Dhamaal |Sufi Trance Dance| (by HEROINCHIE)

“Music is kind of a drug, it’s up to you if you opt for this drug over the others or not.”

jawsmusictheme:

The fact of the matter is, it often feels like you don’t just live in Lahore. You exist in a sea of smog and noise and chaos and the nausea of a city that is often at odds with its own history and its own brilliance. Nothing is where it should be and everyone seems to be drifting or rushing through the dusty streets. Motorcyclists veer in and out of traffic at break-neck speed. Kites and crows pick at trash and meat thrown on the side of the roads by believers who think all will be well because of this sadqa to take away the Evil Eye. Children cross thoroughfares without looking both ways. Traffic wardens do their dance of authority with bored expressions on their often handsome faces. At any given moment there are dozens of people overcrowding a public transport bus, clinging on for dear life. The jarring noise of rickshaws mingles with the many calls for prayers from minarets spread like spikes through the mohallas. Questions of science and progress are debated in halls of learning. 

There is so much in this city at any given moment that perhaps, for its own citizens, it becomes easier to ignore it all and not feel for it one way or the other. Then sometimes something like this is passed around and its a chance for us all to pause and consider the worth of these ordinary everyday things happening all around us all over again. 

Lahore, now, is merely a ghost of its glorious past. That is what some may believe. But those who live here, those who know that no matter where the world goes, there is no other place like this city, they understand that this place is always in transition, and always in repair.

That is its charm. That is its pull.

Here’s Lahore. And you’re always welcome. 

Video by Saad Khan; Sound by Khurram Siddiqi.

Beautiful words from Herman Hesse. See also a poem we wrote about trees.

jawsmusictheme:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the forces of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals it’s death wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk, in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal tress grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought. I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labour is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Text © From Wandering by Herman Hesse. Published by Picador. 1972.

A fallen tree in the forest of Changa Manga outside Lahore. Photograph taken on 3rd November, 2011, at 12:24 pm. 

Abdullah M. I. Syed
THE FLYING RUG OF DRONES (Ed. of 3)
2009
Box-cutter knife blades and stainless steel
48 x 96 in.

(Thank you, RKSTNI)

(Source: aicongallery.com)

Fascinating. Please click through to read the full article on The Friday Times site.

Three “prophetic” Persian poems ascribed to a Shah Ni’matullah Wali have been a fascinating feature in the popular political discourse of the Muslims of South Asia. For nearly two centuries these poems have circulated whenever there has been a major crisis in, what may be called, the psychic world of South Asian Muslims. The first recorded appearance was in 1850, after the “Jihad” movement of Syed Ahmad had failed in the north-west, followed by serial appearances after the debacle of 1857, the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate and the failure of the Khilafat and Hijrat movements in 1924, the Partition of the country and community in 1947, and the Indo-Pak war of 1971-72. Curiously, these poems have re-emerged in Pakistan in 2010, and have found wider circulation on the internet.

columndump:

                               

Madiha Sattar, a writer based in Karachi, in her recent comment on the Karachi violence complained about ‘the mythology of the city’s not-so-distant golden past’ that is evoked whenever the times are dark and roads bloody. Those of us not old enough to have worn hipster saris to nightclubs here in the 60s and 70s, are frequently subjected to misty-eyed reminiscing about a city that was once apparently safe, cosmopolitan and liberal, a magical place where one could drive around late without racing home to avoid a hold-up and people were far too polite and open-minded to be too fussed about each other’s religions, sects and ethnicities.

In my very personal and spotty survey of post-1947 literature on Karachi, it has always struck me that this poetic construction of Karachi’s alleged liberal past exists more in prose than in poetry. In fiction, one thinks of the charming passages in Muhammad Khalid Akhtar’s works where the author captures the din and bustle of the city in the ‘50s and ‘60s through his impish characters. Elphinstone Street, for instance, repeatedly surfaces in MKA’s works as the preferred destination for his flâneurs who seek delight in city lights and life. Then there is the wildly popular Ibn-e Safi’s Imran Series novels are set in an unnamed city, but it is widely believed that the place they draw on — marked most notably by an alluring night life complete with nightclubs, alcohol, and vixens on the hunt — is in the image of the Karachi of yore.

But for whatever reason, the poets never seemed to be enamoured of Karachi and its ways. The gentle poet from Lahore, Taufiq Rafat, whose work shows remarkable restraint and control, wrote two uncharacteristically tart poems on Karachi. The first one, Karachi, 1955, describes the city in strong grey images: The screaming wind transplants the soil/ particle by particle […/] All the forces of nature crowding man off his perch/ so that the land can return to its ways.// In this city of scarce sweet water and little rain/ each man protects his rood of greenery/ with panicked care. His other poem similarly entitled rather unimaginatively, Karachi, 1968, is even sourer. The second-last stanza reads:

There is no weather here as we northerners
understand weather. The season telescopes
a sort of summer into a sort of winter,
topped by a mini-monsoon. Each new morning
brings no hope of change. Generally the clouds
are sexless, mute, and above our affairs.
A splitting sky announces a jet not rain.

Even in Urdu poetry, one would be hard pressed to find a loving ode to the city. Zia Jalandhari, writing in his book of poems khwāb sarāb published in 1985, writes movingly about Karachi as a hard, wretched place.

karāchī kisī dev qad kekṛe kī tarah
samandar ke sāhil pe pa’ooṅ pisāre paṛā hai
naseṅ uskī faulād-o āhan
badan ret cement patthar
buseṅ, taxiyaṅ, careiṅ, rikshā, ragoṅ meiṅ lahū ke bajā’ye rawāṅ
jism par jā bajā dāgh daldal-numā
jahāṅ ʻankabūt apne tāroṅ se bunte haiṅ baṅkoṅ ke jāl 
…
yeh woh shehr-e mutma’in hai
jo apne hī dil kī shaqāwat pe shīda rahā

Karachi’s story is usually told as that of a utopia that suddenly took an about turn during the Zia era and went horribly wrong. But there is enough poetry to warrant against such a narrow view of things. We desperately need narratives of Karachi that do justice to its complex past and help us grapple with its bewildering present.

Where are the historians?

 

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in the Express Tribune, September 18, 2011

P.S. For all looking for a bout of nostalgia, here’s a video of Karachi in 1942 apparently shot by a visiting British soldier: Karachi at the End of the Raj. (I don’t attest the date/veracity of this film; but it’s nice. Do watch.)

 

jawsmusictheme:

This is Pakistan. I am a Pakistani. Of the female gender. It is all happening all the time. It is happening in Pakistan; it is happening to Pakistan. I’m only twisting my hands standing in the unbearable heat trying to hurl some comically simple truths at people who are passing by. 

We have families and we have pets. We play around, eat ice cream, study. We don’t have lemonade stalls, but we have shikanjabeen kay thailay. Same difference. Nothing is lost in translation. You’ll be shocked to know that.

We shave.

Trust me: most of us will have to pay for that before any Taliban or Al-Qaida operative ever even gets to your shores again. 

Friends, comrades, citizens of the world: lend me not your money. Lend me your eyes and ears. Lend Pakistan your genuine sense of curiosity. Lend us a minute to explain ourselves. We make sense when you’re not looking at us through the hazy aftermath of a bomb blast.

From Reportage 2008

Untitled

Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 27 December, 2007

Picture: John Moore (Getty Images) / Courtesy of the Reportage Photo Festival

A survivor is overcome with emotion at the site of a bomb blast attack that killed former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

See more Reportage Photo Festival | 10 Years of The Reportage Photo Festival | News.com.au