Ok I am not a summer person. I hate when it gets too hot and humid in Lahore. But I love a few things associated with Lahori summer. Like mangoes and falsa (errr.. what is falsa called in angerezi?) and oh not to mention tarbooz (watermelon). For some reason I always find it funny when I see people eating tarbooz in public :D.

When I was a chota sa bacha (little kid) going to school, garmiyon ki chuttian (summer vacations) was the best part of whole year. Chuttiyan was the only motivation that kept me going to school everyday. But then three months of freedom and befikri, visiting cousins and reading all the books from library. And the short trips to Karachi in June. Silly that Karachi always reminds me of too salty food and the huge metallic planes (pankho wale) that flew over our apartment. Anyways coming back to summer vacations, I know not everything was good, there was home work. But c’mon, it was nothing compared to waking up at 6 everyday and going to school. I think I miss those gurmiyon ki chuttiyan.

Hmm.. So tell me what makes you love Lahori summer? Chuttiyan, memories, fruits.. what??

That, ladies and gen’lmen, is a shot of the view from the third and highest roof of our family building, on Basant- Lahore’s annual kite-flying festival, held to mark the beginning of spring.
The building is called Nazir Manzil, after my grandfather, who received it after Partition as compensation for the lands left behind in Ludhiana. Originally built by a Hindu businessman, Rama Krishna, shortly before Partition, the facade (of which I don’t have a picture just yet) is built to resemble a ship. It still says ‘Rama Krishna and Sons, 1957′ on it too :) It’s on the corner of Anarkali, right opposite Old Tollington, across from Punjab University’s Fine Arts Department (on the right, in the photograph), and just a little up the road from NCA (on the left). The dots scattered about are actually kites :)
From the roof, Mall Road stretches adjacent to it like a ribbon, dotted with cars, and across from the building is a sprawling old tree in the P.U yard with broad leaves that glisten in the late afternoon sun. It’s also got three levels of roof, about ten rooms, pigeons in the space between our building and the one behind us and jinns in the basement! One year we came *this* close to sitting on their feet during a game of hide and seek :)

For some reason, maybe because I’m the “outsider” here, the boring talk about the stuff that people who live here tend to take for granted seems to be left to me by default. It’s ok though, I’ve been one of those monument-haunting, camera-weilding people-who-hate-being-called-tourists here long enough :)

Source: http://www.travel-culture.com/au/lahore-bazaar.jpg
Anarkali was one of the first places that I wanted to see the moment I landed in Lahore. It’s not just a gigantic sprawling shopping mall-type place. It’s more like an entire village of twisting alleys and shops and stalls. For those who are familiar with Karachi – this place is a rabi center, a zainab market, a hyderi and several tariq roads (i guess sans than rabi center :p) all bunched together in a happy dirty festival.

(It’s weird how many places here resemble sprawling festivals that spring to life every single day like strangeold and reliable whirring machines – food street, anarkali, liberty, minigolf…)
That’s an oldish picture though – you don’t see nearly as many horsecarts around as you do in that picture.
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Lahore is different things to different people. To some, it is the Walled City with its betel-stained and winding roads. To others, it is the majestic havelis that take on their real colours during Basant. For a few, Lahore is simply the smell of sweet halwa, lassi and spicy nihari. But for me, Lahore has always been MM Alam Road ? the way it used to be.

Read article by Ayesha Javed Akram here

Source: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2005/03/20/images/2005032000170101.jpg

Because, you know, any blog or webpage or whisper about Lahore would obviously be incomplete without mention of the foodstreet. :) It’s wonderful and glorious and lit UP…and somehow, the only thing that’s really struck me about the place has been the lights. The food isn’t amazing, it’s NOT the best food that you could have in the city. It’s just the lights, the colours, and music, because a little of that could never hurt when thrown in.
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(loosely translates to ‘Lahore’s (after all/wonderfully/ultimately) Lahore’)
One of the first things that struck me about this city was it’s relationship with Karachi. I came here as a nineteen year old Karachiite, in transit for four years of undergrad school in a city not my own. I carried bits of Karachi with me wherever I went. But Lahore never resented that. Every Lahori I met immediately had me pinned down as someone who didn’t belong, who didn’t form an impeccable weave in the proverbial fabric. And yet they always wanted to know what I thought of the city, how I found it there. How it compared.
I always muttered something about the weather.

For Lahore is as homogenous as they come. The girls always wear the same type of shalwars – narrow one season, wide the next. Everyone says ‘fit’. It was scary. Still is.

I’m still here though, and the city never quite lets you forget about it. It doesn’t scream out for you to notice it – rather, it steps back, content in knowing that it is way too breathlesslybeautiful for you to ignore it for long. I’m not talking about the Mughal ruins, the standard tourist fare. I’m talking about the way you can imagine someone’s forehead having crinkled with concentration as they designed the look of a building, the colour of a wall on a random street corner. Lahore isn’t a one-frown town, where apartment buildings loom like towers of shoddily squished pigeon-holes. Whether it’s through makeup or fountains at every traffic signal, beauty is a prerequisite here, not an extra credit.

I first became familiar with city of Lahore during the 70s and after wandering about in different parts of the world for over three decades, I have come once again, to be part of it this time.

Away from Lahore, I used to wonder if all the rhetoric about the magic city has any substance to it. Land of superlatives, Lahore is Pakistan’s second biggest and one of the most prosperous cosmopolitan cities, home to universities and colleges, spiritual centres and historic, cultural, commercial and political centre. It has been a land of plenty since centuries. “Lahore is one of the greatest cities of the East,” wrote William Finch, a traveller from the west, in his journal back in 1610.” I found new answers every day.
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