Karachified !!

All credit to Swaleha Ahmed for the first report on the first meetup of KarachiTips Blog Team, now recognised as 'Karachifiers' as decided there. As a true Karachite, any one of the co-owners were not on time for the meeting. Any ways, we were soon joined by the two co-owners Abdullah, Bilal and the rest of the members of the team.

It began with Abdullah and Bilal telling us about how they started Karachi Tips and the difficulties they faced at the start. Soon we were also joined by the the 3rd and final co-owner, Baakh and the discussion really begun. After all the intro and the story of the establishment of Karachi Tips, we were also told about how to make the tips and the ideas behind them. Just for some fun and experience, we were divided in three teams and were asked to produce some tips, which were scheduled to be published on the page tonight.

The amazing trio of Baakh, Abdullah and Bilal.

 As the tips were discussed and short listed to be published, the team name was decided, and it was decided 'Karachifiers' as described earlier. Saad Saeed (The official photographer of the event) and Muhammad Ali were picked to be given free Tees for suggesting the team name.

All the suggestions that were put forward for the team name, read the first one as KUTAS :D

Continuing with the proceedings, we started sharing our ideas of how we could be different from anyone else and make Karachi Tips a brand. There were ideas of telling the world (and even Karachites) about Secrets of Karachi (the things still unknown to many people about Karachi), promoting the hidden talent in Karachi, organising events and how to raise awareness about this blog, the development of bumper stickers/notebooks, how Karachi Tips could be promoted by the team members in their institutes/universities and the current goal was decided to reach 40,000 fans by the end of January, 2012.

As for the long term goal, I suggested to make it such a brand that in 4-5 years' time, visitors from abroad or even when Pakistanis wants to search anything about Karachi, the first result on Google or any other search engine should be karachitips.com

So we had lunch (Pizza mufta FTW) after the ideas were shared and just as we were opening up the Pizza boxes, we were joined by the FM 100 RJ Umm e Kulsoom (what timing I must say :p) and shortly after, the guy from Oh Bhains !, Hammad Ilyas joined us too.

Pizza FTW

After the lunch, we began from where we left and the ideas were shared again. The screenshot of the website was revealed by Baakh and the layout was discussed too. As much as I remember, it had the KT traditional yellowish theme, designed mostly with the Truck art of Karachi. Speaking of Truck Art, Umm e Kulsoom started telling the names of the buses she has travelled in and was soon joined by others too. An idea was put forward to place the 'Naqaab Posh Haseena' (as seen on many Trucks, Buses or Rickshaws), lets see what the designers decide.

A glimpse of the website

After the website was revealed, we again broke into teams according to the roles we applied for to be part of the blog. My team, the writers', was headed by Umm e Kulsoom, photographers with Baakh and Designers and Marketeers were headed by Abdullah and Bilal.

The ideas kept coming and in the end, the writers' team had put up all topics related to Karachi that we can write articles on, into 6 separate categories. They were related to food, people, attractions, secrets, humour/comics and fashion trends.

So it all finished some 30 minutes before 4:00 PM and we had group photos then. The photographers tried their best to snap a crazy pic of the group, but no one was up for it. To wrap it up, we all signed a banner and shared free chocolates, thanks to Sadiya Azhar.

A glimpse of the banner that was signed at the end

It was quite fun attending the meetup because I learnt so many lessons from it. One being that I will never ever trust Facebook display pics again :p !!

There were a couple of awkward moments too, once when Bilal had a slip of tongue (mentioned in the group by Hira) and another when Abdullah fell off his chair while deciding the team name.

The awkward moment when Abdullah fell down :p

Overall, it was all fun and we're looking forward to work with them. First, lets just bring 40k fans to Karachi Tips and start the blog with a bang !

Group photo of all the attendants

p.s. Tried to compile the report in a serious and the most professional manner I can, but looks like I failed. Looking forward for your comments and suggestions :)