Kabir in Lahore

A four-day long festival in Lahore celebrating Kabir Das, the revered 15th century poet and mystic who defied the boundaries between Hindu and Muslim, ends on Thursday.

 

The Kabir Festival (Sep 29-Oct 2, 2014) has been organised by the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in collaboration with the Kabir Project in India, a unique and acclaimed initiative by documentary filmmaker and musician Shabnam Virmani.

 

The aim is to promote the philosophy of spirituality and harmony through film screenings, live musical evenings, photo and video exhibitions, storytelling, and interactive sessions. The performers include classical and folk singers, scholars, artists, and students of Pakistan and India, who share a passion for the mystical world.

Dr Ayesha Jalal’s lectures in Lahore

Raza Rumi
The Department of Humanities & Social Sciences and the Development Policy Research Centre (DPRC)
Present Lectures by Dr. Ayesha Jalal

Jinnah’s Contemporary Relevance
Date: April 28, 2010
Time: 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm
Venue: NIB Auditorium

Jinnah’s Case for Pakistan
Date: April 30, 2010
Time: 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm
Venue: NIB Auditorium

Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and currently a Visiting Professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Dr. Ayesha Jalal is among the most prominent American academics who writes on the history of India and Pakistan. Her innovative scholarship has led to frequent criticisms by both Pakistani and Indian establishment scholars. Her most prominent works are on the role of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the partition of India.

RSVP

Building ‘MIT for Pakistan’

Raza Rumi

I met Dr Abidi many years ago. I was pleased to find his interview in my inbox. Readers might find it of interest.

This article appeared in STEP (Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan), and has been reproduced with their permission. The article first appeared here

Building  ‘MIT for Pakistan’

A Conversation with Dr. Asad Abidi

By Bilal Zafar, April 12, 2010

In Fall 2008, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) opened its doors to 150 freshmen students to study science and engineering at its brand new School of Science and Engineering (SSE). Offering undergraduate degrees in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering, and graduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics, LUMS SSE had much grander plans than most Pakistani universities. Indeed, SSE envisions to be not just a “successful research university”, but “perhaps an MIT, Stanford or a Caltech for Pakistan.” To realize this vision, SSE was able to raise a significant amount of money (more than $25 million), including Rs. 1500 and 500 million from the governments of Pakistan and Punjab, respectively.Perhaps equally impressive was the faculty that LUMS was able to assemble for this nascent school. It was a small — perhaps too small — group of promising young researchers, brought together by the project team to set the standard for LUMS SSE.

Strings wow Lahore audience with classic Pakistani pop

Strings duo Faisal Kapadia and Bilal Maqsood are currently going through the major cities of Pakistan as part of a concert tour. Having played a Valentine’s Day show for the Isloo crowd, Strings made their way to LUMS in Lahore on February 17, and sent an already keyed-up audience into absolute adrenaline-rushed mode.

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.

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.

ADP’s Latest Blog Entry: The Great LUMS Trip Day 1

Posted by Raza Rumi

Read this crisp, fresh and youthful perspective on a blog entitled Koolmuzone: Pakistani Underground Media. The real Lahore lives beyond the cliches of terrorism and media-cooked crisis. I am cross-posting this as the readers would get a flavour of the youth and their interaction with myriad facets of Lahore.

The fact that I had so much to blog about usually puts me in denial of how much I have to blog about. The result is I don’t blog. But here I have forced myself to go back to writing and give you the account of our concert at LUMS. Last weekend ADP were booked to play at LUMS University’s 10 Year Re-Union of their Music Society. Now we got the gig mostly because Omar Khalid is a favorite son of LUMS and he seems to have this legendary reputation there as an extraordinary musician. The kind of awe that OK inspires in LUMS freshies is pretty surprising to me. No doubt OK is an extraordinary musician. But as we all know, he is mostly a choot. Anyway, I was pretty sour-grapes because for once I wasn’t hogging all the attention, and for some reason everyone in LUMS seemed to assume that OK was the lead singer of ADP.

Nadeem Aslam reading from The Wasted Vigil

The Wasted Vigil is Nadeem Aslam’s third and most powerful novel yet. It follows the lives of five damaged souls dealing with the repercussions of the “War on Terror” in later day Afghanistan. A work of deepest humanity, “The Wasted Vigil” offers a timely portrait of this region, of love during war and conflict. At once angry, unflinching and memorably beautiful, it marks Nadeem Aslam as a world writer of major importance.

Nadeem shall be reading from ‘The Wasted Vigil’ and answering your questions at the Sayeed Saigol Auditorium on 10th April between 5-7pm.

This event is being arranged by The Last Word in collaboration with the LUMS Literary Society.

Climate Change lecture at LUMS

LAHORE UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCES (LUMS)
LAW AND POLICY DEPARTMENT

INVITATION

The Department of Law & Policy has the pleasure of hosting Mr. Toufiq A. Siddiqi’s lecture on Asia’s changing role in global climate change at the PICIC Auditorium at the Lahore University of Management Sciences at 11am on 20 November 2008.

Enrique Penalosa to speak about sustainable cities at LUMS

LAHORE UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCES (LUMS)

LAW AND POLICY DEPARTMENT

INVITATION

With a fast growing population, and increasing pace of urbanization, Pakistani cities, like many other in the developing world, are facing mounting problems related to provision of municipal services, public transport, land for housing, and the deteriorating quality of drinking water and ambient air, amongst myriad others. Confronted with growing challenges, many cities around the world are re-thinking ‘traditional’ approaches to urban development, emphasizing different priorities and approaches which factor in the needs of the many against those of the few.

To highlight some of the major challenges facing large cities around the world and how these cities are responding, the Environmental Law and Policy Class at the Law and Policy Department at LUMS in collaboration with Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI), a programme of the Clinton Foundation has organised a talk by Mr. Enrique Penalosa, world renowned urban strategist and former mayor of Bogota (Columbia) who transformed that City of 7 million inhabitants into a living example of sustainability – building schools and dispensaries, improving transport, increasing public spaces, and reducing crime rates. Mr. Penalosa has been featured in The New York Times, Herald Tribune, PBS Television, BBC and many others and has advised cities throughout the world such as Cape Town, Denver, Berkeley, Seattle, Melbourne, Sao Paulo.

Mr. Penalosa’s talk will be followed by a brief presentation on issues and challenges of public transport and mobility by Mr. Oscar Diaz, Sr. Director of the Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP).

To benefit from this opportunity the LUMS School of Law and Policy invites you to join members of the civil society, professionals, architects, planners, academics and students to the event at 11am on 19^th September, 2008 at the Sayeed Saigol Auditorium at LUMS Campus, DHA, Lahore.

Lahore Students excel in an MIT Design Competition

Tech Lahore blog has this pleasing news (below) to offer. It is indeed gratifying to note that Lahore students are doing so well. But our question is – when will the non-elite education institutions reach, or aspire for, this level?

“Kudos to Hasanat and Farrukh, two sophomore students from the Lahore University of Management Sciences who have placed 5th in an MIT Design Contest that required entrants to design, code and document an electricity consumption monitor that uploads information to a central database. Since the competition was open to contestants from all over the world, this award is a huge honour for the young engineers, their school… and for Pakistan. The quality of our science and technology graduates is increasing by the day. LUMS and its new SSE (School of Science and Engineering) promise to yield several Newtons, Einsteins, Turings and Abd-ul-Salams! “

All three students should accept mubarakbaad from Lahore Nama.