Join Lahore’s 10th Critical Mass Event at 5:00pm this Sunday 27 September 2009 from the Zakir Tikka intersection, Sarwar Road, Lahore Cantonment.

Critical Mass is about having clean cities that provide mobility and accessibility. Critical Mass is about clean transport. Critical Mass is about putting public good over private interest. Critical Mass is about making friends. Critical Mass is about reclaiming public space. Critical Mass is about showing a man or a woman on a cycle is the same as one in a ten lac car. Critical Mass is about democracy.

What do I need to participate in a Critical Mass Event?
All you need is a road-worthy cycle and an sense of fun. Buy, beg, borrow or steal a cycle if you have to, but join the Mass. Come, cycle around Lahore. Reclaim your city, and have more fun than you can imagine!

Where and how else do Critical Mass Events take place?
Critical Mass events are typically held on the last Friday of each month in over 250 cities all over the world. In Lahore, it is held on the last Sunday of every month. For information about Critical Mass Lahore, be at Zakir Tikka at 5:00pm this Sunday 27 September 2009 or visit the Critical Mass Lahore Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38992998526) or the Critical Mass Lahore blog.

Important: Be on time!!!

Members of the Pakistani Photographers Group at Flickr have arranged a collection display of about forty photographs related to “The Other Pakistan” theme. Submitted by amateur members of the group, these amazing captures range from portraits, landscapes, and architecture to everyday life spanning over entire Pakistan including Lahore, the Northern Areas, Cholistan, Skardu and Uch Sharif.

After its first successful day (Feb.18), the exhibition will contiue on February 19 at the Students’ Lounge, Lahore University of Management Sciences. The exhibition, sponsored and supported by Bank Alfalah, is to later visit smaller cities of Pakistan as well.

Note: Pictures in this post are shared with permission from Mr. Yasir Nasir, photographer and organizer of  the exhibition at LUMS and are property of their respective photographers.

Last summer, I received a very special birthday present: A charter flight over Lahore. I recommend the experience to everyone. Since I managed to take some photos with my camera phone, I decided not to let the experience go to waste and so endeavored to put them on the internet. The result: my first attempt at blogging.

I’ll be posting the remaining two parts of the series soon.

Donkey Road Trip!

Update: Only NY-LHE is non-stop. The LHE-NY sector still has a stopover.

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.

Pakistan’s oldest and largest museum is a red sandstone masterpiece of Anglo-Indian Gothic with a white marble facade that unlocks a treasure chest of southern Asian artifacts.

I walked into the main vestibule under a high, frescoed ceiling, listened to the hum of the wall fans, and immediately felt at home. This was as I had always imagined the perfect museum to be, with just enough clutter and disorder to create a feeling of intimacy, but not so much as to distract from the individual works of art.

Kim and the lama had gone into the ”Wonder House to pray before the gods there.” The lama was especially awed by the collection of religious statues from Gandhara, a Buddhist culture that flourished in northwest Pakistan in the first centuries A.D. There are also Hindu and Jain sculptures, Persian, Turkoman and Kurdish rugs, Islamic glazed tiles and calligraphy, Tibetan furniture and votive paintings, and a main gallery filled with Persian and Mogul miniatures. Visually, it is like being glutted with a spicy, multi-course subcontinent meal.

In the novel the ”Keeper of the Images” – a figure based on Kipling’s own father – inspired the lama in his spiritual journey across India in search of a sacred river. The wealth of this collection speaks volumes about the encyclopedic knowledge of Asian culture that the curator, Lockwood Kipling, must have possessed; knowledge that evidently rubbed off on his son to judge by the lavish descriptions in ”Kim.”

Kim procured food and lodging for himself and the lama in Lahore’s old city. ”The hot and crowded bazaars blazed with light as they made their way through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the lama mooned through it like a man in a dream.” The crowds are as dense now as they were then (”Kim” was published in 1901). But unlike bazaars in India itself, there are no beggars and few of the hustlers who make life miserable for tourists in places like Delhi and Agra. Despite the press of humanity, you can have a measure of solitude in Lahore’s old city.

And you can see women too: after visiting so many Middle Eastern bazaars where women were just bobbing black tents, I was dazzled by the number of poor and lower middle class Lahori women with hauntingly beautiful faces, highlighted by eye kohl, gold jewels in their noses, and the flowing saris and trousers-and-tunics outfits that give the bazaar its dash of primary color.

I had entered the old city through the Delhi Gate, the most impressive of the portals that are still standing. Under the Mogul emperors Akbar the Great, Jehangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, Lahore reached a zenith of splendor. The old part of Lahore is the greatest medieval architectural spectacle between Delhi and Isfahan, rivaling the former if not quite the latter.

After a few minutes of walking I came to the Mosque of Wazir Khan, which gets its name from the Governor of the Punjab who built the mosque in 1634 during the reign of Shah Jahan. In an Oct. 1, 1887, dispatch in the Civil and Military Gazette, Kipling wrote that the area of the mosque was ”full of beauty even when the noonday heat silences the voices of men and puts the pigeons of the mosque to sleep.” I removed my shoes and walked into the courtyard at midday, sat on a rush mat under an archway and admired the thin wafers of red brick, the kashi tiles and the frescoes painted in various shades of yellow and orange, the very colors of the ground curry sold in the market nearby. The crazy geometry of the bazaar buildings towered over the courtyard, making it seem even smaller than it was. But, on account of the courtyard’s silence and the lovely reflecting pool in the center, I felt far removed from the city.

I walked out of the old city through the Kashmiri Gate, not far from where Kim and the lama spent their first night on the road together in the stable of an Afghan horse trader. The stables are gone, but the transient atmosphere of the caravansary persists in the form of tented tea stalls and rows of jute beds. For the equivalent of 50 cents, I took a three-wheel auto-rickshaw for the five-minute ride to the Badshahi (King) Mosque, farther along the collapsed old city wall. Completed in 1674 by Aurangzeb, the last great Mogul emperor, the Badshahi Mosque is said to be the largest single-unit mosque in the world, and is arguably second only to the Taj Mahal as an example of Mogul architectural genius.

The courtyard, within four inches of being a perfect square, is almost twice the length of a football field. The linear sweeps of red and pink sandstone clash majestically with the three white marble domes that appear as planets floating in space, around which smaller, white marble satellites, resting atop the turrets and minarets, revolve. Though the scale is grand, it isn’t alienating. Under the stucco tracery of the prayer hall, men were relaxing and praying on the carpets. Nobody talked to me, or stared either. I could have read several chapters of ”Kim” without being interrupted.

The Badshahi Mosque stands in perfect spatial harmony to the old city, the white and gold pudding cake of a Sikh temple, the gardens of Hazuri Bagh and Akbar’s fort. The Sikh temple holds the remains of Ranjit Singh, a one-eyed drunkard and opium addict who brilliantly ruled the Punjab in the early 19th century by uniting all the Sikh tribes and maintaining peaceful relations with the British. It was amid the trees and flowers of the Hazuri Bagh where he held court.

The red brick fortifications of Akbar’s Fort, roughly four times the size of the Badshahi Mosque, give an impression of what the old city walls must have once looked like. The fort, completed a century before the mosque, is nowadays a quiet world of well-kept gardens and archeological remains. In the northwest corner is the Shish Mahal (Palace of Mirrors), built for the women of the court in 1632 by Shah Jahan, the same emperor who built the Taj Mahal. What’s left of this pleasure palace is actually quite little. But, like a good, spare poem, the few marble, Corinthian archways and pavilions, each overlaid with frescoes and thousands of silver, convex mirrors, are sufficient to convey the luscious ambiance of the harem. One can imagine the women, in jewels and saris, reclining on cushions, while sipping pomegranate juice and being refreshed by the breezes that blow through the archways.

The most magnificent of the surviving pavilions is called the Naulakha, which means nine lakhs, or 900,000 rupees, because that was the cost of building it. The Naulakha was also the title of a novel Kipling wrote in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, the brother of his fiancee, who died of typhus a few weeks before the wedding. In the book, the Naulakha is a famous jewel. But Kipling no doubt was inspired by this pavilion in the Shish Mahal, filled with silver and semiprecious stones. Close by is the Fort Museum, an air-conditioned refuge from the heat, holding an excellent, albeit small, collection of miniature paintings and illuminated manuscripts.

The next morning I took a taxi to the Anarkali Bazaar just outside the Lohari Gate. According to legend, Anarkali (Pomegranate Blossom) was the name of a favorite concubine of Akbar the Great, whom he put to death for having a love affair with his son. This is Lahore’s main shopping district, and on account of its length and the mixture of exotic and mundane household goods, it reminded me of Muski Street in Cairo. For the tourist, Anarkali is a disappointment. All I bought was a battery-operated racing car for my son. (The best collection of miniature paintings I found not in Anarkali, but in the gift shop of the Lahore Museum, where prices range between $10 and $200 depending upon the quality. And for those interested in printed cloth and saris, the best shops are in the Panorama Shopping Center, formerly the site of The Civil and Military Gazette, on the Mall road.) From Anarkali, I took another auto-rickshaw to the Bhatti Gate, and walked up the bazaar street to the Faqir Khana, a rambling, down-at-the-heels mansion in the old city that is known for its private art collection. The guest book showed that I was the first visitor in three days.

A kindly man led me through the many rooms of the house, teeming with precious objects: carpets, old books, Chinese silkscreens, Buddha statues, coins, pottery, paintings, photographs. There was a Mogul miniature with a detail of a court artist drawing a horseman. The horseman was so small that a magnifying glass was required to see it. I was next shown a framed and shredded piece of silk. When I held it up to the sun I saw an intricate Mogul needlepoint drawing of archers and courtesans. This work of art was so faded that a strong light was needed to reveal the details. In another decade or so, I thought, nothing would be left of it.

”Kim,” as I was discovering, though as old as the century, had not faded at all in its ability to render both the overwhelming beauty and squalidness of the Indian subcontinent. And my last night in Lahore, I thought I caught a glimpse of the respect, combined with the terror and amazement, with which Kipling himself must have reacted to this city, back in the days when he edited newspaper copy while sweating under a ceiling fan and sipping a whiskey and soda.

From other travelers, I had heard vague stories about the ‘’street of the dancing girls” in the old city, but I assumed this was just a polite phrase for a red light district. Then a taxi driver insisted I was wrong, and took me inside the Taxali Gate to the Diamond Bazaar at 11 P.M. This was where Kim had listened to the fakirs and their ”lewd disciples.” (I did see one old man who was shaking a bell and chanting.) The narrow, derelict alleys here were crammed with all types of people, and groups of policemen stood at each corner. But there was no atmosphere of crime or tension.

The crowds were attracted to the succession of lovely carpeted rooms lined with velvet cushions, which were opened to the street and illuminated by the light of hissing gas lamps. In each of the rooms, as though mannequins in a store window, were one or two beautiful women sitting impassively, sipping tea and flanked by a troupe of musicians and an old woman – the dancer’s ever-watchful mother. None of these women leered or even smiled at the passers-by. The women looked fresh, haughty and elegant in their saris of every imaginable color, like the daughters of rich oriental politicians being shown off at a ball.

I selected one room and entered. The door closed behind me and I was offered a seat against a cushion. Then, to the accompaniment of a sitar and a squeeze-box piano, two young women began a classical dance. Their painted faces could have been sculptured by a Mogul artist: I was reminded of the ladies in Shah Jahan’s court. The dancers asked for the equivalent of $10 for the private, 15-minute performance. The only thing hokey about it was that, in the middle, a vendor came through the door, as if on cue, and threw rose petals at the dancers.

There are tales of wealthy Arab emirs who send their servants to these streets near the Taxali Gate at night, ready to pay thousands of dollars to the mothers of the most beautiful girls in order to take them as concubines to the Gulf. It is the kind of story that young Kipling would have loved to check out, wandering these same back alleys as he often did.

”Our city, from the Taxila to the Delhi Gate . . . would yield a store of novels,” wrote Kipling, whose imperialism was tempered with a humanism and street-wise reporter’s knowledge of the East that many people today don’t give him credit for. And, particularly in ”Kim,” Kipling has created a sympathetic literary myth to go hand in hand with Lahore’s artistic pleasures.

Credit: Published in New York Times, Jan 29, 1989 Photos: AP Pakistan

Source: Khaleej Times

December 29, 2007 was the night when we, as a family, decided to head back to Lahore from the Southern part of Punjab province where we all had spent the last couple of days in reunion fun and Eid happiness.

The plan was to leave after sunset for a seven hour journey that was to take us through several important settlements and cities including Multan, Khanewal, Sahiwal, Okara and finally to Thokar Niaz Beg at Lahore.

With news of total chaos and violence taking place in many parts of the country, especially in Sindh and Karachi, we were quite expecting live accounts of damaged infrastructure, burnt banks, ransacked offices and unlawful crowds roaming the streets and that obviously added to our fear of safety.

We started moving on the Grand Trunk Road – N5, country’s main logistics artery running from Karachi to Peshawar, 1,819 KM in one stretch, in the direction of our destination quite late in the evening.

Our vehicles proceeded without any extended stay except for a break of about two hours at a relative’s house in the middle way. The N5 gave quite a deserted look, the first time I saw it so clear, except obviously in Ramadan during the Iftaar (fast breaking) timing when almost every moving thing abandons roads for at least 15-30 minutes.

Silence and darkness was all that was to be seen throughout the journey which made me feel at that time, how attractive and significant was NHA’s motto of ‘Friendly Highways’.

Despite all fears and apprehensions, we, thankfully, did not encounter a single damaged thing and reached Lahore in the late hours of the night between 29th & 30th of December. And Lahore at that time was no different with now the usual scene of all gas and petrol stations cordoned and closed in fear of getting burnt or end gutted.

All we could relish was refueling our tanks at the Shell Station – Thokar Niaz Beg opposite Toyota Ravi Motors, which probably seemed to be the only operational station in this part of Lahore and that too under armed police guard.

God was to be thanked for making us feel relieved after getting home safely and securely for I have never traveled to my city in so much fear!

Predominantly, one of the sign is reconstruction/re-touching going on throughout the city and specifically speaking of roads, the lucky portion of the road, that is undergoing resurfacing now a days in my corner of world, is near Polo Ground, that you have to cross when you are heading towards Walton from Cantt area via Tufail Road.

This half a kilometer piece of length was ROUGH, I must say. Though apparently, there were not SO many potholes, cracks or rutting but still it was the one that makes you jiggle from head to toe even if you are at speed of 30. If anyone of you have dust allergy, please change your route for a couple of days because it has a big dusty cloud there.

Let us hope, this repair will get accomplished soon (before Eid) and last longer. Happy maintenance days!!! :)

Coping with the joy (read stress) that is the first semester of a Master’s program, my fellow classmates and I found ourselves pressed for time to get our library membership forms and begin researching literary greats in-depth. All four of us decided to climb into a car and make our way to The Mall straight after our third class in the morning. By the time 2 o’clock actually rolled around, it began raining. No, no, not raining, I mean RAINING. (a notch above in intensity from the pakora-chai drizzle, know what I mean?) After weighing the pros and cons, which included ruining a new pair of slippers, waiting out the weather, postponing the trip all together, and the technicalities involving broken windshield wipers, we all sprinted to our vehicle of choice and began the journey towards the Library.

Ahh, Traffic. If you live in Lahore, inhabit Delhi, exist in Karachi, or any other bustling metropolitan Asian city you should have an idea what that word means. For those who don’t: normally slow and erratic traffic is even more so because the rain makes driving/riding haphazard. Don’t ask me how, but it does. Established fact. Waiting and slinking our way through traffic, we made peace with the circumstances, rolled down our windows and enjoyed the weather.

Speeding on The Mall, which is actually a bad idea considering the presence of the police, our car tires shrieked as we turned onto the parking lot of Bagh-E-Jinnah, as if the signal our arrival to all the bookworms inside. Umbrella-free, and toting mostly leather bags, we braved the gigantic and fast-falling raindrops once again to enter the Library from under the columns.

Interrogated by the grandfatherly (read harmless) security guard and then allowed entrance into the library itself after disposing of private books, we went straight to one of the many dark wooden tables on the immediate left, impatient to be bestowed with our library membership forms. If you are a student, the deal is you have to bring in your university/college identitfication card to prove that you are , indeed, a post graduate student, then and only then can you expect to recieve the pea-soup green library card form. Aside from the card the only other predominantly green aspect of the library was the carpet, but that is a story for another day. ( I intend to share my impression vs. actual experience of the library soon, I need to visit once more…hang on)

We were wet yet triumphant! Now all we needed were two specifically specified sized photographs, a bunch of boring personal details, a signature by our Head of Department, and we can research to our merry lil hearts content!!

Splashing through the considerable puddles on our way back to the car, my classmates and I chalked this trip up to the gorgeously rained-out Bagh-E-Jinnah/Quaid-E-Azam Library as one we were not going to forget any time soon. Ending the way any heroic voyage should, the sun shone golden-warm rays all the way home.