Coming back to streets of lahore! i drive around at different place but when i come at any signal to stop my car, the beggars starts to come car by car for asking money. Well, in my heart i feel pain and help poor people asking for people, may be one or two rupee can do it. But as a society i have to think why these so many beggars are present at every signal and places asking for money. Are we really poor or potrait to be poor society.

The beggars on streets and roads of lahore are very organized and they are multiplying with time.
i define the lahore beggars in few categories.

1)Old Beggars
Amma jee and baba jee, the old people who come to you and ask for money.
these old people use to accept anything whatever you give but some dont take money less then
Rs.10 Rupee. This shows a new attitude in beggars due to high cost of living.

2)Family of beggars
One lady holding son in one arm and asking for money, once you give some money to her
her daughter will come to you, if you have given to her also, the son or another small child will come
for asking more money.

3)Smart Beggars
They come to you and asking for money by telling you a problem e.g.
One person on bike come to you and ask u, pls help me as i dont have money to petrol
Pls give me some money for bread or Pls give me some money for traveling back by home town
which is out of lahore.

4)Newspaper Beggars
The unsuccessful newspapers agency which no one bothered to read, they hired small boys for
distributing newspapers on signals, if you dont buy the newspaper, they ask you for some money

5)Glass cleaner Beggars
if you stop your car and the car is dirty, the small boy will come to your car and start cleanning
if you tell him to stop, he wont, untill you really get angry. So the small boy will clean your front
and back car window and come for asking some money.

6)Cursing Beggars
These beggars have their own terms, they can be old person wearing rings or some snake-man who
shows snake dances or it can be monkey-man, these low profile jugglars in early 80’s, earn money by show tricks but now they ask for money on signals or shops or coming at your home.

7)Accidental Beggars
These beggars have some physical problem like arm or hand is not present or they dont have leg
or burnt or some other physical or mental problem. I can understand, they might be requiring money
and prefered on other people.

8)Naked Beggars
These beggars are very few in lahore, few slices of clothes are present on their body and these old
men are walking naked on main roads. Once one man was standing in center of main road facing to
traffic and not wear clothes and yelling to the coming cars towards him. This incident recently happened few days back near link canal road joining Mall and Jail road.

9)Healthy Beggars
These beggars looks quiet okay, who can work but they are asking money as they find its easy to
earn money via begging.

Well, these all above people should be stopped, as they creating problems for themselves and us
due to them, traffic jams can happen and we should not encouraged them by giving money as i think
you can give money to really needy person who u know rather then on streets as these people play
with your emotions. The police present on signals should stop such people on roads and we can stop them by not giving money.

THOUGH Rudyard Kipling lived only five of his 70 years in Lahore, they were the most crucial years of his development as a writer. This rich confection of a city, whose great Mogul buildings and street life evoke the deep hues and sensuality of a miniature painting, was where the teen-aged Kipling cut his teeth as a newspaperman. Lahore provided the setting for some of Kipling’s greatest stories, as well as the raw material for his somewhat misunderstood view of East and West.

Though now obscured as a tourist destination due to its location 15 miles inside Pakistan, Lahore was the heart of Kipling’s India. Between 1882 and 1887, he worked there as the assistant editor of The Civil and Military Gazette, combing the back alleys of the old, walled city for stories and material for his later fiction. Like the Irish street urchin, Kim, the hero of his greatest novel, Kipling used Lahore as a base to explore the rest of the subcontinent.

Armed with the Penguin edition of ”Kim,” I set out for the Lahore Museum, where Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, had been the curator and where the first scene in ”Kim” takes place. The novel opens with Kim sitting ”astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.” It was while astride the gun that Kim meets a Tibetan lama, whom the boy then escorts into the Wonder House.

The Zam-Zammah (Urdu for lion’s roar) is known in Lahore as Kim’s gun, and, except for the brick platform that has been replaced by marble, the copper and brass cannon looks exactly as Kipling described it; a massive icon of imperialism over 14 feet long, mounted on wooden wheels that are well over six feet in diameter. And the Wonder House opposite is just that; in my opinion one of the world’s great underrated museums.
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Recent torrential rains, especially the heavy rainfall on Tuesday, left the whole city paralyzed. Forecast experts considered it a record rainfall (168mm) in past 12 years. People from all walks of life were badly affected. The attendance remained short in offices and most of the businesses, especially in the lower areas, remained closed or were opened late in the evening. The water entered the houses and in the shops of the people. It was reported that even the Chief Minister’s house was drowned. It may also affect the Independence Day celebrations.

Boys pushing a broken down ambulance.

Many motorcycles and cars broke down in 3.5 to 4 feet rain water.

A section of Ferozpur Road is not able to be used due to rain water. The other lane is jam packed with vehicles.

Luckily, the rain stopped. If it had continued for a little more while, I had to help my family to wipe out the rain water from my own house. It’s still raining today. I wish it does not add to people’s problems.

It did nothing..

WASA Emergency centre: I believe they were helpless.

No other way to cross except going through it.

It’s June, I know and have sweat drenched clothes to prove this. But I am talking about the March that everyone else is talking about, the long one, and not the month. (as if)

Lahore has played her part in this of course, as has every other major city all across the country. What makes this Long March so remarkable, that it has never happened in our country before (as per news reports at least…hmmm). So many people, and not only that, so many people with as many different backgrounds; from your farmer to your lawyer and from the average housewife to the average businessman, all opted in. They were not forced, no fuedal ordered them to reach Islamabad, no intelligence agencies coerced the civilian into going through unbelievable traffic jams and slow moving procession to reach the capital. But there they were, the representers of all of us.

To make it known, that we want Justice. And justice is for all. It does not matter if it is Musharaf that deviates or if it is Chaudry Iftikhar that ‘beholds’, no it does not. What matters is that for the first time ever, Justice itself matters.

God willing, this will have long lasting implication in the adolescent years of our country, that are right around the corner. The pimples on the face are there, the hormones are kicking in and boy oh boy, the world is our freakin’ oyster.

Let’s just make it work and let it all be honest, morally strong and ethically correct.

God bless and good luck to us all.

Let the wardens finish their day-long duties and the general rush of traffic get off the streets, Lahore’s roads become freeways of the wild. One can’t help notice the utter disrespect for traffic laws and a complete disregard for other travellers’ safety at night as most of the drivers just don’t care to bow before traffic signals.

This particular scene was snapped at about 2:00 am at Kalma Chowk in which cars are seen violating the red light collectively and quite bluntly.

For the last few days I had not been watching too much TV (apart from IPL), given my somewhat busy routine and the facts that:

1) Our local TV has become extremely uninteresting
2) Our local TV tends to over-hype, dramatize, scandalize and criticize every single news event to the last extent known to mankind
3) I prefer internet as a more reliable source of news on Pakistan

But today I sat down for a while to watch a news channel. Three pieces of news one after the other struck me and I will paraphrase them here without commenting on them. It may be business as usual (or life as usual) in our country, but it hasn’t always been like this… or has it?

a) Severe traffic jam in Lahore due to a mass procession in front of Governor’s House. The protestors were carrying 3 corpses of their tribe/community who were killed in a clash. The scenes were very disturbing. Chief Minister Punjab had to come over and negotiate.
b) Similar protest in front of Governor’s house in Quetta on the same day. I have actually forgotten what was this protest about, but probably on some killings as well. As I said, these instances are business as usual now.
c) A tribal clash broke out some days ago on killing of a dog. The rival tribes fought for a few days (killing several people) before the elders were able to sort it out. As a way of punishment, one tribe handed over its 10 young girls to the rival tribe along with 7 lakh rupees.

A few days ago, mob in Karachi burnt a couple of thugs to death on the grounds that police would not be able to get them prosecuted. A few days later mob in Lahore tried to do something similar.

Before that we were trying to figure out why do we have 3000W shortage of electricity leading to 6-8 hours loadshedding per day, not to mention shortage of wheat which is supposed to be the staple food of Pakistan, an agriculture based country.

And before that we were having one new suicide bombing every 6th day in one city or the other.

And before that we were trying to cope with a situation where our GDP growth targets were being revised downwards, while inflation (food, fuel and housing) kept going upwards.

And before that our major problems were 55% illiteracy, utter lack of health facilities outside main cities, serious pollution and frequent violence inside main cities and corruption everywhere around.

Not to mention poverty and lawlessness… the list goes on…

However I don’t blame the present or any of the past governments. The problems that we have are much more deep rooted. One particular regime (whether Mush (1999-2007) or PPP (1988-90, 1993-5) or PML-N (1990-93, 1995-9) cannot be blamed for all this and that. Maybe as a society, we have all failed in doing our bit, or making our contribution towards progress.

After all, when we blame the mob, we forget that in aggregate terms, “we” are the mob. Why don’t we look at things this way… if 55% of Pakistanis are illiterate, mathematically speaking we all are 55% illiterate, no matter what degrees we tend to flaunt among peers and friends… it’s only when we start to realize our duty as citizens (not that of standing in protests and shouting slogans, but that of actually doing something constructive and positive)… only then we will achieve anything.

For an idea that was conceived almost 25 years ago, it has certainly taken almost a generation to plan and manage the build of the much touted Lahore Ring Road. From the grand promises of Sheray-Punjab (NS) to the endless modifications under successive regimes, the project has see-sawed between fever-pitched activity and eerily silent machinery on locations.

Regardless of the bullet-pointed benefits of the scheme which we have become accustomed to, the outcome of the protracted construction phase has resulted in Lahore being engulfed in an ever-present dusty atmosphere. Any visitors’ appreciation of the gleaming International Airport is wiped out as soon as one leaves the airport perimeter as clouds of dust from the piles of dug up earth blanket the traffic.

The mind also boggles as to why there has been so little work over the last decade or so the project has been in progress. Just to put things into perspective, a city like London which has an existing infrastructure dating back to Roman times has outlined a complete overhaul and redevelopment of the East end to build a whole 2012 Olympic Village and transport network to support it. I can appreciate that things take a little more time in our part of the world but taking 10 years to complete merely 15km of the originally proposed 75km is just plain unacceptable.

I call on the Project Team, Lahore Municipality and Civic agencies to either roll up their sleeves and work their socks off to complete the project by mid 2009 (still delayed by years) or face public name and shame campaign (not to mention legal accountability) for all persons involved in the city’s biggest sham project to date.

In my view, the whole project ought to be scrapped for a much more extensive and eco-friendly mono-rail service. Yes, I mean the Lahore Rapid Transit System which should be extended to the route of the poorly-managed LRR. This form of public transport will not only help reduce vehicle congestion along all routes but it will also reduce the pollution levels which are threatening people’s health.

As always, your view are always welcome.

Radio channels were airing a traffic report all yesterday evening about the massive traffic jam at Chowk Chauburji and the resulting chaos in and around the area. Diversions were being recommended to alternative arteries by the Lahore Traffic Police Department.

Photo by Khalid Babur at Wikipedia

For every Lahori, this beautiful monument is a familiar structure and now lies in the middle of a thriving commercial area. Shops, restaurants and offices circle the intersection where Chauburji stands reminiscent of Princess Zeb-un-Nissa’s once grand and extensive gardens.

Built around 1646 AD by Zebinda Begum or Princess Zeb-un-Nissa, daughter of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir, Chauburji’s current dilapidated state is not a new sight. Go to the Shalimar Gardens; Emperor Jahangir’s Tomb; Queen Noor Jahan’s Tomb, all these places were once crown jewels among the ‘City of Gardens’ i.e. Lahore’s green heavens and now there hardly is anything left in color there.

Our general respect for our heritage and particularly regarding such architectural wonders is as low as for the traffic rules inscribed for us by the ‘goras’ and which are considered to be followed only by the really dumb.

A visit to Chauburji gives you a glimpse into Lahore’s magnificent past and, somehow makes you sad when thinking of its unsure future.

Shadbagh police on Monday seized two homemade bombs from Tajpura Road Lahore and handed them over to the Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS).

Shadbagh police Supervisory Police Officer Shahid Mehmood said that the police had spotted two bombs on the road. He said that all shops were closed and traffic was diverted to other roads to avert any untoward situation and officials of the BDS were called in.
And that the BDS officials had defused one active bomb on the spot and declared the other one inactive. He said that the bombs weighed between 1.5 kg and 2 kg.

Bombs out in the open? On a road? Dear God! Where is this country headed? Will we ever find a way out of this deep crisis?

God help Pakistan!

Source: Daily Times