Capri crawls back to life
Karachi: Exactly three months after it was reduced to ashes, the Capri Cinema on MA Jinnah Road has managed to stand up on its feet and is open to cinema-goers once again. Although functional, the scars of the fateful day are still evident. The owner of Capri said that he could not have waited for government’s support, as it has forgotten the issue altogether.
“I have not received a dime from the government,” said Adil Shaikh, the owner of Capri, at a press conference-cum-premiere held at the cinema premises on Thursday. Adil said that his business was still far from recovering the losses incurred on September 21.
“The government should be careful about our security on the MA Jinnah Road and be prepared to help us, if something like this again happens,” he said. Speaking on the occasion, Nadeem Mandviwalla, who owns the Nishat Cinema, which also met the same fate, said that the District Commissioner South had visited him after the cinema-houses were burned.
“The commissioner said he will compile a report on the damages and move it forward to his high-ups for compensations but nothing happened after that,” said Nadeem, the owner and managing director of Mandviwalla Entertainments.
Capri Cinema has already spent money to the tune of Rs 30 million to restore the gutted structure and according to the owner a lot more it needed to bring back what was lost.
Nawab-ul-Hassan, one of the directors of Mandviwalla Entertainments, said that the fun-starved city of Karachi was in much need of entertainment. “More cinema houses are needed, we see a growing trend among Karachiites, who, after a long time have started coming to Cinema houses, the tragedy could not have struck in a time when we were really looking forward to investment and expansion.”
On September 21 this year, a mob protesting against an anti-Islamic movie rampaged through cinema halls on the MA Jinnah Road, burning them down to ashes.
According to the owners of the movie theaters, the government, after a number of promises, never came forward with help and after waiting for all these months the cinema-house owners restored their businesses. Capri is premièring Dabaang-2 for the public from Friday. The movie stars are Salman Khan and Shonakshi Sinha.
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