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The Zam-Zammah (Urdu for lion’s roar) is known in Lahore as Kim’s gun, and, except for the brick platform that has been replaced by marble, the copper and brass cannon looks exactly as Kipling described it; a massive icon of imperialism over 14 feet long, mounted on wooden wheels that are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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“Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in a desert.” Khalil Gibran

Photo Credit: AP Pakistan

Hello friends!

From the face of it you have been observing that we used to be a lot busier in terms of number of posts and visitors as well. The reason being that LMB is in shortage of budding authors and their active contributions.

Hence, here we invite anybody who’s ever been connected to Lahore; born here, lived here, loved it or here ;) and who wants to write for Lahore’s place on the Metblogs Network.

Blogging for LMB is easy as it requires sharing of thoughts, viewes, pictures, videos, rants, practically everything related to our beloved city of Lahore, it’s culture, history, people, places, food, music, politics, again anything and everything related to Lahore.

The only conditions required by us are the prospective author’s commitment of contributing actively at least three times a week or more and being a valuable asset to help expand viewership and audience visits to the site.

If you are well interested in joining our fold, please send me your brief profile, location, any writing or blogging experience, and/or your website/blog that too if it exists to the following email address as early as you can:

hasanmubarak@metblogs.com

Please note that writing for any Metblogs site is totally voluntary work and we are not being paid for it.

See ya soon at what we call the LMB Den! ;)

Regards,

Hasan Mubarak

Captain, Lahore Metblogs

If Metblogs is a city, hub.metblogs is the playground. We kept hearing from people that one of their favorite parts of Metblogs was meeting and interacting with readers and writers from other parts of the world, as well as getting requests for more ways that readers could be involved besides just posting comments. We thought about this for a while and decided that with a network like this, a giant community area where folks from all over the world could hang out, post photos and videos, talk with each other, form groups, play games, send messages, and do about a million other things was probably a pretty fun idea. The Hub is that.

If you have any tech ideas or suggestions join this group and speak up. See you on hub.metblogs!

Hello all, I just started with LMB so i thought i’ll start off by saying hi to everybody in here .. introduce myself and then get to work :) Here is something that i wrote on my profile:

“A 27 year old entrepreneur from Lahore, Pakistan, I see Lahore differently than everybody else… working nights has taught me Lahore is a totally different city during the late hours of night .. peaceful, quiet and beautiful. it is a total contrast to how the rest of the world see’s this bustling metropolis and i hope to bring forth some of that beauty and tranquility….. i am also involved with one of the foremost event management companies and that allows me to network and meet new people and experience new stuff going on in Lahore .. will do my best to talk about all of this and more through what i put up …”

This is all very exciting and new to me.. so if i screw up “maafi”

-Bilal Rashid

Now you can find us at the hottest place in the cyber-world:

Metroblogging Lahore on Facebook

With A4P’s coffee temptation, LMB completed its 2,000th post.

Yew Hoooo!

*distributes free ‘I Dil LMB’ stickers among visitors*

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Nopes… I didn’t say that. Albert Einstein did. But he was practically resonating my thoughts when he said it; the thoughts I would have a few decades later. To me, this is precisely what makes Einstein the most brilliant mind of modern times.

Now how is Einstein related to Lahore? One may rightly question. (adding a loud and clear “Hain Ji?” afterwards to magnify the emphasis, manifolds) Did he ever eat phajjay kay payee, Hain Ji? or shout bo kataaa while flying a kite at the rooftop of Lahore Hotel? No. (that may have been Benjamin Franklin). The truth is, Einstein has nothing to do with Lahore. But I do; which is exactly why I am writing this post at LMB.

Now what do I have to do with Lahore? The answer is very simple. Lahore is where the home is. I don’t think I can explain it any better… oh wait a sec… I could also say, Lahore Lahore aye… but I am sure somebody else has already said that (thousands of years ago, and then every year onwards)

The idea of this post is simply to write my first post at LMB (which I senselessly have) and introduce myself (which I conveniently haven’t). I may be writing more. I may even write too often. Or I may just disappear altogether. The idea is to get it rolling first and see what happens.

Afterall, Einstein also said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”… I wonder why he said that!!!

Mercer Human Resource Consulting is a global conulting firm that amongst other things, carries out an annual Ranking of some of the major cities in world. It compiles this data to primarily advise global business on say, what city would be nice to live in, keeping in mind all the requirements of a modern fast paced world necessary for a modern business executive. These factors include “39 key quality-of-life issues”, things like the quality of the public transport network, the average cost of living in the city, sanitation etc etc etc and blah blah blah…and “political stability, currency-exchange regulations, political and media censorship, school quality, housing, the environment and public safety”.

So any way, for year 2007 the rankings were published a while back, and turns out that Lahore is amongst the
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hey , just wanted to share with you all; atlast i have joined the author list for Lahore MetBlog - my lil bit of introduction; as my nick name explains, i am an IT geek (or you can call freak) and more specifically a telco network specialist , in first half of my 20s and based in Lahore.

in coming days, you will certainly see my posts around … happy MetBlogging….