Introduction - Sindhi Association of North America

INAUGURAL SESSION:Introduction: SANA Information Secretary, Mr. Asim Kaghzi.Mr. Asim Kaghzi: Good morning. We are sorry to start the session little bit later than what we plannedto. We did not realize that people do not wake up and show up on time, but anyway the people who arehere we are extremely delighted to see you here. We are extremely thankful and the people whoshowed up around time. We are thankful to that as well. My name is Asim Kazi, I am the InformationSecretary for Sindhi Association of North America. The first session that we are in right now is we havetagged it as inaugural session. We will have our guests; we have actually two guests here, prominentpeople in their own fields and then we are going to break for a short while and then the rest of thesessions will kick in. I will introduce the Sindhi Association of North America very briefly because I donot want to take whole lot of time talking about us. The whole idea of being here is to talk about Sindhand all the issues that surrounds. Sindhi Association of North America has been around for last 27 years.The marked difference that we are very proud of in North America as Sindhi community is thedemocratic structure of the organization and we are very proud of it because we have hailed that normmore than what Sindhis have been able to in Pakistan. You have more marshal laws taking over andthrowing out democratic people out there and we have brought up democratic process in there for thelast 27 years. We have been running organization purely on democratic grounds. We have our by-lawsand constitution, which we stand by every day.Second thing that we are very proud of and I think that that is something that we beat otherorganization is the plural nature of our discussion and discourse. You would find and I think that peoplehave started seeing that is democratic deficit in western societies even, but the discourses that we havein our organization is more plural than western democratic. Obviously I am not trying to put everythingand everybody in one bucket as people do, but we are very proud of being plural. We take up any andevery issue talk it out and resolve the issue by democratic process.The third thing is the freedom of speech and in that case I think since values are very much aligned withNorth American culture and western culture of democracy, open societies, public discourse and opendiscussions. Few things that we have lately done which we want to mention is the response that we gotfrom our people in the week of recent floods in 2009 and 2010. We raised about 150 thousand dollars,we ran a very successful project and rehabilitation area besides rescue efforts and relief operationsalong with our partners here and we have also raised last year 125 thousand dollars which isunprecedented and we are in the process of running this project again. One more thing which is the lastone that I am going to mention which is absolutely not the least is the scholarship program that ourcommittee took over and it has been running for quite a few years now and number as grown to about70 scholarships on yearly basis. Minimum scholarship that we give away is 250 dollars and maximum is500 dollars to our graduate and postgraduate students.So I am going to now ask our panelist to take the seats, first I would like to request our president, Dr.Valeed Sheikh to come over and take the seat here on our panel.

Our keynote speaker for the session is Mr. Hameed Haroon who is the publisher and CEO of DawnMedia Group and he is also the president of APNS. One thing that impressed me more than what I justmentioned is that he is the managing trustee of Mohatta Palace Museum. Very keen interest has beenshown by this gentleman and he has been avid art collector; he is the curator of art in Pakistan as welland has run two expos very successfully, very high rate of visitors. So I am proud to introduce Mr.Hameed Haroon and I will request him to come over please. I would request now, we call in Canadawhen we use salutations honorable and I believe he will not mind it. United States has a different way ofaddressing public service people. So I would like to call him honorable Counsel General. Mr. WilliamMartin who has been in public service for the last two decades, he is a native Californian and he is a fanof Oakland Raiders and Cal Bears; they are officially named as Golden Bears if I am right. He callsKarachi his home now so we are reciprocating actually our homes; please come over Counsel General,United States of America. He is our Chief Guest for this session. I would request now Dr. Aijaz Turk tostart our session as we do with poetry of our great poet Shah Latif. Dr. Aijaz, the people who haveknown SANA knows him very well, but he is also the chair of our flood relief committee as well.