Rickshaw dreams

Saad Sultan meets a rickshaw wala of a different sort

Rickshaw passengers will testify to the fact that these lethal vehicles treat all roads equally: as though they were still under construction. If they had been a species of aeroplanes, rickshaws would undoubtedly have treated the air as if it were under construction as well.

Rickshaw wala’s speak to their passengers as though they were all short of hearing. I put this down to their vocal chords being accustomed to competing with their rickshaw’s engines to be heard. One has to wonder if that horrendous buzzing ever stops ringing in their ears. From how they speak, it would appear not.

Shakeel Massey, the rickshaw wala whom I interviewed, assured me that he knew no colleague who would not prefer driving any vehicle other than a rickshaw. After giving that contention some thought, he drifted off for a while into a world of his own, his brows knit together, fore-finger and thumb ponderously squeezing his chin, as though carefully shaping his next words, which he spoke with the confidence of a man who had thought up the aptest analogy. “For instance, a rickshaw is no BMW!”

Cleric’s killing turns Pakistan public against the Taliban

Pamela Constable, The Washington Post

LAHORE, Pakistan – The modest office where Sarfraz Naeemi kept his library and received visitors seeking spiritual guidance is now a charred hole. The floor is strewn with burned pages, glass shards and ball bearings from a young suicide bomber’s lethal vest.

WorldCall launches wireless broadband in Lahore

LAHORE: Following an encouraging response in Karachi, WorldCall Telecom Limited (An Omantel Company), a reputed name in Pakistan’s telecommunication market has successfully launched WorldCall Wireless Broadband in Lahore, which is a compact USB device which provides broadband Internet connectivity with mobility to its users.

Lahore tops list of most polluted cities

ISLAMABAD – Lahore has topped the list of most polluted cities with highest air pollution level of 121.85 micrograms per cubic meter that is three times higher than the safe standards, followed by Peshawar and the Federal Capital.
The facts were revealed in statistics gathered by the Pakistan Environment Agency (Pak-EPA) under its Air Monitoring System.

Sikhs from India in Pak to mark anniversary of Guru Arjun Dev

Lahore (PTI) Scores of Sikhs from India arrived at the Wagah border on Tuesday to participate in events marking the death anniversary of fifth Guru Arjun Dev here.

A total of 260 Sikhs from India were greeted by officials of Pakistan’s Evacuee Trust Property Board and Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee at the border point to take part in the events at Lahore’s Gurdwara Dera Sahib.

Over 1,000 Indian Sikhs were originally scheduled to attend the events, but security fears amid recent terror attacks in Pakistan’s eastern city reportedly kept many of them away.

CULTURES OF PUNJAB

The geographical entity in the north-western region of India called Punjab, the land of five rivers, has been and still is an integral part of the common pool of Indian culture. Its arts and crafts also form an important part of the deep-rooted artistic tradition of India and are equally rich and significant.

The culture of Punjab prior to the partition of 1947 was a mixture of three strains one flowing frorn Kangra hills, the second from south-western area from Multan to Lahore, and the third from Peshawar w Lahore.

Abandoned pleasures

LAHORE: The paien bagh at the Lahore Fort is without visitors. The garden was adjacent to the sleeping chambers and was built by Emperor Jahangir in 1633AD. It was used only by the inmates of the emperor’s harem.

SSE in Lahore

Salal Humair

This newspaper’s editorial ‘Whither and wither’ of Jan 4 articulates two excellent questions about the direction of Higher Education in Pakistan, while expressing disappointment over the shelving of HEC’s plan to create world-class universities in Pakistan. The editorial asks: ‘If you are poor and bright you have few options and ‘abroad’ isn’t one of them. But what if ‘abroad’ were somehow to be able to come to us? What if the benefits of a foreign education system could somehow get transplanted to Pakistan?’ I believe those are well-phrased questions to which we may still find solutions, but we would need some visionary political leadership to do so.

Cycle bling

Last Sunday’s Critical Mass event was a success.  About 40 cycle enthusiasts turned out in the late afternoon to cycle around the city in an effort to raise awareness about the environment, alternative modes of transport, democratic development and also just to enjoy themselves.

One enthusiast brought what was, by far, the most blinged-out cycle I have seen.  Here are some photographs:

This is what he had written on the front of the cycle:

Now that’s cycle-sense if ever saw it!!!

Moving Journeys: An Exhibition of Photographs of the Colonial Punjab

Photographs of the Punjab taken by London’s Royal Geographical Society
(RGS) members during the late 19th and early 20th centuries form the
core of the exhibition. The RGS images provide a glimpse of the Punjab
province through the ages, capturing the changes brought on by
different empires and the impact of internal and external migration.
To help interpret the pictures, the exhibition also makes use of
travelogues collected and written by RGS members during the colonial
period.

First Gurmukhi course concludes

First Gurmukhi course concludes

By Ali Usman

LAHORE: The graduates of the first Gurmukhi Certificate Course were awarded certificates on Wednesday after the completion of the course at the Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture (PILAAC).

The Gurmukhi Learning Certificate Course – the first course of its kind in Pakistan to teach the Gurmukhi script of Punjabi commenced at the institute last month. Some 35 students were registered for the course, of which 21 qualified the final examination. Gurmukhi is the universal script used for writing Punjabi, and is quite close to the Hindi script. In Pakistan, the Shahmukhi script (also called the Persian script by some) is used for writing Punjabi.

The aim of the course was to equip the students with the basic skills of Gurmukhi and making them able to read and write the script. The course instructor was eminent Punjabi scholar Jameel Paul. Speaking at the ceremony, Paul said Gurmukhi was the universal script for writing Punjabi. He said there were around 100,000 Punjabi websites, and only two used the Shahmukhi script for the language. He said by learning this script, the poetry of great Sufi poets like Baba Fareed, Shah Hussain, Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah could be written in Gurmukhi and the people living in Eastern Punjab could learn about this rich Punjabi treasure. PILAAC Director Dr Abbass Najmi said the institute would keep organising such courses in future.

First Gurmukhi course concludes

By Ali Usman

LAHORE: The graduates of the first Gurmukhi Certificate Course were awarded certificates on Wednesday after the completion of the course at the Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture (PILAAC). 

Punjabi Taliban

By Frederick Kagan, Ahmad Majidyar

(The Critical Threats Project is developing a site focused specifically on the threat from al-Qaeda and Associated Movements (AQAM); until that site reaches production, related pieces will be posted on the IranTracker site.)

A group called Tehrik-e Taliban Punjab (TT Punjab) released a message on May 27 claiming credit for the suicide car-bomb attack in Lahore that killed at least 40 people and injured nearly 150, according to a translation prepared by the SITE Intel Group.  The message said that the attackers struck to retaliate for the operations the Pakistani Army has been conducting against the Tehrik-e Nafaz-e Shariat-e Mohammadi (TNSM) in the Swat River Valley and elsewhere in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan.