So what does rushing out on the streets, painting your face, making a lot of noise, hanging out of your car window, passing through the red light and burning/wasting a lots of fuel tells about people of Lahore? Are they happy or sad?

From one perspective, they are the happiest people on earth! Its their independance day and they are making a point as well as enjoying themselves. From another perspective, they are just sad people desperately looking for reasons to have some good time.

I don’t know about you, but all those ‘celebrations’ seemed unnatural, unnecessary and forced. Most of us are living an uncultured life. Our education, way of life and ambitions don’t come from an organic evolution: they are forced. Are we really happy people?

A Hamid, the distinguished Urdu novelist and short story writer, writes a column every week based on his memories of old Lahore. People in their late-twenties like me, remember him well for his novels. It was later that I discovered him as a columnist and perhaps as a historian. I am talking about the era when Ishtiaq Ahmed and Ibn E Safi were still read by a good percentage of our youth. This one, published in Daily Times, has been translated by Khalid Hasan (I am a BIG BIG fan :)) and I thought it would be very appropriate to share it here today.

On the lawns facing the Punjab Assembly, there used to stand a statue of Queen Victoria under a canopy, ringed by magnificent trees. If you walked towards the Assembly from the Plaza cinema side, so thick were the trees that you could barely see the entire Assembly building. They were such lovely trees that I could never tire of looking at them. For many years after the establishment of Pakistan, the trees stood at that spot in all their splendour, but then they were cut down, for what reason I am not sure. One day, as Munir Niazi and I on our stroll down the Mall, came to Charing Cross, I looked towards the Assembly building and said, “There used to be such lovely trees there with impenetrable foliage, but since they were axed, the beauty of this spot is gone.” Munir replied, “But have you not noticed that the removal of the trees has opened up this vista and brought in heaps of sunlight that could never reach it before.”
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“Freedom is a fragile thing & is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for & defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom,& then lost it, have never known it again” – Ronald Reagan

‘Independence’ is too broad a term used for getting a separate country. The word ‘Independence’ in its true sense would be applicable only when v r free 2 think, speak, promote that’s right, refrain from doing wrong; when we are free to respect ourselves, our nation, its law, environment, people & its integrity as a whole. It will be then that we can be proud of being a free nation.

For that moment, I wish you all a very “Happy Independence Day”!

To celebrate our beloved country’s birthday, we should all thank God for giving us our own land to fight for our Independence.

Happy Birthday Pakistan!

May our country progress, prosper and achieve true independence. Amen!

Another year, another Independence Day. I don’t know why but I feel that for the past few years in particular, 14th August has become more of a media event than people actually celebrating it. I don’t see many little kids decorating their house with Jhandiyan and National Flag. No special cooking at home and not even mandatory wearing green and congratulating friends and family on phone. Some of us just put a flag on their house (hence proved I am patriotic).

If you go out, there are more and more young kids every year, on motorbykes without silencers, making every effort to prove, in some people’s views, their chichora pana. You still find all those little kids, the beggars, gaari ke sheeshe saaf karne wale, the ones serving food in those little gareebo wale resturants and not to mention the Chotas working in workshops. What difference does 14th August each year brings in their lives? I see president and prime minsters dancing with a bunch of selected kids on TV, singing songs and talking about Pakistan. In my humble view it would be more useful if, for a change, we can visit a few jhughis and kacha makaans and sing National Anthem and dance with little kids I mentioned above. I know it won’t make much difference but atleast it would provide them clean clothes and a nice meal on 14th August.

Anyways, you tell me. How do you guys spend 14th August day? What 14th August means to you?

Its been a few days since I posted an installment of the Lahore History Tour. So, here is the next one….in the last one, we had just entered the forecourt of the Shish Mahal complex and today we will enter the Shish Mahal courtyard itself.

Carved marble pillars of a veranda surrounding the Shish Mahal courtyard.
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credit: Daily Times

After my recent post about Musharraf replacing Quaid’s quotes in our textbooks, which drew a lot of comments, I thought it would be amusing to post this photo. 14th August is all about our independence and paying homage to the father of this nation and all those who sacrificed there blood and sweat for the creation of this country. I don’t see why we would need a larger than life-size poster of Musharraf.

Found this in a newspaper today. Workers of the municipal administeration chopped down an old tree which had stood outside Bagh-e-Jinnah for years. At the same time, they also knocked down some power lines in the process. The government is proposing to plant a green belt in and around Lahore while at the same time chopping to old grown trees that have provided shade, beauty, and clean air to Lahore for years.

So every now and then you see people boasting about the college they went to on their cars. The most common ones in Lahore are “Engineers Make It Happen” for UET champs, “Ravian”, “Crescentarian” etc. Some institutes which don’t even have toilets have a car sticker for their students. But here is one I saw today that I had not seen before. It’s a pity I didn’t have a camera with me at the time :( Anyway, it said: “I was born intelligent, education ruined me”

I guess all the people who go through our education system feel so at one time or the other. People might suggest foreign education and O/A level for high school education, but personally these things didn’t work for me. At the end of the day you have to realise that a person cannot find intellectual satisfaction in his profession and studies.

While I was in college, this is 2 to 3 years back, drugs were an easily obtained ‘commodity’. No more were there boys hiding behind bushes trying to smoke a plain cigarette, now the semi-sanctuary offered by the bushes were inhabited by druggies and junkies. And they were ‘normal’ people, not the usual ‘bad’ influence one would imagine druggies to be. And that is the problem…

Media, in all forms and functions, is ‘supposed’ to first capture ‘life’ of any given society, then ‘filter’ it under thier own ‘ideology’ and then show it to the very same society, a mirror of sorts. PTV plays, if my memory serves me correct, have depicted these drug-addicts to be ruffians and ‘street-rats’ and have portrayed them to be the badmaash of thier muhallah. Parents, especially some families I know, hold the opinion that thier children should not mingle with the militant-minded friends beucase then drugs and what-not will follow. They are right. But only partially.

Drugs, namely charas and its variants, were common. I have been out of college for some time now, and my interaction with junkies have been minimal, but when I was in college, those oh-so-vunerable years, smoking tobacco versus charas was a simple matter of taste, rather than morality or even availability. There was no problem of morality (as for most of us, drugs conveniently lie in the ‘grey area’ of Islam (!heh!)) and there definitely was no problem of availability; you could have a toke if you wanted it, you just gotta want it. Persons you would consider as decent, persons you would see sometimes walking out of the small college mosque or persons you would cheat from on your mid terms (hehehe), they were not excluded from the drug-thing. And the thing is, I have NO REASON AT ALL to believe that the situation have stayed the same or, dare I say, improved. Law of Entropy states that unless external forces are applied, any given system will approach complete chaos. Entropy and drugs, both of em seems to be winning.

I really do not see the local Police helping out the situation. They may catch a few peddlers and put behind bars a few dealers, but our Police has done nothing to improve its image. Now I am not the one to generalize, but a police station and an ‘inside connection’ is all you need to have an unlimited source of charas! Coupled with an occasional blackmail (gimme some money) from the uniformed-protector-of-our-rights, of course.

The situation, and there is one, can be handled, firstly and formost, by the media: Letting people know the exact problem, through news reports, through plays and through songs and what not (media can do all of that). And the local government can set up student cells that, with the help of the media, can help at least minimalize the drug-thing by raising awareness and by providing other means of entertainment (football anyone? :) ).

One thing that I find to be highly true, that lack of healthy entertainment opens avenues for not-so-healthy entertainment. We, as a society, have lost our cinemas to pathetic scripts and ‘thumkas’ a long time before the recent much-touted collapse of the pakistani cinema. Our theatres are host to the same old jokes, repeated again and again and again (and then some). Our amatuer theatres TRY TOO HARD to remain aloof and too polished to provide real, gripping and useful entertainment. Our TV serials, that have unlimited potential to induce positive change, have succumbed to the STAR PLUS/BALAJEE FILMS formula of rich-families-with-all-the-problems-in-the-world script with flashy camera zooms. Our religion has been put on a pedestal too high for anyone of us to claim such high morality; the theory of religion, theology, philosophy, even poetry and reasoning are all lost to us for the religious-leaders are now busy in proving everything ELSE wrong, rather than actually leading thier own lot to wherever! So now then, bring on the drugs!

This sounds like a great way to get our youth involved. I would have also liked to see the 20-25 age bracket (many of the college/university students).

The Lahore Arts Council is organising a painting competition at the Permanent Art Gallery on August 13, as part of Independence Day celebrations.

Artists from two categories between ages 12-16 and 16-20 will be allowed to use any medium to make paintings on ‘Independence, Migration and My Country: As I See It’. The first prize will be Rs 10,000, second Rs 8,000 and third Rs 6,000, while all participants will be given certificates.