Our Hara

Riyadh can be described as the city with a network of bridges, fly-over, over-passes, under-passes, grade-separated intersections, clover-leaf intersections, Malls & Super markets, white-colored limousines, flood of cars & vehicles.
There is a place in Riyadh where one finds a similar look of a neo-China town; here the Indo-Pak-Bangladesh expatriates don’t simply gather for rendezvous rather live here. This place is very famous and is called Hai-Al-Wazarat (Wazarat means ministries) and over the years its name got metamorphosed dramatically to a simple HARA; HA from Haiyya and RA from Wazarat, interesting no? This area is now known as HARA alone and be it a limousine driver (of any nationality) or even a local Saudi almost every body in Riyadh now knows it by this new name. May be some day even the local Municipality may name it as a official name.

Some 25 to 30 years ago when expatriates first started to arrive in the Kingdom for employment in large numbers, they preferred to live here in this locality. For simple reason: their workplaces (at that time they were largely employed in the Public Sector rather than Private Sector) were generally located here. For that matter, many offices of the Government Ministries still happen to be located here. This human settlement then saw its natural growth and the development followed to accommodate the incoming expatriates and their families. This explains the reason for this unusual concentration of such communities here in HARA.

In Hara, you willl find all sorts of small shops that sell those especial food items only which are exclusively used and consumed by the Indo-Pak-Bangladeshi community alone. Mutton & beef and even some vegetables & fruits and similar supplies from Pakistan/India and frozen fish from Bangladesh are abundantly available. By virtue of these, Hara enjoys a unique place and reputation among the Indo-Pak-Bangladeshi community; residents from other places of Riyadh, even Arabs and Filipinos, are also known to frequent Hara in search of their desi stuffs or simply for stuffs at bargain prices.