

This is inside my city’s Central Jail area. The Staff-Club is really a canteen for the staff and police officers residing in the huge prison territory. I noticed how this ‘resting’ place and sign were right outside the main gate of the Central Jail. Right outside where the main prisoners chained from The Supreme High Court are brutally taken in and locked up inside a limestone building of pre-partition architecture. It is said that one of the reasons this place was planned in such a way that the more so ‘luxurious’ places were parallel to the ‘slaughter houses’, is to, yet again, provide more torture.

Although, a very creative way to harm someone’s psyche, not all was grim at the Central Jail.

I was admittedly shocked when I first came across this very sign. An ‘Art & Craft Gallery’ in the Central Prison just existing was unbelievable, let alone well-functioning and alive. This marvelous opportunity resides right to the extreme end of the main jail. It is a nurture house, a place free of all pains and most importantly somewhere for prisoners to openly and freely confess their crimes, forget, forgive and grow through art. Although in the ‘unwanted’ part of the area, the ‘Art & Craft Gallery’ is most definitely a pleasant site (more so, because of my major). The very fact that let alone a Pakistani Jail, let alone a jail in Karachi, but the Central Jail thought this to be important just shows the progress in the minds of Pakistanis to be more open-minded and liberal when it comes to sins, mistakes and prisoners alike. The concept of forgiveness and repentance, is, also a core part to every religion, hence, from every view, this is seen to be a good progression and concept.

Maybe now, we can say that this is the point of rise to the fall of liberty.