KARACHIWALI

Review: Instant City

2012-01-22T23:07:00.003+05:00

NON-FICTION: Understanding Karachi

Reviewed by Rumana Husain for Dawn's Books & Authors, Sunday 22 January 2012

Tea isn’t the only thing brewing in Karachi. It is a city mired in intrigue, conspiracies and violence, with problems looming on nearly every front.Ghastly images of the not so distant past continue to haunt the city, and major political and religious parties deny responsibility for helping to create this deadly situation.

In this scenario, Steve Inskeep (the host of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition”) chronicles the growth of Karachi and its myriad problems in his first book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi. He discusses the push and pull factors of the city which, in the 1940’s, was a modestly populated urban township of 350,000, but is now inundated with millions of vehicles and concrete structures, as well as 18 million inhabitants (the book puts the population of Karachi at 13 million).

“Instant city” is an apt title for a city that has grown at such a pace. For the migrants coming to Karachi, economic opportunities out-weigh its negative attributes. For those leaving this commercial hub, they are not only leaving Karachi but going beyond the borders of the country looking for a life with better prospects and without Karachi’s trials and tribulations.

Inskeep introduces us to the city in an interesting, almost fictional manner, ostensibly through a day in its life. That day is December 28, 2009. It is a date that most people in Karachi would remember. It was the tenth of Moharram and the Ashura
procession comprising thousands of mourners was attacked by (typically) “unknown perpetrators”. Two bomb explosions resulted in over thirty deaths and hundreds wounded followed by complete mayhem and widespread arson in a wholesale district in the heart of the city.

Arriving some days later, Inskeep writes of this neighbourhood: “I saw gaps in the otherwise crowded landscape. Daylight showed through the archways on the facades of a row of stone buildings. Through the doorways I saw a field of rubble. The buildings behind the facades were gone. Next to the rubble was a piece of real estate that I knew had held a market not long ago. Now it was a parking area covered with motorcycles.”

Hundreds of shops were gutted in the fire. According to popular conjecture, the real motive behind this disastrous event seems to have been not merely an act of sectarian terrorism but, under its guise, a foul plan to destroy old stone buildings in order to make way for new real estate in a choice area of the city.

Inskeep goes about the city looking for clues like a seasoned detective solving a murder or theft mystery. He interviews many individuals, from those living in dilapidated homes to some of the most influential and affluent citizens of Karachi, dwelling in gated, guarded, high-walled villas. He draws on these interviews to paint a portrait of the “instant city”.

Social disparity in Karachi can sting sensitive nerves and looking at the congested lanes and the overcrowded buses, one begins to wonder what happened to this city. Why and how did it reach its present condition?

Step by step Inskeep unravels the mystery behind some of these questions. He probes land use abuse in Karachi in detail, not only through the 2009 Ashura tragedy but by also looking for other inter-connecting stories. He investigates the murder of social and environmental activist Nisar Baloch. Despite its lofty new name, the Garden of Martyr Benazir Bhutto, or Gutter Baghicha as it was originally called, is that large piece of land meant for a park for which Baloch raised his voice against encroachers, and for which he paid with his life. Gutter Baghicha’s borders have been drawn and re-drawn over the years and the land-grabbers’ settlements are a result of manipulated ambiguity. Although the park continues to present neglect, squalor, violence and crime, it is a coveted piece of real estate eyed by at least two ethnic groups and their respective political supporters. Baloch was killed a day after he named the political parties at a press conference. Inskeep also makes a reference, though only in passing, to the Pakistan military establishment as “the single most important property owner in the city”.

Inskeep’s observations are peppered with in-depth interviews with the Edhis, Dr Seemin Jamali of the Jinnah Hospital, Perween Rahman of the Orangi Pilot Project, former city mayor Mustafa Kamal, businessmen and builders such as Adnan Asdar and Nadeem Riaz, and others. He has also studied several publications related to Karachi. Perhaps these prompted him to say that “in many ways, it’s a city that lives beyond the law, but it’s a city that lives and a city that has a vibrancy to it that’s hard to find elsewhere.”

As a citizen of this city by birth, and having grown up and lived and worked here, to me Karachi’s notoriety fades in comparison to its resilience, its thriving civil society, entrepreneurship, innovative projects, and the richness of its ethnic diversity. Inskeep does not miss these signs either. Despite switching between a plethora of topics, the book is a veritable page-turner. The insights he provides are significant as well as remarkable.

The reviewer is the author of Karachiwala: A Subcontinent Within a City

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi
By Steve Inskeep
Penguin, US
ISBN 9780670086078
284 pp. Rs1,195

Popular Socialist Imagery by Rumana Husain

2012-01-21T13:11:00.023+05:00

The idea behind poster art is mass communication; and throughout the history of modern poster, which dates back to 1870, symbolism has been in use, whether to convey religious diktats, advertising for commerce, or for travel, entertainment and events, propaganda and politics. Some symbols became nationally or internationally popular, and they have permanently affixed themselves in people’s memory.

The world over, socialist imagery, e.g. the Swastika, the Hammer and Sickle, or the spade; laborers, peasants, factory workers, the raised hand or fist, the Red Book or the color red itself, all came to symbolize a revolution for basic rights and equality. Some of those ideas and imagery filtered through and also came to Pakistan.

“Dignity of Labor”, “We Can Do it!”, “New Rights, New Duties” and “Hope” were the slogans of the posters that we were assigned to create as students

of graphic design in the late sixties and early seventies. Much later, in March 2006 at The World Social Forum (WSF), held in Karachi, which I attended together with my colleagues at the Children’s Museum for Peace and Human Rights (CMPHR) the slogan had changed, it now was “Another World is Possible”. The slogans and imagery painted by the young students at WSF against imperialism, slavery, poverty and other oppressions, and also about dignity of labor, were a personal reminder of heady days when Che Guevara's portrait was transformed into an international symbol for romantic rebellion, and a smiling Chairman Mao’s image remained a constant reminder of Socialism in

China

Socialism and Pakistan

In Pakistan’s art world, if there is one Pakistani contemporary artist who comes to mind for his socialist symbolism, it is Ijaz ul Hassan. His famous painting, Thah, showing a popular film star of the Punjabi cinema of the seventies, the voluptuous Firdaus in a provocative pose, shared the canvas with a Vietnamese freedom fighter holding her baby close to her breast. With the same hand she held the Red Book, and her other hand held a gun. This was painted in 1974, and as a young student I had seen it hanging in an exhibition at the Arts Council in Karachi. Although at the time this particular painting had only resonated with the risqué words of a popular Punjabi film song “Seenay naal lag ja thah ker kay”, it was much later that I understood the socialist/political and subversive meaning of Ijaz ul Hassan’s art.

“In 1977 during General Zia ul Haq's Martial Law, Ijaz ul Hassan was one of the first activists to be arrested and put in solitary confinement at the infamous Lahore Fort. During this period, when every form of dissent was crushed, Ijaz tried to have his thoughts and feelings known to the viewers with images and symbols; many derived from nature,” is an appropriate summation of the artist’s later works when censorship was clamped on his art. (http://www.ijazulhassan.com/Profile.html)

One can also attribute socialist symbolism to paintings of the late A. R. Nagori, depicting poverty and deprivation, and raising human rights issues, in particular for the underdeveloped Thar region of Sindh. Well known in Pakistan as a political painter, Prof. Nagori consistently presented socio-political issues that polarized the nation.

The Jeay Sind movement (a Sindhi nationalist movement) founded by G. M. Syed in 1972 (later renamed Jeay Sindh Tehreek by militant groups), used as its identity a red flag with a black axe painted onto a pure white sphere.

When the pro-Mao and China’s close ally, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto prepared the manifesto of his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in October 1966, it read: "Islam is our Faith, Democracy is our Policy, Socialism is our Economy, All Power to the People". With Bhutto’s rise to power in the country, the PPP became the first left-leaning political party in Pakistan, and attracted the urban working classes and the rural peasantry with its socialist agenda. The charismatic Bhutto used to

don the Mao cap and suit, which later gave way to the ‘Awami suit’ (shalwar kameez) and his ‘Roti, Kapda aur Makaan’ (literally meaning ‘bread, cloth and house’) became a popular slogan. In 1967 the PPP introduced Pakistan’s version of Islamic Socialism. The attempt failed on a cultural level as the religious leaders were obsessed with orthodox Islam that favoured the veiling of women, and discouraging cinema and music.

The subject of socialist propaganda strategies can be seen throughout world art and literature. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry addressed his poems to his "beloved", which is central to Urdu ghazal, but Faiz’s beloved were often the people and the revolution he envisioned.

Writing in Pakistan’s daily, Dawn, the Indian columnist Jawed Naqvi had written in May 2010 that writer Arundhati Roy presented a recording of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge sung by the legendary Iqbal Bano, and a book of Pablo Neruda’s poems to a group of Maoist rebels she visited in the forests of Chhattisgarh in India. She had later wondered whether sharing music constituted to “offering intellectual and material support” to the banned organization. According to India’s home ministry it was an act of national betrayal.

Socialist Imagey in Socialist Countries

Swastika can trace its origin to the Sanskrit words ‘su’ and ‘asti’ which in translation means ‘to be good’ and was used as a Hindu Aryan symbol since ancient times. It was used for 3000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength and good luck (Wikipedia). It had also been a symbol for the military and socialists in the USA and in the USSR before the National Socialist German Workers Party took it up. Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and Communism in Russia were all well-developed radical forms of socialism, the outgrowth of the socialist philosophy popular in the 1800s in Europe.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, when for the first time in history a nation was governed by a communist system, and artists used the poster as a medium to reach out to the masses. The posters designed initially showed a revolutionary fervour. By 1930, when Stalin was in full control, propaganda focused on political discipline and ambitious programs of agriculture, heavy industry, etc. The posters of his era show a powerful and dynamic Russia. But soon this style was considered to be too individualistic and only ‘Socialist Realism’ got a nod. A smiling Stalin became the subject, together with his ‘happy and healthy’ people. The Soviet-era propaganda imagery was bold and striking, simple in its style yet effective in its message. Socialist Realism also became an international literary movement with writers such as Tolstoy, Neruda and others gaining universal popularity.

A communist system of government and a Soviet system of values was imposed on Poland at the end of the Second World War. It also meant that painters were expected to paint in a monumental and realistic style designed to glorify workers and the socialist state. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin's atrocities, Socialist Realism was abandoned in the fifties.

Due to its controversial nature, Socialist Realism was rejected by the West. This was highlighted in a debate, as recently as 2007 in USA, when the building of a national monument was termed ‘made in China’ when the Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, was selected as the lead sculptor for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. His selection was opposed on the grounds that his earlier works celebrated Mao Zedong. Lei Yixin was later dropped from the project.

Even after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, in China Socialist Realism in Art may have weakened but it hasn’t died altogether.

The style can still be seen in government sponsored posters, and in the old posters (mostly reproductions of the originals) available in many Chinese antique markets.These posters focus on building the new country - the Great Leap Forward, aimed at boosting China's industrial production. Some of these are blended with elements of traditional Chinese painting, specially seen in the use of colors which are applied in soft gradations or combinations of heavy black contours with bright flat colors. Red is the dominant color on almost every poster. The root

s of the Chinese posters can be traced to two main styles: (1) The New Woodcut Movement of the 1930s and 1940s, in which “the stark black-and-white woodcuts depicting human deprivation and an urgent need for popular resistance are radically different from traditional woodblock print culture in pre-20th century China” 1. and (2) the Socialist Realism imagery of the Soviet Union.

Many Chinese artists who participated in the Long March in 1934, a year-long 8,000-mile military venture of the Red Army against the Nationalists, established the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts at Yan’an where artists studied both woodcut and other techniques. 2. Some years later they traveled to study under folk artists for the same purpose: to create artistic propaganda for the improvement of the nation. During this period Art was seen as a service, hence there was no ‘art for art’s sake’.

It is relevant to mention here that similar rules had been laid down in the early 1920s by the Bolshevik Institute of Artistic Culture to glorify the Bolshevik Revolution. Later, a direct propaganda approach was the need of the day for Stalin’s rapid industrial growth; the Socialist Realism style became the only approved style for paintings, sculpture and posters. The power of the Red Army was central to these artworks, and so were the successes of collective farms and steel mills. Until the later Brezhnev era of the late 1980s, this art was practiced in the entire Soviet bloc, including Poland, East Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States.

Chinese posters, which differed slightly from the Soviet style, had brighter colors. Compared to this, Cuban revolution posters were understated. The Cuban post

er developed after Fidel Castro seized power at the end of 1958, and tried to take an independent line from Russia. The Socialist Realist posters of Cuba from the early years attest to this influence, but more interesting are those that came about after 1965 when relations between the two became strained. But by the 1970s the liveliness of the Cuban posters diminished and this unique chapter in the history of the political poster there came to an end. However, the common factor between the Chinese, the Soviet and the Cuban poster is the negation of the individual graphic artist and his/her personal style, to prioritize communication with the mass audience. The style that runs like a thread throughout is the dominant palette of flatly laid out red and black colors. The stylized lettering evokes the times when it was either free-hand calligraphy or done by the graphic artist, or letterset was used manually by the printer.

My earlier mention of the nostalgia surrounding Che Guevara's portrait is from the period when cultural organizations within Cuba, such as OSPAAAL - the organization for solidarity with the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, distributed its posters worldwide. Those were the pre-television (and of course pre-Internet) times in Pakistan, but the universal Che Guevara posters found their way into the country after crossing the proverbial seven seas.

“The fact that many of Cuba’s graphic artists have been, and still are, painters and sculptors, is evidence that the new society has bridged the gap between fine arts and graphic arts (an artificial gap at best), created with the advent of high speed printing presses and the mythology surrounding the nature of art as being somehow unintelligible to the masses,” writes Dugald Stermer 3.

Stermer further explains that all Cuban propaganda posters were unsigned. The ego and imagination of the artist, assumed to be individualistic, became subservient to the larger cause of the revolutionary culture.

Fidel Castro, in his Words to the Intellectuals, laid down the ground rules for artists and writers in his statements “Within the Revolution, everything. Without it, nothing,” and “the Revolution does not ask sacrifices from its artists; rather, it says, put your creative spirit to work for the new Cuba without fear that the quality of your art will be curtailed. And if someday you feel that it has been, say to yourself that it was worthwhile to make this new life.” 4.

In the introductory essay in Dugald Stermer’s book, Susan Sontag compares the Pop Art style of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselman, calling it ‘parasitic on commercial poster aesthetics’. She reaffirms that the Cuban poster artists “remain very conscious that the poster art is a public art, which addresses an undifferentiated mass of people on behalf of something public (whether a political idea or a cultural spectacle).”5. It is interesting to note Sontag’s other comparison between a graphic artist and a poet. She says that the graphic artist in a revolutionary society does not have the problem the poet has, “when the poet uses the singular voice, the lyrical “I”: the problem of who is speaking and being spoken for.” 6

More recently, Maoist posters in Nepal, calling people for action protests on May Day, the imagery used by the All Nepal Federation Trade Union can be linked to Soviet expression of the past. Missing Maoist members shown on the top right of these posters reinforce the message of sacrifice and martyrdom, and flags showing different manual labor tools (the Hammer and Sickle) are displayed prominently in the middle, with smaller flags framing the lower half of the layout.

Conclusion

It is interesting to study the deconstruction of socialist imagery in China by contemporary Chinese artists; for example, the jaw-breaking grins painted by one of the most important artists of the Chinese avant-garde, Yue Minjun, who has achieved international stardom by making parodies of symbolic smiles in his self portraits. He uses a similar technique to that in advertising and propaganda posters: sharp outlines with even color which gives a 'Pop art' effect. During the Cultural Revolution period, there were Soviet-style posters showing happy people laughing, which Yue Minjun now uses in his paintings as a comment: ‘normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality.’

In the works called the ‘Great Criticism series’ of another Chinese artist, Wang Guangyi, who grew up in China during the Mao era, images of the Cultural Revolution are juxtaposed with mass-produced images from Western advertisements. This style of art combines political propaganda with Western pop art. Wang Guangyi’s ‘Great Criticism: Coca-Cola’ is a prime example of the Political Pop art of the 1980s and 1990s. In it the artist uses three figures (in the past it was common to depict one soldier, one laborer and one farmer, the latter often a female figure shown between two men), as it is a familiar concept for the Chinese people: strong revolutionaries standing with their left arms outstretched, in this case holding an oversized ink pen. Below the pen is the familiar Coca-Cola logo in bright white on a red background. The Coca-Cola logo in white stands out boldly against a red color, which has its own significance (the red of the western Coca-Cola Company and Mao's ‘Red China’).

As recent as February 2011, posters appeared in the Tahrir Square in the mass protest in Cairo, Egypt, when the Egyptian people demanded the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years of dictatorship.

The imagery

on these posters varied from swastikas and the Star of David as well as equating Mubarak with Hitler or the Egyptian pharaohs.

Attitude and interest may have shifted and changed, but the reality of poverty, oppression and marginalization that inspired the socialist ideals of yesteryear have not disappeared. In fact, they are the cause of a totally new set of crises and problems that face the world's thinkers today, and may continue to do for some time.

End Notes:

1. Ref. Appreciation Woodcuts, ‘China Institute’ – an online journal founded in 1926 by a group of American and Chinese educators.

2. Ref. History of the Modern Chinese Woodblock Print by Yan Shancun

3. The Art of Revolution by Dugald Stermer published by Pall Mall Press Limited, London, 1970

4. Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel by Lee Lockwood, published by Macmillan, 1968

5. Introductory essay by Susan Sontag, The Art of Revolution, Pall Mall Press Limited, London, 1970. An author of seventeen books, a human rights activist and a social critic, the late Susan Sontag who died in December 2004, was one of the most powerful thinkers of her generation.

6. Arts editor David Walsh talk October last year on Socialism and Cinema, at the University of Salford in the UK, in which he referred to yet another talk given by him sometime back in Toronto.

(Published in NuktaArt, volume 6, issue 1, May 2011)

Flashback: Memories of a Karachiwali

2011-12-04T09:38:00.010+05:00

When I think about ‘growing up in Karachi’, I start preparing a mental list of all those names, places and things that have otherwise been tucked away somewhere, deep in my memory. As the floodgates of my memory suddenly open, a whole lot of things tumble out. In my recall, I relive my past, often in minute detail.

‘B.P.’ biscuits, sweets and toffees were a staple but once in a while we went to have ice cream at ‘Havmore’ or ‘Pioneer’ in Saddar. Those were the days when a small tri-coloured slab of ice cream (vanilla white, strawberry pink and pista green) was served on a plate, and we had it with special spoons that were squared in the front. Much later, ‘Topsy’ was a favoured place to stop for an ice cream or a

cold drink (read Pakola) and ‘M.F.’ ice cream was the brand with which we had become familiar.

I was familiar with Malbari ki chai (they were the people from Kerala, South India, perhaps mostly from the Malabar Hills,

who brewed and sold tea) and the Irani hotels (Irani restaurants and bakeries were mostly set up by members of two communities of different faiths, the Bahais and the Zoroastrians or Parsis, both originating in Iran). These were scattered across the city, but I was hardly ever taken to one. ‘Ambala Sweets’ was popular, and so was ‘Fresco’ at the corner of Burnes Road and Frere Road.

Sitting inside the Gallery Sadequain at the Frere Hall recently, speaking to groups of school students who were visiting an art exhibition with which I was involved, I found myself reminiscing about my childhood, and my visits to the Frere Hall during those years. From over 500 students with whom I interacted, only a handful had ever stepped inside the Frere Hall building and the gardens around it. I told them that during my childhood this building housed the National Museum. Outside, in the gardens, there was a bandstand where a live band played each Saturday evening and I used to come with my parents and friends to hang out, eat popcorn or ‘chana jor garam’ or take to the see-saws and swings. There was a skating rink too where children would swirl and twirl and everyone seemed to be so carefree, surrounded by large trees, water-fountains, marble sculptures of Queen Victoria and others, and the hullabaloo of happy shrieks, laughter and music.

My school was about fifteen minutes walking distance from my house. I used to go there and return home with two or three other children of our neighbourhood. Always commuting on foot, it never occurred to us that the school would be closed for any reason. If it was raining, I would don my blue rain-coat, which I loved to wear on such days, and walk along with my friends who would have a domestic help carry an umbrella over their heads.

I was very young when US President Dwight D. Eisenhower came on a state visit to Karachi and, two years later, in 1961, when Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the city. Our entire school had to rehearse the welcoming act for days. We were instructed to wear clean, crisp uniforms. We had to go and stand along Elphinston (Zebunnisa) Street and wave small flags. Our principal was a wonderful British lady who was thrilled at the Queen’s visit. I recall Field Marshal Ayub Khan sitting next to these important guests in a convertible limousine. The excitement around those visits made us children believe that we played an essential role, and that the smiles and nods of the dignitaries were meant for us in acknowledgement of our enthusiasm.

When I turned seven, my father encouraged me to

become a member of the British Council Library, then located at the Sarangati Building at Pakistan Chowk. I was registered in the section for juniors. The fortnightly visits to borrow and return books were always a high point for me. There was a wide range of books available on different subjects including fiction, which played an important part in my ever-lasting love for books. A few years later, for Urdu fiction, I would stop by a small shop on my way to school. It was almost like a paan shop, a mere niche in the wall, but full of books. I paid a weekly rent of eight annas (half a rupee) and lapped up the novel or the compilation of short-stories that I had picked up that week.

My father owned a bicycle until I was about five, but he seldom used it for transporting me, although I had heard that my sister, seven years my elder, used to ride in front and be taken to school on his bike. Cycle-rickshaws were my mother’s preferr

ed mode of transport. I also remember that my sister and I often rode the tram with her. When I was older, but still in school, my mother’s cousin who had come from Bombay to live with us, took me or my sister around on his Vespa scooter. I loved those rides.

I can hardly believe that during my college days in the late sixties, I used to walk the half-hour distance between my place and the Karachi College for Women on Princess Street (now called Chand Bibi Road), only rarely using the public bus. But by this time I had learned to balance myself while standing precariously on the footboard of a bus, holding on to my books or my bag with one hand and a metal rod or passenger’s seat with the other.

Going to the cinema was a regular activity. There were several that we visited, and others that we never stepped into. Most of them are no more. I remember watching Indian, Pakistani and American films at various cinema halls, including Nishat, N

az, Plaza, Lyric, Bambino, Paradise, Capitol, Rex and Palace. Those that I never visited included the Godeon, Eros, Kohinoor, Rivoli, Reno, Light House, Jubilee, Ritz, Regal and Odeon. These were, nevertheless, also very popular and always crowded but my father, who used to be my cinema guide and companion, avoided these.

There was the Nazrul (Islam) Academy on Bunder Road, named after the progressive Bengali poet/ writer of (East) Pakistan. Besides my fondness for books and films, my other passion was art. While still under 10, I was encouraged to participate in the children’s

painting competitions organised at the Nazrul Academy. I also remember participating in the Shankar Weekly’s International Children’s Art Competition conducted at the Indian High Commission in Karachi. K. Shankar Pillai was a famous Indian cartoonist who published this political weekly, and the art competitions were held for children on an annual basis.

The Katrak Hall located in Saddar, and the Theosophical Hall opposite Radio Pakistan, were two auditoriums where we went to see Khwaja Mueenuddin and Ali Ahmad plays. I had performed on the Katrak stage in a school play, and on the latter while in college. Other forms of entertainment included the circus (from Germany), acrobatic shows (from China) and dance performances (by the Ghanshyams) at the Arts Council and the Metropole Hotel.

Between the late sixties and early seventies, I was an art student for four years. Being out on my own or with a bunch of friends, we hardly ever felt insecure. Walking to and from the Arts Council or taking the public bus was the normal routine.

However, the late sixties is also a period vivid in my memory for student unrest, in which the (progressive/socialist) National Students Federation (NSF) held anti-Ayub Khan street protests. As we lived in the vicinity of several colleges, we bore the brunt of tear-gas used by the police even in those days (together with lathi-charge) to disperse the angry young men who played hide-and-seek with them.

It was rare to see a gun, or a guard, or barbed wire, or barricades, or CCTV cameras, or sniffer dogs. Life was safe enough, and enjoyable enough without these. But these are only memories.

By Rumana Husain (Published in Dawn, Sunday, December 2, 2011. http://www.dawn.com/2011/12/04/flashback-memories-of-a-karachiwali.html)

Warehouse-size Art-making and Selling in Shanghai

2011-11-20T14:17:00.023+05:00

The Chinese contemporary art market, which had a rapid rise in just a few years, has also now succumbed to the global economic crisis after reaching its phenomenal peak. Nevertheless, today China is still the second biggest art market in the world.

A recent visit to 50 Moganshan Lu Art District of Shanghai (simply known as M50) left me impressed with some works, and utterly disappointed with others, but all in all after spending close to five hours there I was overwhelmed; my head bursting with so much art and information… and it also gave me aching feet, as there are no less than over 120 galleries and artists’ studios there!M50 sits snugly in the north of downtown Shanghai and it is the place to visit if you want a handle on contemporary art in China. Once a textile mill, the space of its huge warehouses totals 41,000 sq m. They have been converted into art galleries and studios, much like the 798 Art Zone of Beijing, which houses the artists’ community among 55-year old decommissioned military factory buildings. At M50, a few design companies, ceramics workshops and exhibition spaces, a few restaurants and coffee shops, as well as a well stocked bookstore feels inviting and gives a break from an overdose of paintings, sculpture and new media art. The bookshop also has a reading area, and it specializes in books, magazines and journals on art, design and architecture. One can browse through or buy lots of other books written specifically about Shanghai, and on China in general. On this recent visit, I also noticed the addition of a small convenience store and a large store selling art supplies at M50. Of course the scale of this Art District also lends itself to regular performances as well as performative arts.

In this labyrinth of galleries and other spaces, ShanghArt Gallery is a well-respected and leading gallery. In fact it is one of China’s most influential contemporary art institutions. On my previous visits to M50 over the last four years, I have seen some very interesting and unique shows in this gallery, which was set up almost 15 years ago by a Swiss-born director, Lorenz Helbling. He chose Building 16 which serves as a great artwork storehouse and a 1, 650 sq m exhibition space. Unfortunately during this visit, ShanghArt did not have any new show, and only a few pieces from its storage were on display, leaving me disappointed. Later, I read that ShanghART Taopu has opened in another location last year in October. Apparently, it is a 3000 sq m space, a “warehouse complex with functions for storage and show room, education and research, and exhibition and projects, which intends to explore new possibilities on how to use space more reasonably for display, preservation, study, and education of contemporary art.” That explained the desolate look of the gallery at M50.

The Outstanding Art Gallery, located in Building 4, has regularly displayed paintings by the famous Shanghai artist Qiu Shengxian. It continued to have a large number of his paintings on its walls. His ‘Ladies’ Leisure Time’ series, in which each piece is painstakingly detailed, shows the female icon as very different from the classical marginalized fate of Chinese women. Qiu is a skilled artist, and his presentation of the paintings done in postmodern collage by “deconstructing and reorganizing traditional symbols with a strong sense of decoration and

Artist Wang Xiaolong, whose work is influenced by Taoism, and who signs as ‘Sanzi’(meaning freedom or humility) had a huge presence in a gallery where his paintings and ceramic pieces were on display. Called ‘Figures in a Schematic Landscape’, the paintings, basically done in oils, also have a mixed technique involved, including the traditional Chinese ink painting. The thick layering of black paint, giving a luminous quality to the colour, is a distinct characteristic of Sanzi’s work.structure”, and with a distinct taste of a past era (the women are shown in Qing Dynasty costumes), is elegant and royal, and the women have a strong independent look.

Photography and New Media Art, including Installations, are a part of several shows at M50. A seminal not-for-profit centre for experimental and new media art, called Island 6 Arts Center, was displaying ‘Everyday Frenzies,’ which were experiments with landscape art using computer technology, mixing video, paper-cutting and LEDs. It brought to mind the work of Zhang Peili, known to many as ‘China’s Father of new media / video art’ since 1988 to the present. The installation of a collective work by artists Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing, called ‘Grab and Help’ had a sense of humour. Made with cloth and other materials, it showcases the conflict between individuals and a group. Many a time individuals become insignificant when they are a part of powerful and invincible groups. The work is noteworthy as it shows how we sometimes move up or otherwise slide down, and as a result gripped with obsession or recession.

The “Red Town” is the other recently developed Art District in another part of Shanghai. It boasts of hundreds of sculpture pieces kept both indoors and outdoors. It also has a few galleries where paintings and installations are displayed. Sipping coffee while sitting outside a café, it was so serene and beautiful to view the sculpture pieces spread over a green hillock and on vast acres of land all around it.

Among the innumerable sculptures kept in the cavernous Sculpture

Space Art Museum of the RedTown, Yin Zhixin’s ‘The Dancer’ fleetingly reminded me of the paintings and sculpture of ballerinas by the famous French Impressionist Edward Degas. But The Dancer is a far cry from those petite and pretty ballerinas of Degas, as Zhixin’s dancer was bald and her oversized limbs (the dimensions of the sculpture are 83 cm x 110 cm x 205 cm) seem to be an attempt at ridiculing the slim and trim dancers that one is otherwise accustomed to see.

It was also a great pleasure viewing several works of the iconic Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami in one of the galleries. His hyper-colourful recurring theme of flowers, often interspersed with smiling faces, or his skull motifs that hardly appear depressing or offensive, were a visual treat.

Hope one day the art enthusiasts in Pakistan will also see large clusters of ‘art districts’ in its cities where artists and artisans, art teachers and aspiring artists fill the ‘district’, bulging with galleries and studios, sculpture gardens and green areas, auditoriums and museums, bookshops and coffee shops.

Text and images by Rumana Husain (Published on Sunday, November 20, 2011 in The News)

A Trip to Rannikot Fort in the Kirthar Mountain Range on 11.11.’11

2011-11-14T15:43:00.004+05:00

The first time Mukhtar and I had heardof the Rannikot fort (pronounced Runny Coat, not Rani kot) was in the late1970s. In fact, hardly anyone knew of the existence of this fort back then besides the people of Sann and other villagers who lived in the vicinity and a handfulof some other well informed people. Amongst them was Mukhtar’s friend from his school days - an Islamabad-based physicist and environmentalist Dr Q. Isa Daudpota - who used to teachat the Jamshoro University back in those days.

Isa asked us to get in touch with a friend of his regarding Rannikot. His friend being the well known artist, late Prof.A. R. Nagori, a pioneer of socio-political art in Pakistan, who was also the Founder Head of the Fine Arts Dept. at the University of Sindh in Jamshoro. Since Mukhtar is an architect, with a keen interest in heritage buildings, Isa had wanted us to discuss with Prof. Nagori if it was possible to extend help in the preservation of this magnificent monument of gigantic proportions.

We met Prof. Nagori in his Karachi house. He had visited Rannikot, and what he described about the fort remained with us for over three decades, until recently when we were finally able to visit it. It was like a dream come true.

Nagori had told us in the seventies that it was impossible for ordinary citizens to take up the cause of the fort. “Now only the walls and gates of the fort remain, snaking over the Kirthar mountain range…but the area is replete with dacoits. A government agency such as thearchaeological department has to take it up in order to preserve this historical monument,” he had said. We also learnt that no one really knows its history / when exactly was it built.

So on the 11^th of the eleventh month of 2011, Mukhtar and I, together with our friend Shaheen (he is also Mukhtar’s old and very close class-mate) and his wife Nazneen were being driven towards Rannikot in a rented car by our driver Waris.

We left the house at 6.30 am, picked our two friends from their place at 7.00, stopped to fill the car’s tank with fuel, and reached Hyderabad at 9.15 am in order for Nazneen to deposit a few things at her sister’s place, as her niece was to get married in a few days. It was a small detour. We later passed through Jamshoro and over the Ghulam Mohammad Barrage where the River Indus was wide and swelled looking quite majestic, unlike its pitiful appearance before, when we had crossed it earlier to approach Hyderabad.

Rannikot lies to the west of the Indus Highway, 30 kilometers southwest of Sann (the ancestral village of the late G M Syed), and 90 kilometers north of Hyderabad in the hills of the great Kirthar Range.

Although the Super Highway, running between Karachi and Hyderabad, is far from being ‘super’, we were pleasantly surprised that the Indus Highway had perhaps been recently rebuilt and was a flawless road. It was therefore an enjoyable drive. We stopped for tea at one of those ‘New’ Quetta – Khyber ‘hotels’ which are sometimes no more than a shack, dotting our urban and rural areas.

While we waited for the famous ‘doodh patti chai’ to be served, I noticed a tractor decorated with ‘chamakpatti’ parked at the petrol pump nearby, so I had my camera out and sauntered over to take a picture. Normally trucks and buses in Pakistan tend to be decorated like this. I also noticed a young boy with rather sad eyes sitting atop a heavily decorated Bedford truck. A toddler sat beside him. I asked the older boy if he went to school (it was a Friday) and whereas the rest of the country observes Sunday as holiday, in interior Sindh Friday still remains a closed day). The boy, whose name wasIlyas (and his younger brother was called Riaz), said that he ‘worked’ with his uncle. “This is his truck and I go with him to Lahore,‘Pindi, Peshawar, Karachi…” Ilyas told me, evading my question as to why he wasn’t going to school. I wanted to know what they took with them on the truck. “Coal,” he replied, and turned his face, lest I ask him other difficult questions.

The tea was ready, so we had it together with the potato chips, biscuits, payday and barfi from our well-stocked car boot.

At around 10.45 am we noticed a rusty old signboard to the left of the Indus Highway at Sann, announcing ‘World’s Bigest (sic) FortRani Kot (sic)’. A smaller note on the same board read: “2500 Labours had prepared Fort Rani Kot 22 miles during 3-4 years, about before 325 BC. Not Accurate.” (Sic, sic, sic!)

The signboard has been prepared by the ‘Sindhi Culture and Tourism Department’ and there are also attempts to depict Rannikot through paintings of the hills, the walls, the terrain, and a map of the area.

Just minutes after the car had moved on the dusty narrow road, Waris brought the car to an abrupt halt as the road was completely broken. “Oh no!” All of us cried out. He told us not to worry and sank the tyres into the sandy drop, safely coming out on the other side.

A sandy desert stretches on both sides of the road but only some parts of it have been transformed into farmland; water being brought through a pipe from the Right Bank Outfall Drain (RBOD) for irrigation purposes.

For as far beyond and on the two sides of the road that we could see, there were no humans to be seen. For the first time since that morning, the five of us felt a bit jittery. Dacoits andkidnappers crossed our minds and we joked what could happen if we get way-laidin this wilderness where not a soul had appeared.

Suddenly we heard a motorbike approaching from the opposite end. We held our breaths! When it came in full view, we saw two men, a woman and a child sitting on it…villagers, who were going somewhere. “What a pity,” I said. “We are suspicious of all strangers.”

Mukhtar tried to get in touch with some people on his cell phone who lived in the Gabol village, which was a settlement supposed to be somewhere close to the fort. He had been given those contacts by architect Anila Naeem who teaches at the Architecture Dept at the NED University in Karachi, and who knew about our intended trip to Rannikot. Unfortunately, contact could not be established at any of the numbers. We were on our own.

We continued moving on, spotting a cow here and a sheep there but other than those the same sense of an eerie quiet and desolation prevailed. The dominant vegetation all around was babulor Acacia nilotica and keekar or Acacia arabica.

Finally, after half an hour, and about two hours from the time we had reached Hyderabad, we were most excited to catch the first sight of the Rannikot fort from a distance of about four kilometers. Indeed it was snaking over the mountain ridges, and Mukhtar and I immediately thought of our visit in 2007 of the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China, which is close to Beijing. However, while the main Chinese wall is around 3,460 km long with an extra 2,860 km of branches, Rannikot’s total circumference is about 26 km. Sure, no comparison with the Great Wall, but nonetheless, impressive. According to a legend, a helpful dragon had traced out the course of the Great Wall and the builders followed the tracks of the dragon. I wondered if there was any such legend attached to Rannikot as the original purpose and builders of the fort remains a mystery.

According to Wikipedia, “a tale told by the local inhabitants tells of fairies coming from far and wide on the Poonam Nights (full moon) to take bath at a spring near 'Karo Jabal' (black rock). Splashing sounds of water falling on the rocks can be heard at another spring, Waggun jo Tarr or "the Crocodile Spring", named so as crocodiles once lived there.”

Regarding the history of Rannikot, Wikipedia goes on to note that “some archaeologists attribute it to Arabs, or possibly built by a Persian noble under the Abbasids by Imran Bin Musa Barmaki who was the Governor of Sindh in 836. Others have suggested a much earlier period of construction attributing to at times the Sassanians Persians and at times to the Greeks. Despite the fact that a prehistoric site of Amri is nearby, there is no trace of any old city inside the fort and the present structure has little evidence of prehistoric origins.

Archaeologists point to 17th century as its time of first construction but now Sindh archaeologists agree that some of the present structure was reconstructed by Mir Karam Ali Khan Talpur and his brother Mir Murad Ali in 1812 at a cost of 1.2 million rupees (Sindh Gazetteer, 677).”

We kept getting out of the car at intervals to take pictures as we approached the fort, and then at the foot of the wall where two hills fork out to the left and the right, with a gate built at the bottom on each side. But instead of climbing the wall there we were keen to explore the area further, and drove ahead. Unfortunately though, just after half a km we came upon a vast ditch where there was no road, or a path in any form and we could see that a bridge or a road was to be constructed there, or at least we hope that what we saw was not an abandoned project.

This was indeed a setback and we had no choice but to make a ‘U’ turn to return to where we came from. We saw some goats on our right, grazing here and there, and a shepherd’s path, which could have taken us to the village. The Kirthar mountain range has a number of hills oriented north-south, separated by valleys. The altitudes there range between 70 to 1004 meters. We noticed the calcareous sedimentary rocks that made up those hills.

We were keen to return and climb over to see what views the majestic sweep of the fortification offered. Apparently, the name of the fort is due to the dry bed of the Ranni River.

We were back at the turreted gateway, a classic example of defensive architecture, and I was pleased with myself that Ihad my joggers on, as the place was full of spiky babul thorns, pebbles and stones. What had appeared from afar as brick structures (and Mukhtar kept wondering aloud how that was possible in the arid land that we observed all around, where there wasn’t enough water – except for some water trickling down from a small stream - or enough timber in the absence of forests to fire the kilns in order to make the bricks) were in fact all stonework, and unfortunately some ill-advised ‘conservation’ efforts with concrete and paint jobs stood out like a sore thumb.

We climbed the stairs along the walls on the ridges that go twisting and dropping around the hills and disappear from view in the distance. There are numerous slots and peep-holes in the wall, which could have been made for the archers defending the fort.

The walls, made of gypsum and dressed sandstone are about 6 meters high in most places, reinforced with bastions along the outer wall. Catching our breaths now and then, we kept climbing higher and higher, with Nazneen and myself leading the two men who were taking it easy as they climbed, discussing the architecture and the probabilities of the mysterious place, which overlooks other hills and valleys, and just like the remnants of the stream that we had seen earlier, there must be other streams and ponds, fossils, flora and fauna that were hidden from our untrained eyes. Shaheen had quipped that Sir Richard Attenborough would have found at least fifty species of insects in this wild terrain!

I forgot to mention that while we climbed thefortification on the right hill, our driver Waris requested to take Mukhtar’s camera and he climbed the hill on the left. In the meanwhile we were also joined by three men, all dressed in white, starched shalwar-kameez, who came on two motorbikes. They had come from Dadu. Just when we were climbing, they came down and joined Waris on the other hill.

After a few minutes of our ascent, as we were admiring the structure, the watch towers, the steps, the view all around, the serenity of the environs was suddenly disturbed by loud voices and shouts coming from below.

We noticed a white van, and some fifteen young men coming out of it, running towards ‘our’ hill.

A few of them overtook us, but then stopped ahead, panting heavily. I wanted to know where they were from. “Larkana,” said one young man. Apparently, most of them were from Larkana but a few were also from other towns. All of them were friends who had hired the van for the day. Like us, it was also their first visit to Rannikot. “We saw it on the National Geographic channel,” quipped one of them when I asked how they had learned about it. Another boy said he had come across some information on the Internet.

These young men were shocked to see that the four of us, more than double their age, had managed to climb up, and yet we were not breathless. We told them that the trick was not to be running around, but to climb slowly and steadily. However, for the last summit, which was so steep that Nazneen and me and even Mukhtar, declined to attempt the climb, but Shaheen was gung-ho about it and he managed to go right up to the top. He saw more hills and more fortifications, but found no signs of any ruined city down below.

After spending a good two hours there, we figured that unless we can establish a local contact for a guided tour of the area, wewere at a dead end and decided to begin our return journey. But when we realized that there was still time for us to consider paying a visit to Sehwan Sharif, only 45 km away, we decided to embark on yet another trip…

Rannikot, the enigma, we hope we can pay another visit, and soon.

Rumana Husain

2011-10-16T11:17:00.000+05:00

Images to the icon
‘Postcards to Faiz’, commemorated the birth centenary of the humanist poet

The Faiz Art Prize exhibition and related events concluded last week, with an impressive ceremony at the historic Frere Hall in Karachi. The evening was organised by Aman Ki Asha, Nukta Art and the Progressive Writers’ Association, to applaud the winners of the art competition ‘Postcards to Faiz’. To commemorate the birth centenary of the humanist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, icon of peace and tolerance, upholder of social justice and human rights and a devotee of the arts, the A4 sized Postcard was an appropriate and specially chosen format for expression. Artists combined letters and imagery, materials and relief in their messages to Faiz, as also to the awam, the masses.

About 150 practicing Pakistani artists and art students from across the country, as well as artists in the Diaspora sent their Postcards, including Abdullah M. Syed, Adeel-uz-Zafar, Amin Gulgee, Ghalib Baqar, Hamra Abbas, Hasnat Mehmood, Mashkoor Raza, Meher Afroz, Moeen Faruqi, Naz Ikramullah, Riffat Alvi, Ruby Chishti, Sabah Hussain, Saeed Akhtar, Shakeel Siddiqui, Sylvat Aziz, Zubeda Javed and several others. A few entries were also received from India.

A distinguished jury belonging to the fields of visual arts and literature determined the awards. These included Prof. Naazish Ataullah, Mussarrat Nahid Imam, Saquib Hanif, Tariq Rangoonwala, and Dr Asif Aslam Farrukhi.

The Jury Awards for artists went to Karachi-based Meher Afroz and New York-based Ruby Chishti, while another Karachi artist, Sheema Khan received the Popular Award, which was decided by the votes of all those hundreds of people who visited the show throughout the week. Each of them received a beautiful translucent ruby-coloured statuette, conceived and crafted by Shahid Sajjad, arguably the most prominent sculptor of the country.

Several years ago when I had asked artist Meher Afroz about the imagery in her art, she had said that she explored her subconscious in her paintings. She was brought up amongst a large number of family members in her grandparents’ huge ancestral home in Lucknow, where there were “three aangans, three devdees, a kutubkhana and an azakhana… Aware of the various conflicts around her, she had learned to treasure good values early in life.

Her deeply devout and religious but nevertheless broad-minded father, as head of the family, gave his children a traditional upbringing. Meher was, however, allowed to study at the liberal Government College of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow, from where she graduated with honours in Fine Arts.

For Meher to come out as one of the winners is perhaps not surprising for those who have followed her seamless continuum. She has been projecting her worldview and philosophy in her prints and paintings: the contradictions and conflicts of the man of the new millennium, sometimes exploring the new relationships that he forms with the outside world, and sometimes lamenting the moral decadence that startles and mortifies her. Her temporal experiences have been expressed through various ‘series’, such as portraits, masks, puppets, amulets, mehvar, niche, hisar, zindaan, dastawez, etc.

For the Postcard to Faiz, Meher rendered a beautiful collage created with tiny, jewel-like triangles of gold and silver arranged in the ganga-jamni tradition and titled “yeh phool hain kay lahoo.” The words are taken from Faiz’s famous poem “Yahan say Sheher ko Dekho” from the verse “jo rung her dar o deevaar per pareshan hain, yahan say kuch nahi khulta yeh phool hain kay lahoo.”

Meher’s collage reminds me of some of her other works in which she has used needle-work, appliqué, etc. Her ‘postcard’ is an interpretation of the dualism between the benevolent and the malignant. It can also be read as the artist transcending the duality of her times and achieving a kind of enlightenment…spirituality. The amalgamation of the text and the gold and silver paper cut-outs has several layers of meaning. In the background, the artist has used words from a marsia written by Mir Anees, which describes the martyrdom of Ali Akbar, the handsome, eighteen year old son of Imam Husain who, like several other men fighting the Yazidi forces, sacrificed his life in the battle of Kerbala on the tenth of Moharram.

Meher arranges and thus presents the pieces of shiny paper geometrically as if they are four-petalled flowers blossoming after the blood has been spilled. Since the words in the title are from the compiled works of Faiz called “Sar e wadi e Sina” (The Valley of Sinai), and all the poetry in the composition is quite poignant, Meher has created a unique relationship between the heart-rending marsia and Faiz’s poetry, which will remain relevant for all times to come. She observes that man has two major responsibilities: he should either give evidence to an event he/she has witnessed or convey those important messages to other people. The truth as elicited in the verses of Faiz reveals the layers of the intangible as well as ceremonial interaction and dualities.

Ruby Chishti, who trained as a sculptor at the NCA, Lahore, is the other award-winner. Ruby lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In the light of the medium used by her in all her works (fabric, straw, plastic bags, old newspapers, cotton-wool, etc.) it is interesting to read this text on her website: “The materials Ruby employs raise the question of permanence, a preoccupation in our society. However the artist believes the value of works cannot be measured in how long they survive. We have seen ideas that exist nowhere last for centuries and sculptures in bronze meant to stay forever melted down for weapons.”

Ruby Chishti’s entry for the Faiz Art Prize was certainly one of the most innovative works in the show. Although she has continued to use the same idiom as she does for her other works created in a contemporary manner while employing traditional doll / toy-making techniques with novelty, her Postcard to Faiz was an outstanding example of thinking out of the box.

Her award-winning work, using threads and scraps of fabric is titled “aaj ik harf ko dhoondta phirta hai khayaal” (my thoughts today are in search of a single word). These words are borrowed from Faiz’s poem by the same title in his work “Shaam e Shehr Yaraan” of which some of the other lines read: “mudh bhara harf koee, zehr bhara harf koee, dilnasheen harf koee, qehr bhara harf koee…”

As mentioned earlier, Sheema Khan received the Popular Award. A miniaturist, she received her training at the Visual Studies Department at the Karachi University. It was obvious that her entry was a popular choice of the visitors who were fascinated by the unusual 3D miniature. A diptych, one part of it was a executed in wood and paper. She references the ‘Hamzanama’, titling her work “bus ker rukh amn ka,” drawing connections from history and literally ‘framing’ today’s socio-political circumstances.

The other part is text-based, where Faiz’s verse is calligraphed in bold: “mataa-e-loh-o-qalam chhin gaee to kya ghum hai, keh khoon-e-dil mai dubo li hain ungliyan main ne, zuban pe mohr lagi hai to kya, keh rakh di hai har ik halqa-e-zanjeer main zuban main ne,” which could be translated as follows: what if they snatch my pen and ink, I have dipped my fingers in the blood of my heart; even if they seal my tongue I have no qualms, as I have kept my tongue in each ring of the chain around me!

The writer is cofounding senior editor of Nukta Art, one of the organisers of the Faiz Art Prize.

Published in The News, Sunday, 16 October 2011.

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2011-weekly/nos-16-10-2011/enc.htm#3

Skewers and Surnames: Chinese Muslims of Shanghai

2011-09-25T14:55:00.015+05:00

I recently had a chance to spend the month of Ramazan, and also Eid, in Shanghai. Although not very noticeable, there are approximately 60,000 Muslims living in Shanghai, a city of over twenty million. There was a speedy increase in the Muslim population of this city after the Opium War in 1840, after which Shanghai was forced to open up for foreign trade.

Islam was first introduced in China in its earliest days through Arab and Central Asian traders. The Chinese Emperor at the time, Yong Hui, who otherwise had no interest in adopting foreign ideas and beliefs, out of respect for the first Muslim mission to China, ordered the building of a mosque in Canton City (Guangzhou). The Memorial Mosque, first built in the seventh century, was entirely rebuilt in 1350 AD, and rebuilt again in 1695 under Emperor Kangzi of the Qing dynasty, after being destroyed in a fire. It is also known as the Great Mosque of Guangzhou. The mosque complex covers an area of about 3,000 square meters and stretches along the north-south axis, in the Chinese fashion. Like its contemporaries at Quanzhou, Hangzhou and Yangzhou, the Great Mosque of Guangzhou is notable for its integration of the local Han building tradition with imported Arab styles.

From official estimates of about 200 million religious believers in the country today, 11% are said to be Muslims. Within this, the largest community is the 9.8 million Hui Muslims, followed by 8.4 million Uyghurs living in the West of the country. Other Muslim groups include the Dongxiang, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tatar, Tajik, Uzbek, Salar and Bao’an. The majority of Chinese Muslims are descendents of Iranian, Turkish or Arabian parents who married in China and adopted many Han Chinese customs.
There are about a dozen mosques in Shanghai. The oldest mosque is the Songjiang Mosque, built during the Yuan dynasty (1341-1868). Every Friday, about 35 to 40 stalls are lined up on both sides of the street near the Huxi Mosque. This is perhaps the biggest Muslim food bazaar in the city offering halal foods, and is visited by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. You will see woks of rice, lamb cooked in a variety of ways (lamb kababs, lamb on skewers, lamb broth…), naan in different tastes, shapes and sizes, pulao, beef dumplings, noodles, grilled mutton chops, shashlik and chicken, spices, fresh and dry fruit, also mehndi and kajal from Pakistan!

There are several Uyghur Muslim restaurants in the city serving Xinjiang food. They range from small places with no special ambience to large, crowded restaurants where the dishes served, the music played, and the wall murals are all characteristic of Central Asia. A restaurant called Xibo, serving Xinjiang food, is perhaps the only one of its kind in Shanghai which has a chic and contemporary interior. Muslim eating places in the city remain open all day during Ramazan. An ‘Assalam o Alaikum’ to the owner or Muslim bearers will ensure a big friendly smile and good service.
Beards are not exclusive to the Muslims in China. Very few Chinese men grow beards and/or moustaches. This is perhaps a result of growing western influence as, according to ancient Confucian custom, the Chinese were not supposed to cut their hair or shave their beard in conformity with filial piety. However, many Chinese Muslim men cover their heads with caps, and women with scarves. In most other ways, however, the Chinese Muslims are quite ‘Sinicized’ and have integrated with the Han majority.

Readers may be interested to know what Dawood C. M. Ting writes in ‘Islamic Culture in China’ regarding the adoption of Chinese surnames by Chinese Muslims: “Many Muslims whose names started with the letter M took the surname Ma, partly because Muslims loved horses and the character Ma stands for horses. There is a common saying, ‘Nine Ma in ten Muslims.’ The Chinese surnames Mo, Mai, and Mu have been adopted by Muslims whose names were Mohammad, Mustafa, Murad, Masood. Many Muslims who found no existing common Chinese surname sounding like their names simply used the Chinese character sounding closest to their name, for example, Ta for Dawood and Tahir; Ha for Hasan; Ho for Husain; Ting for Jalaluddin or Shamsuddin…” When in China, do as the Chinese do!
Text and images by Rumana Husain

http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/25/shanghai-muslims-skewers-and-surnames.html

The Adventures of Feluda by Satyajit Ray

2011-06-27T13:19:00.004+05:00

Holmes of Kolkata

The series, The Adventures of Feluda consists of thirty-five stories, written by one of the greatest filmmakers of our times, Satyajit Ray. A writer, screenwriter, director, producer, advertising man, illustrator, composer, graphic designer… he directed over 30 films, wrote over 40 books, (a similar number of books have been written about him) and received no less than 60 national and international awards - winning almost every major prize that could be won! In 1992, at the age of 71, and on his deathbed, he received an Oscar for a lifetime of achievement in films.
Ray was born in a family of exceptionally gifted people. His father, Sukumar, was full of wit and wisdom, with phenomenal observation, logical thinking and memory. He was a brilliant writer – a satirist, and India's first writer of nonsense rhymes in Bengali, akin to Dr. Seuss. He was also a photographer and an illustrator. His mother, Suprabha, was an outstanding singer. His grandfather was a scientist, amateur astronomer, illustrator, musician, writer of children’s stories and a publisher of a children’s magazine called Sandesh, which he started in 1894, to be revived by grandson Satyajit in 1969.

Ray not only wrote the Adventures of Feluda appearing in Sandesh, he wrote other books for children and illustrated them too. He also made films for them. In 1969 he made a song and dance children’s fantasy film – Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. For his 1974 film Sonar Kella, he received the Best Feature Film for Children and Young Adults award. The story of Sonar Kella is the story of one of the books under review: The Golden Fortress.

Apparently, it was Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thief that inspired Ray to start work on his first film, Pather Panchali, which he made in 1955. He is amongst some of the greatest directors of cinema who have ‘made a difference,’ such as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Shyam Benegal. “He distilled the urban as well as the rural landscape with equal felicity, whether involved in a pacy drama about a child from a random cross section of metropolitan low life, or while painting a grimly authentic canvas of squalour and destitution in the City of Dreadful Night (Kolkata),” says Anwer Mooraj (Dawn, April 26, 2004) about Ray’s exceptional talent as a filmmaker.

Ray went to Shantiniketan, the unconventional open-air university founded by another Bengali genius, Rabindranath Tagore, where he studied fine art, read extensively, appreciated and studied nature, and became interested in graphic design.
Satyajit Ray wrote the Feluda stories between 1965 and 1992, most of which were extremely popular among Bengali children. Humour is an important aspect of the exploits of detective Feluda. Urbane and clever, Feluda has won children over, and now the English translations by Puffin Books, of a dozen of these stories, has made them available widely.

The four children’s books under review are based on the super sleuth Feluda, whose real name is Pradosh Chander Mitter, and who is accompanied by his cousin Topshe. Sometimes, a half-witted crime-fiction writer on the lookout for exciting adventures - Lalmohan Babu alias Jatayu - also assists Feluda.

A highly ‘visual’ person, Ray had the ability to imagine not only things that were tangible but also those that were abstract – like music - a useful trait which few authors have, but one that gives them the opportunity to express their words in pictures as they themselves see them. Unfortunately, the four storybooks under review, translated from the Bengali into English by Gopa Majumdar, do not have any illustrations. However, she has done a great job of the translations; the racy tempo and vivid characterisations maintain the reader’s interest with such impact that the illustrations are not missed too much. Majumdar has translated several works of Satyajit Ray, including all of the Feluda stories for Penguin Books India.

In The Golden Fortress Ray takes the reader out from the congested city of Calcutta to the sandy deserts of Rajhastan, where the archaeological romance of cities such as Jodhpur, Bikaner and Jaisalmar is interwoven with the hair-raising escapades of Feluda and Topshe, ala Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Like Watson, Topshe narrates all the stories. In The Golden Fortress the two are on the trail of a parapsychologist Dr. Hajra and a jatismar boy - Mukul - of eight years of age. Jatismar is a term that is used for people who claim to remember their previous lives.

The complex case that Feluda has to unravel has several strands and several steps. Far-flung desert cities; a reincarnated boy from lush, tropical Bengal who remembers sandy deserts, peacocks, and a golden fortress; suspicious characters lurking in Circuit Houses and Dak Bungalows; railway platforms and old forts; taxi drives and camel rides; friendly Sardarjis and ominous-looking Rajhastani bandits… The story of The Golden Fortress is replete with these, plus the inevitable hidden treasure that is the main objective of the bad guys for kidnapping Mukul.

The second book, Incident on the Kalka Mail is a tale of switched attaché cases, and the deft handling of the case by Feluda. “Feluda spoke with ice in his voice. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that the tables have turned? So stop playing this game and let’s hear what you have to say.” Most typical of the detective, who always seems to have the upper hand, eventually. In the same book, he and his two assistants have to travel to Simla which, according to young Topshe, is a hill-station for which they had to first travel by airplane from Calcutta to Delhi and then on a metre gauge train from Kalka to Simla. “I had seen snow-capped mountains before – Kanchenjunga in Darjeeling and the top of Annapurna from a plane; and certainly I had seen snow in films. But nothing had startled me as much as what I saw in Simla. If it wasn’t for other Indians strolling on the streets, I could have sworn we were in a foreign country,” he says, referring to the snow, the neatly laid out wooden cottages and the Alpine forests in Simla. On the Kalka Mail is another thrilling adventure that includes an old manuscript and a large diamond, and which reaches its climax on the snowy slopes of the popular Indian hill-station.

The Secret of the Cemetery, the third book, is a complex, blood-curdling mystery of an English and a Bengali family interlinked by marriages. The story unfolds in Calcutta’s Park Street cemetery as well as in some of the city’s old murky lanes and buildings. Any tale that has to do with a century old dug-up grave, a midnight vigil in the graveyard, cryptograms, antique clocks and watches is sure to make the reader jittery, and The Secret of the Cemetery is no exception. The protagonist trio of this particular adventure remain in the city of their origin, rather than travelling to other places in the country, like they do for most cases. Ray however does not miss a chance to familiarise his young readers with some of the history of the city, as well as with its different landmarks.

Nevertheless, in The Criminals of Kathmandu the clever Bengali detective and the duo, Topshe and Lalmohan Babu get to travel to Nepal to resolve a murder mystery and much more.

The Puffin Books of the Feluda series are small, handy paperbacks. Each book is approximately of a hundred pages, indeed a good size to handle and cuddle with in bed at night, devouring the thrillers, savouring the flow of the language, and also learning a great deal about people and places in the bargain!

Review: Rumana Husain (Published on August 8, 2004 in Dawn newspaper's Books & Authors)http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/books/archive/040808/books5.htm

Author: Satyajit Ray
All the titles under review of The Adventures of Feluda have been translated from the Bengali by Gopa Majumdar
Cover photographs of all four books by Ashish Chawla
Cover design by Ajanta Guhathakurta
Published in Puffin by Penguin Books India 2004
Price: India Rs. 99.00 each
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book title: The Golden Fortress
ISBN: 014333577- 4
No. of pages: 119
---------------------------
Book title: Incident On The Kalka Mail
ISBN: 014333578-2
No. of pages: 95
--------------------------
Book title: The Secret Of The Cemetery
ISBN: 014333580- 4
No. of pages: 110
--------------------------
Book title: The Criminals of Kathmandu
ISBN: 014333572 - 3
No. of pages: 89

URBAN FACTS

2011-06-24T09:57:00.008+05:00

Urbanism is a Long Game – Evolving Karachi 1838-2011

The mega-city of Karachi now has a demographic pattern which defies description, and a population which increases by the day. According to official sources, the population in 2007 was estimated at 18 million, spread over 3,500 sq km. Its citizens include those who have lived their entire lives here and watched it evolve rapidly, as well as those who have migrated to Karachi due to its several urban qualities. For the migrant, opportunities out-weigh all other attributes of this commercial city. It is therefore vital that, as the years go by progressive changes within the city are highlighted in a resolutely optimistic perspective by those at the helm of affairs. Is the city responsive to the needs of all its inhabitants? Unfortunately, Karachi is planned and managed in a way that excludes significant portions of the public. The absence of a fair balance between the power of the public and the finances of the private and commercial pressures behind almost every project forces peculiarities and wastefulness, sometimes even by the most restrained designers. In this nexus of the (powerful) politicians and the (donor-driven) planners, those who get marginalized are the people who are often not organized, or form small, formal or informal interest groups.

Today’s Karachi is a far cry from the small walled settlement, with an area of 0.12 sq km and a population of a thousand inhabitants, which slowly rose to 14,000 by 1838. It was then a tiny fishing village near the Lyari River, mainly near today’s ‘Tower’ area, with smaller settlements at two locations on either side of the inlet from the sea. Karachi was officially adopted as the seaport of Sindh in the latter part of the eighteenth century. By 1870 the population had risen to over 50,000. Its strategic location, together with its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural population base, to this day gives the city its distinctive quality. Though members of the different communities generally prefer living in neighbourhood clusters, there are, on the other hand, also those who are happier living by themselves, away from their families / tribes / clans / communities, mixing with other groups. This tendency of living-together or living-away has created a constantly evolving situation, providing its own joys as well as tribulations.
By 1922 a substantial growth had taken place in the population of Karachi, with people living in a built-up area spreading in all directions. A new road had been built to the north-west and noticeable port activity had also started. The Saddar area, the Mewa Shah graveyard and small settlements across the Lyari were to be seen. In order to facilitate growing port activities, some changes were made to the geographical layout of the port area. By 1944, just a few years before Partition, Karachi, a vibrant city, was expanding to the east and south-east and settlements along the road leading out of the city to the east were growing in size. The population that year was estimated to be 399,000 people, with a settlement sprouting at Malir. A railway track was in place, parallel to the road, and the airport too started functioning. Outstanding town planning and some very notable architecture marked the city. Karachi had become not only an important seaport but also an all-weather airport for undivided India.
In an independent Pakistan, Karachi became the first capital of the country, and its significance increased manifold. As the only port city in the Western Wing at the time, it also acted as an important connecting point between West and East Pakistan. Besides the large-scale migration of Muslims from India due to Partition, (1 million, according to the census of 1951), a large number of people from different parts of the country also migrated to Karachi in search of better prospects. New housing schemes were developed to accommodate this influx. Residential settlements began to be spaced more densely, and these grew to the north, south and east along the road to the airport, as well as in Malir and beyond.
By 1970 the city’s population was 3 million, with substantial and sustained growth visible all over the city. The vacant land between earlier settlements had been built up. The development of SITE to the north-west, Korangi to the south-east and North Karachi further north, as well as larger orchards and agricultural land east and north-east of Malir, had grown in size. The central business district along I. I. Chundrigar Road represented a high-density development close to the port area. Land in the possession of the armed forces could be seen within the city and at its periphery to the east. In 1971, 175,000 non-Bengalis living in the former East Pakistan migrated to Karachi after the creation of Bangladesh. By 1972, the population had increased to 3.5 million, and the city had expanded to 640 sq km, nearly doubling in ten years.
In the next decade, the population once again almost doubled. By 1985 the large suburban residential neighborhoods of Nazimabad, North Nazimabad and North Karachi to the north, and Federal ‘B’ Area and Gulshan-e-Iqbal adjacent to these to the east became significantly developed. Similarly Korangi, extending eastward to Landhi, grew substantially. P.E.C.H.S and Kehkashan (Clifton) also witnessed fast pace of development, commercial as well as residential. Karachi was now a very large city.

Today the city is divided into eighteen towns, and governed and administered for infrastructure and municipal services such as water, sanitation, disposal of solid waste, traffic engineering, road repairs, parks, street lights, etc. Lately, the expansion of roads, underpasses, bridges, the Lyari Expressway, the Northern Bypass, the rapid ‘greening’ of the city and an influx of large billboards have all contributed to the way the city has evolved.

Failure to develop a housing plan for the poor has led to the underprivileged seeking shelter in settlements on illegally occupied lands. Karachi’s mega-problems are perhaps similar to those of megacities around the developing world: political, ethnic and religious strife, shortage of clean drinking water, lack of a reliable electricity supply, lack of public transport, schools, hospitals, parks, playgrounds, and jobs. There are acute problems of coastal degradation and pollution, and the chronic shortage of housing units and land ownership is a familiar undercurrent. What was once the pride of Sindh has now become a symbol of over-growth, pollution, mistrust, poverty and violence. Karachi is not new to political violence, which sometimes takes the shape of ethnic or linguistic bloodshed, as well as brutality by the land and drug mafias.
After reading a story about the makeover of Nigeria’s capital city Lagos in a recent issue of Time, I began to see a ray of hope. Perhaps in a few years Karachi too can become safer, friendlier, healthier and self-sufficient in terms of energy. Fashola, governor of Lagos since 2007, on taking over saw opportunity amidst the chaos: The infrastructural deficit of Lagos was a chance to relieve its poverty. If there was a bad road, it meant they needed engineers and laborers, architects, valuers, land merchants, banks, merchandisers, suppliers of steel and cement, and food courts. After Fashola’s intervention over just four years, the city today has fewer traffic problems, garbage dumps are replaced with parks and 59% people (instead of the previous 30%) have access to clean water. The changes he is overseeing improve infrastructure, create jobs, make money.
Has Karachi become more chaotic than Lagos was? Can no amount of planning (or wishful thinking) restore it to its original glory? Inspite of the pitfalls of predicting the future, it must be acknowledged that urbanism is a long game, and what is being built now will define the way the next generation will live, and grudgingly bear the consequences of our follies. Or will the city find a messiah who will transform it for the better?

By Rumana Husain
Published in Dawn, Lifestyle supplement, 24 June 2011

Images for sale!

2011-06-23T17:23:00.003+05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rumana-husain/

Visit the above link to view the images and contact the photographer through this blog.
Thank you!

The comic-tragic-magic of Begum Jaan

2011-06-19T11:34:00.006+05:00

Begum Jaan is a vivid, colourful woman lost in the folds of time. In the 1940s and 50s, she was a star, a popular singer and a courtesan, but now lives a life of penury in the play Begum Jaan, set in the 1990s.

Begum Jaan has a compelling story, written by Javed Siddiqi, one of the finest writers in Mumbai, who writes in both Urdu and Hindi. An active member of IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association), Siddiqi has written several plays for the theatre, including the much celebrated Tumhari Amrita. He has also written television serials, as also dialogues, screenplays and stories for a number of films. He wrote the dialogues for Satyajit Ray’s famous film Shatranj Ke Khiladi and is behind a number of other successful Bollywood movies, such as Baazigar, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Zubeida, Taal, and many more.
The old and reclusive singer, Begum Jaan, was at one time full of affinity and proximity with other great classical musicians like Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Jaddan Bai, Begum Akhtar and others, and artists like Shakir Ali who painted a portrait of Begum Jaan before he ‘went away to Pakistan’, while the painting continued to occupy pride of place in her house. At one time she was also close to the likes of Majaaz, Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, but now lives in oblivion, treasuring the memories of her past. These memories are preserved not only in her alert mind but also in the form of several letters written to her by none other than Maulana Azad, kept inside a Kashmiri lacquered wooden box which is fiercely guarded by her. Begum Jaan has a strong plot and a vast canvas: from the dying legacy of classical music and traditional values to Begum Jaan’s personal life. However, the play is at times a tad slow in its pace.
Nimra Bucha plays the title role of Begum Jaan with great aplomb; the gritty as well as witty character of this erstwhile diva of classical music who originally hails from Bijnaur (the ‘Hindustani’ / Urdu-speaking Rohilkhand or Bareilly region in Uttar Pradesh, India). There were innumerable lines spoken by her in a characteristic lyrical style, such as “Yeh haath zara sambhaal ker pakadna, purana hay” when, in the opening scene, she is being assisted to be seated; or the pun she makes on the word ‘record-breaking’ “Mein nay bohut say record today hain,” referring to breaking her own ‘gramophone records’, and some profound statements such as “History books may jo likha hay aisa safaid jhoot tau alif laila may bhi nahi hota,” and “Aik puri quam dhobi ka kutta bun gaee, na ghar ka na ghaat ka”; or the philosophical “Ghar main jitnay ziada kamray hotay hain aangan utna hi chota ho jaata hay.”

One missed having playwright Javed Siddiqi here from across the border each time the audience applauded his dialogues. It was difficult to decide whether to applaud the writer, the actors, or the director, Anjum Ayaz, who is a senior faculty member at NAPA. Begum Jaan is NAPA’s 16th production, which played from 3rd to 12th June every evening at the Arts Council auditorium in Karachi.

Living with the old woman is her young and attractive granddaughter, Zarina, played brilliantly by Naila Jafri, a well known actor, who plays young, middle-aged and elderly characters in television serials. She endears herself to the audience with her smart quips, her charm and talent.

In fact the two women in the cast of just three characters in the play steal the show away from Ali Sheikh, a NAPA graduate who plays the role of Sanjay Panday, a young journalist cum biographer. Sanjay is keenly interested in Begum Jaan’s life’s story, relentlessly pursuing her as one of the last living vestiges of a time of great historical importance.
Initially, Begum Jaan resonates with the memories of films such as Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jan Ada and Shyam Benegal's Sardari Begum, which are both stories of courtesans and women musicians set in pre-independence India. But only fleetingly, as the similarity ends there. Begum Jaan has lived through the political turmoil of Partition, and is now a recluse whose only goal and interest in life is to get Zarina married. When Sanjay Panday comes looking for a story, initially posing as a needy tenant in Begum Jaan’s old house, strangely, she does not even raise the issue of any religious disharmony when she openly suggests that he should marry her granddaughter.
The tanpura, takht, round wooden table, a wall clock that has stopped working - in contrast to the aged Begum Jaan whose life is ticking away fast - two paandaans, a khaasdan, a large old-fashioned radio, and an equally old-fashioned gramophone with a trumpet playing some great songs by Shamshad Begum, whose voice fills the void of the old house (“kaahe jadoo kiya mujhko itna bataa jadugar balma…”). In some scenes the background music is provided by songs sung by Begum Akhtar and other female classical singers from the thirties to fifties, all a lilting reminder of the glorious UP culture of yore. Begum Jaan’s ghararas and batwas further consolidate the memories of a bygone era, pitting the past against the present.

Nimra Bucha comes out with flying colours in her portrayal of an extraordinary woman who continues to live and guard her languorous past, while the character of the journalist presents the heartlessness of the media's fetish for information and scandals.
Although I saw the play on its fifth night, it was heartening to see an almost full house. I wish, however, that the ticket was more affordable for a lot of more people to enjoy this remarkable play. Besides a lapse here and there the play was near perfect: Sanjay’s identity – his name does not get established in time. A house-keeping detail was overlooked: two women live in the house but closing the front door does not seem to be a routine, even at night, making it quite convenient for Sanjay to re-enter the premises and attempt stealing the box of letters from Begum Jaan’s bedroom. But the biggest irritant for the actors and most of the audience was the frequent buzz of cellphones, and people sauntering in after the play had begun (promptly, well done NAPA!) and then daring to walk right towards the front seats.
Nevertheless, it is a fascinating drama with an intensely engaging interaction between the three protagonists, used as a vehicle to present a poignant observation on the altering face of India…er…Pakistan.

By Rumana Husain (Published in The News on Sunday 19 June 2011: http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2011-weekly/nos-19-06-2011/enc.htm#3 )

SUBSCRIBE AYE KARACHI! for a pittance!

2011-06-14T12:59:00.003+05:00

SUBSCRIBE! Get your personal copy of AYE Karachi! for Rs 800 only, for 4 issues per year (for receiving within Karachi). For details please write to: info@jaal.org (the new - 2nd issue - will be out soon).
AYE Karachi! is a Bilingual Quarterly City Guide and Features Magazine. With reports, articles, listings, reviews, advertisements, and much more, this Karachi city magazine is a lively guide - the first of its kind for Pakistan.

- Rumana Husain, Founder Editor
- Amra Alam, Co-Editor
- Shammi Jameel, Coordinator Advertisements
- JAAL, Publisher
Email: info@jaal.org
Phone: (92-21) 35843257, 35843462

Cambridge-Karachi project video

2011-05-27T15:03:00.007+05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lg0u2bXAwo
This is the link to a video that Caroline Jaine (project artist)and Ingrid Stellmacher (who shot this video)had shot when they came to Karachi for the first time. The video was created after their visit with me to Saddar for Caroline's 'Cambridge-Karachi project.' (I am also carrying a copy of my book with me at Caroline's request...!)
In her initial communication to me, Caroline wrote:
"A group of business-people from a particular street in Cambridge have approached me to be involved. What makes Mill Road in Cambridge special is that it has a strong entrepreneurial spirit and it's inhabitants are from every continent in the world. Every religion is represented there too. Again this is entirely organic - I did not contrive this - but I will need to find a street in Karachi where different cultures and religions mix (in the name of business). It might even be fun to see if there are any British business people there (as there are Pakistanis on Mill Road). I would be much obliged to you if you can take me to such a street of diverse people living there. I want to show that Karachi is more than a city with terrorists."

Caroline has worked as a British diplomat in Sri Lanka, and for some years now as an artist in Cambridge. Her paper-back book, 'A Portrait of Cambridge and Karachi' is a 70-page documentary with stunning photographs that juxtapose the people and places in Cambridge, England with those in Karachi, Pakistan - many of who were drawn from the business communities of both cities. This book forms part of a body of work, demonstrating a dialogue between these two places using the arts and film. http://jaine.info/cambridgekarachi.aspx
Read 'Another Face to Pakistan' on Caroline's blog:
http://muslimvoices.org/face-pakistan/

Raising Good Readers

2011-04-24T11:27:00.009+05:00

The New School (TNS) shares its acronym with this paper’s Sunday edition. It was therefore natural for me to assume that the call I got recently from ‘TNS Lahore’ was from the paper to which I have been contributing quite regularly lately.

However, I was informed that The New School is a part of the famous Beaconhouse School System, and is aimed at a new generation of parents who are ready to give charge to the school to undertake an unconventional approach towards learning for their children. I had no hesitation in accepting the invitation to fly to Lahore (I am based in Karachi) to share my experiences with its body of students, teachers, and parents.

Entitled ‘Futurekids: interactive workshops for enterprising parents 2011’, an open-house event was scheduled for Sunday, April 17. I was requested to read out my own stories to children in a 45-minute session in the morning and, more importantly, conduct a workshop for parents in another session later that afternoon.

"TNS follows the Reggio Emilia Approach," I was informed on the phone. I learnt that Reggio Emilia is a city in Italy where, right after the Second World War, a refreshing new approach to learning came into being. Tired of the irrationality of the war and the devastated world it had left behind, a group of parents got together to arrange a new kind of education, far removed from the prevailing system which discouraged creativity and lateral thinking.

Simply put, the school is based on the principle of learning by doing. This attitude of hands-on learning is applied throughout the current age group (3 to 13), adding one class each year. The school building itself appears to be quite unconventional, with its interesting architecture in steel, and an orange-yellow-grey colour theme which exudes warmth that runs across the entire premises, even affecting its occupants. Upon my arrival, I was greeted with that same warmth by the management and staff of the school.

For story-time in the library, I had chosen three stories from the various books I have written and/or illustrated. Aided by the warm and cheerful librarian, as well as the Urdu teacher, who seemed eager to explore new ideas, these stories were read out while illustrations from each story were projected onto a screen. An enthralled group of young children (and their parents) attended the session.

The workshop that followed was called ‘How to Raise a (Good) Reader!’ It was a well-attended and interactive session with vocal, participative parents. I began by asking the group how many of them read aloud to their children?

Parents were then requested to list at least five points that came to their minds about raising a good reader. These points were shared. Meanwhile, I too jotted down ten of my own favourite points for consideration, such as: Parents serving as reader-role-models; surrounding children with reading material; setting aside a regular time for reading every day; discussing children’s books with them; encouraging a wide variety of reading activities; getting a library membership for the children; looking out for reading problems; taking children to bookstores, to public or private events related to children’s books and authors, also to puppet shows; getting good, child-friendly dictionaries and, lastly but most importantly, showing a genuine enthusiasm and joy towards children’s reading!

It was emphasized that, first and foremost, books ought to be valued by both parents and children. Cooperation from grandparents as well as children’s friends and their parents should be sought in this regard so that they give books as gifts on various occasions such as birthdays, religious festivals or as a reward for an achievement.

Later, as children become more independent readers, parents must continue to read aloud to them and also request them to read aloud to the parents! Taking an interest in the books children are reading in school and the ones the parents have read to them, and relating some happenings in one’s family to stories read or heard, is also a good way for sustaining interest in reading books. Child-friendly English-to-English, Urdu-to-Urdu, English-Urdu or Urdu-English dictionaries pique the children’s interest in words, and are a valuable aid. Children must be encouraged to refer to them.

Reading is a highly stimulating and engaging mental activity. I am convinced that the parents who attended the workshop will apply at least a few of the ideas that were discussed in order to harness their children’s interest in books. Whatever misgivings one might have regarding the reading habits of today’s children -- the television, internet, CDs, DVDs, video-games, etc being the most common distractions -- we must ask ourselves how actively we engage with our children in reading activities.

There are stories that subvert, and stories that offer escape into an enchanted other-world. Then there are the age-old morality stories. It is a misconception that morality stories that impart values such as honesty, integrity, loyalty, fairness, respect and facing up to adversity, are not popular with children. Children hold on to these values as much as they crave for stories that are funny, often in a slapstick, exaggerated, cartoonish way. While such stories can be linguistically and referentially challenging, they are at the same time reassuringly repetitive, and worthy of our children’s interest.

By Rumana Husain (Published in The News on Sunday, 24 April 2011) http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/apr2011-weekly/nos-24-04-2011/she.htm#5

Mediterranean Holiday: The North Cyprus Experience

2011-04-18T10:57:00.007+05:00

The other evening, on a boat ride with our friends in the Karachi harbour, we were discussing the life of boatmen and fisherfolk living on nearby islands, and the conversation drifted to our own visits to different island countries in the world. I recalled my short trip to North Cyprus some years ago, where I accompanied my husband who had to present his master-plan of a new airport at Ercan. The capital city of Northern Cyprus is known locally as Lefkosia. It is divided between two states, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) island and the remaining Greek-dominated western part known as the Republic of Cyprus, had large coils of barbed wire laid for this division instead of a wall dividing the city, like post-war Berlin.

We drove up along the ‘Green Line,’ to see the heavily guarded area on both sides. Perched on a piece of high ground, we could see the ruined houses, empty buildings, wrecked cars, sandbag barriers, and tall weeds growing everywhere. It was a depressing sight and I wanted to get away from it as quickly as I had been keen to see it.

Other than this divide, the island charmed me. I realised that unlike many other cities that have grown on the mouth of the sea or along a river, and the way their people relate with the water at all times, Karachi remains isolated from the sea in many ways. Our metropolis spreads far and wide; away from it, and out of the 18 million people of Karachi, only a fraction of the population encounters the sea on a daily basis. In Cyprus, the relationship with the sea was a constant.
Due to the political situation on this Mediterranean island, the two communities in Cyprus -- Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots -- faced the second half of the last century in the light of growing tensions, which erupted into demonstrations and violence, first by the Greeks against the British and then between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. This continued until the Turkish intervention in 1974 and the subsequent division of the island. Since then, there has been no serious outbreak of inter-communal violence on either side. This was also because, after 1974, Turkish and Greek Cypriots had no connection at all other than the meetings and talks between their top-level politicians in search for a political solution. What remained were only the good memories of the old days, until the relaxation in 2003.

We were in the town of Famagusta (called Gazi Magusa in Turkish), on the east coast, at a hotel right on the beaches of the Mediterranean. It was winter time, and instead of the beaches full of sunbathers, it was all quiet and very peaceful.

Normally, one imagines the Mediterranean Sea as a placid body of water. There was a thunderstorm just before we arrived so the weather was slightly chilly. We enjoyed our dinner with some local friends, at a small seafood restaurant near the lagoon, not too far from the hotel. Some crispy fish, tasty squids, and snails served in great style on special ceramic platters with a depression for each snail made up a substantial part of the meal. Large, leafy rhubarbs and fried cottage cheese was also served with loaves of bread. We marvelled at the appetite of our Cypriot friends as dinner lasted for nearly two hours.

The town of Famagusta is locally called Gazi Magusa. We loitered around in the old city area, which is enclosed in massive, fortified stonewalls. We walked in the cobbled streets, climbed the 17-metres-high and 9-metres-wide walls for viewing the harbour and the rest of the city and also the new city, outside the walled area.

The best preserved relic of Famagusta is the St. Nicholas Cathedral erected between 1298 and 1326, which became the Lala Mustafa Mosque in the 16th century. The inhabitants of Famagusta had made 365 churches (perhaps to avoid God’s wrath each day of the year!).

Inside the Cathedral there were no structural changes in the building and very little seemed to have been altered. This is an imposing building in yellow stone. We were told that the huge fig tree in the plaza outside is believed to be as old as the building itself!

Famagusta was founded in 300 BC. Its importance increased due to its natural harbour, and the walls that protected its inner town. In the 13th century its development accelerated, as it became a centre of commerce for both the East and West.

During the Ottoman period the commercial activity of the island shifted to Larnaca and Famagusta became a ghost town. In the British period, the port regained significance. The Turkish population generally settled in the inner town while the Greek population settled outside.

Towards the end of the British period, together with the socio-economic developments, new housing, commercial and recreational areas were built. In 1969-1970, as a result of Beirut losing its appeal due to the war, Famagusta became one of the world’s best-known entertainment and tourist centres. Its buildings represented the characteristics of British colonialism, as well as contemporary architectural trends.

Corn and other grains and vegetables grow in this region, while the country is also famous for its olives, figs and oranges. On our left, the Kyrenia (‘Girne’, in Turkish) mountain range was our companion to the north.

After having been in Famagusta for a few days, enjoying the beach, checking out new dishes, marvelling the historical sites and new buildings, browsing in the quaint little shops located along cobbled streets in the old city, and making daily trips to Nicosia, we visited Salamis, which is only a few miles north of Famagusta. The ruins of antique cities always leave me with feelings of melancholy, and a visit to Salamis was no different.

Earthquakes often interrupted the development of Salamis, but the history of the city goes back to the 11th century BC. The most impressive remains of this large complex are the theatre and the gymnasium. The theatre originally consisted of 50 rows of seats and held 15,000 spectators. We were amused to see that some of the front rows were topped with marble, while the rest were all in ordinary stone. After all, no age was devoid of the VIP culture.

The amphitheatre continues to be used for musical concerts and other performances, and we marvelled at the fact that the audience must enjoy the glorious setting of the place. However, it was sad to think that, sooner or later, more and more stone and marble would crumble as the sand and wind surrounding it would completely ravage what remains after over 3000 years.

We returned treasuring the romantic memories of lovely beaches, fragrant flowers, fascinating antiquities, flavours and aromas.

By Rumana Husain (Published in The News on Sunday, 17 April 2011) http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/apr2011-weekly/nos-17-04-2011/foo.htm#1

AYE Karachi! Pakistan's first city-magazine launched!

2011-03-29T19:51:00.009+05:00

AYE Karachi!is a Bilingual Quarterly City Guide and Features Magazine. With features, interviews, listings, reports, comments, advertisements, and much more, this Karachi city magazine is a lively guide - the first of its kind, available to read/browse free of charge at various selected locations in the city. It is in English and Urdu. It can be subscribed for a personal copy. Contact info@jaal.org for details about subscriptions // placing advertisements // contributions in the form of writings or images.

All major cities of the world have a city magazine; be it London, Paris, New York, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur or Delhi. Our very own city - Karachi, with a population of 18 million, and a sprawl of over 3,530 square km, can now also boast of such a magazine.

The launch event was held on Sunday 27 March 2011 at T2F (The Second Floor), Karachi. Rumana Husain, Founder Editor and Amra Alam, Co-Editor spoke on the occasion. Shammi Jameel Hussain is Coordinator Advertisements.

‘Nobody in Karachi whistles anymore’

2011-02-22T15:01:00.007+05:00

I remember reading, some years ago in The News, Kaleem Omar’s insightful review ‘Nobody in Karachi whistles anymore’. The title had a bitter-sweet taste. Bitter, as it reminded me of my conversations with an ex-colleague who maintained that people in Karachi are a morbid bunch who just don’t laugh heartily, or smile at strangers. And sweet, as the writer reminisced about the ‘good old days’, when “one often used to hear people whistling a jaunty tune as they cycled home at night after a movie…”

There is no doubt that the Karachi in which I grew up - the Karachi of the fifties, sixties and also the seventies - was very different from the beleaguered city that our two children grew up in. However, come to think of it, what has really changed in the last twenty years? Insecurity and the prevalence of fear has been a steady constant - from the mid-eighties until the mid-nineties, and somewhat similar to the present. The fight for the control of Karachi had started and kidnappings, political assassinations, blasts, attacks, torture cells and stockpiling of automatic weapons were the order of the day. There were numerous incidents in which our family came face to face with ugly situations, enough to turn me into a paranoid mother who couldn’t let the children cycle around the block, let alone move around in the city on their own, or take public transport. North Nazimabad, where we lived then, boasted good planning, wide streets and boulevards. Nevertheless, we often felt trapped, as there was frequently trouble all around this area. Likewise, millions of people living in the Federal ‘B’ Area, Nazimabad, and Liaquatabad suffered a tortuous, insecure existence. And all this while people in the PECHS, Defence and some other areas lived oblivious to our suffering.
Our children attended school in the Saddar area, while my husband and I worked across the city from our home. Getting out in the mornings, on the days when it was at all possible, was relatively smooth. But getting back each day was an ordeal: planning a relatively safe route, circumventing the troubled areas and also beating the curfew shut-down time. There was the constant fear of finding the road blocked, or getting caught amidst burning tyres or, worse, in the cross-fire. Burning vehicles, mobs on the streets, police and rangers personnel brandishing their weapons, bullet-pockmarked apartment blocks on our various routes…were familiar features that contributed to our daily trauma. No wonder we became over-protective, hyper-vigilant parents!
Come June 2002, and I experienced a bombing real close. This was the powerful car-bomb set off just outside the U.S. Consulate building on Abdullah Haroon Road which killed twelve passersby, wounded more than twenty people and damaged more than fifteen vehicles. I was inside to collect my visa for a forthcoming visit to the US as an invitee of the International Visitors’ Program. Immediately after the earth-shattering explosion, as the lights went off and we were all thrown onto the floor by the impact of the blast, I had wondered aloud if it was an earthquake. As we recovered from a somewhat dizzied state, with shattered glass all over the place, someone remarked how, as a Karachi person, I could think of an earthquake and not a bomb. 9/11 had come and gone the previous year, the world had changed, and several bomb blasts had already occurred in Karachi.
Continuously ruptured by violence, Karachi has cultivated an intimate relationship with terror that grows stronger each day. Violence has specific implications on the way in which the city is shaped, and in the way it continues to grow.

Alex Marshall, a freelance journalist, writes that to build better cities, “we must understand and control the forces that shape them so that we may direct them in specific ways in order to fulfill planned outcomes.” He identifies transportation as the most obvious, as it literally and physically determines the form that a city takes. The type of transportation infrastructure determines the size, placement, scale, distribution and density of the other components of the city fabric. Residential areas, commercial and business districts, recreation spaces are all determined by their accessibility and their proximity to each other and it is the mode and the means of transportation of the city that determines this and moulds the life of its citizens.
The public transport system of Karachi has always been inadequate, but it has never been as bad as it is today. Despite all the overhead bridges, underpasses and new roads built in the last few years, the poor commuter has never had it so appalling. It is a wonder that some women still manage to commute in public buses, as only men can be seen hanging around or precariously perched on top of the buses, particularly in the evenings.

In their study ‘The case of Karachi, Pakistan’, co-authors Arif Hasan and Masooma Mohib observe that “the state did not develop policies that provided support to the private sector in transport, nor did it have the finances to build an effective public sector owned transportation system.”

Besides the suburban residential areas developed in the fifties and sixties such as Nazimabad, North Nazimabad and North Karachi to the north, and the Federal ‘B’ Area and Gulshan adjacent to these to the east, other large areas such as Gulistan-e-Johar have come up. Korangi, extending eastward to Landhi, has grown substantially, and so has Malir, which has been the land of orchards and vegetable gardens.

The presence and contribution of large numbers of people of different backgrounds makes Karachi arguably Pakistan’s most cosmopolitan city, the only real microcosm of the whole country. These people retain their distinct lifestyle characteristics, although they have begun to blend in and have borrowed from each other. In the process, they have begun to forge a new identity as citizens of this city which is, first and foremost a business centre, a busy market place.

The market has also benefited from ‘Islamization’. This can be traced back to the dramatic swing that took place between the early seventies and early eighties, when the Kalashnikov became a household word. It took a new turn in the nineties due to the Farhat Hashmi phenomenon appealing to the upper and middle-class women. These women first started to cover their heads. Then some of them donned a burqa. But it did not mean they had to settle for a long black gown-like cover. Trendy and fashionable styles of burqa became the rage and are now embellished with embroidery, beads, sequins, colourful stones and what have you. In the trendy boutiques they can cost a tidy sum.
Starting from Clifton, Defence, KDA, PECHS and North Nazimabad, this trend has now spread to places like Landhi and Lyari where women have started wearing such burqas. Meanwhile, under the influence of the Saudi-returned workers and the Taliban, almost every other man in the city now has a beard.

Gang wars in the Lyari area have become commonplace in the last decade. While the women go out to work, many of the men of this area, one of the poorest of Karachi’s neighbourhoods, are unemployed and restless. The drug mafias have overtaken the streets. There are drug addicts and drug pushers, and there are frequent street fights with sophisticated weapons, making life for the common people not just miserable, but downright dangerous.

The high-income areas of the city have gradually become isolated from the rest of Karachi, as all kinds of new facilities, such as shopping centres, cinema houses, bowling alleys, clubs, international food chains, coffee shops and restaurants, libraries and private educational institutions are mostly situated in these areas. Many residents of these areas are therefore unconnected with the rest of the city. Armed guards protect large houses hidden behind high walls, where only a very few family members reside, their children having moved abroad.

This ghetto mentality is not new, but the last twenty years has seen an increase, not only in a class divide but also an ethnic divide, particularly in the underprivileged areas of the city. “My father, mother and wife, even my brothers can barely speak any Urdu, as they have no interaction with any other people but the Pushto-speaking inhabitants in the area where we live,” says our Pakhtun driver.

It is quite possible that the violence in Karachi, from the armed burglaries and street fights to the bomb blasts, is driven by a complex mix of pressures, including political, religious and ethnic, aggravated by economic deprivation and mafia clout. In this environment of fear, what chance is there that you will hear the whistling of a popular ditty by someone happily cycling his way to his house in the dark of the night? Danger stalks every corner, and various freedoms are now restricted. There are many questions that will remain unanswered and a good deal that is best left unsaid.
By Rumana Husain (Published on Tuesday, 22 February 2011, page 73, 'Twenty Years of The News 2011 Witness to History supplement)

A wedding of the seventies

2011-01-23T22:25:00.008+05:00

We had wanted a small wedding for ourselves. And by ‘small’ we really meant small. Both of us managed to convince the two sets of parents that since they had earlier had large weddings for our respective sisters (incidentally for both of us, our sisters were our only siblings as well), there was no need for them to spend large amounts on our wedding.

My husband-to-be had told me that he would only spend on the wedding what he himself could afford to spend; as he did not believe in making his father foot the bill. He therefore gave me some half a dozen sarees and a small jewellery set. We invited less than 30 people for our wedding, leaving out second cousins, even next door neighbours, and friends who did not qualify as ‘close’ ones.

My husband had borrowed the sherwani he wore for the Nikah, from his closest buddy, and for the Rukhsati, also his car; as he himself owned a VW Beetle (although I would have been more than happy to have crossed the city over to his house in that cute car of his). For my ‘munh dikhai’ I received a watch, which I still wear.

There was another mutual decision that was made before we were married…that we would begin our married life from scratch rather than having everything from the word‘go’.

We had a carpeted floor for our bedroom on which we put a mattress, and there were just a few other things in the room, all tastefully and artistically placed, giving a very Zen-like appeal to the place. He had asked his friends to give him reed blinds for the windows of the outer room, which was going to be our ‘baithak’ and I had requested my friends to give me a reed mat as flooring for the same room, in which we later entertained our friends.

Over the last three decades, we have built our lives bit by bit; travelled together, picked up things that interest us (but nothing ever so expensive), which includes hundreds of books, music, terracotta, ceramics, masks, etc.

We have been the happiest two people on earth.

Initially it used to hurt us that no one followed our example to have a small, unassuming wedding. However, one thing is for sure: we are never impressed with grandness of any of the weddings we attend, as they all appear the same. No amount of dowry or lavish wedding events can guarantee a happy married life. It is something else that is its essence.
Rumana Husain. Sunday, 23 January 2011.

China’s Flying Colours: some enthralling recollections of the nine-hours visit to the Expo 2010 in Shanghai

2011-01-16T13:54:00.008+05:00

The Expo in Shanghai opened on May 1 and ended on October 31, 2010. The theme adopted was “Better City, Better Life”, and I had the good fortune to visit it during its last fortnight in October and see for myself what the hype was all about.

It truly was an eye-opener as even on its last leg, the Expo was living up to the expectations of those who were visiting it for the first time. There were hundreds of Chinese people waiting patiently in long queues outside some very popular pavilions. The notices hung there conveyed the number of hours/minutes it would take one to enter the pavilion. The most popular pavilions had queuing periods ranging between 2 to 4 hours! This, I learned, despite a number of efforts by the organisers to reduce the waiting time.

However, it was interesting to see, all over the Expo site, families which usually comprised of three generations: four doting grandparents, a young couple and a single child, very typical in China. Channelizing more than 70 million visitors, safely and comfortably, through this extravagant fair during its six-month period was no small task.

The following are a few observations, which, in my opinion, were instrumental in the successful running of this popular Expo:
-The sale of Expo entrance tickets was decentralised, and tickets could be purchased from a number of different places in Shanghai. We got ours from a grocery store. There were of course additional ticket windows at the Expo entrances and in the subway stations closest to the site.
- No private vehicles were allowed anywhere close to the site of the fair (which was spread on 3.28 km², excluding the Huangpu River flowing through its middle). A comprehensive public transport network combining the subway, buses and marine services provided convenient access to the Expo grounds.
- There were a number of buses plying inside the grounds, and one could use these freely between the pavilions or eating places without a charge.
- With so much time spent on the site by most visitors, it was essential to take care of their hunger pangs. Therefore, some 40 restaurant and bistro buildings – no more than a few minutes’ walk apart, ensured that visitors could choose from a rich array of thousands of Chinese and other dishes from around the world on a daily basis.

I was at the Expo for over nine hours that day, and could see perhaps no more than 25% of it. A couple of visits to the toilets left me awe-struck, not only by the quality and newness of the accessories and materials used, but also the cleanliness of those facilities. It is hard to imagine that kind of high-standard cleanliness even at some of our costly outfits.

With an eye on China’s immense market of 1.3 billion people, 250 foreign countries and companies invested an estimated $ 1.5 billion in the Expo (figures ref. China Daily). It was obvious that they were competing with each other in terms of showcasing their best products, but what was truly significant was the innovative approach adopted in the design of the various country-pavilions. This show of one-upmanship was in keeping with the “Better City, Better Life” theme.

It was impossible to visit each and every pavilion from the inside. A few, which were accessible more easily, with a few minutes of waiting time were visited, while the others were viewed from the outside. The UK Pavilion was the most iconic of them all. With its theme ‘Building on the Past, Shaping Our Future’, its highlight was a ‘Seed Cathedral’ - an object formed from 60,000-plus transparent acrylic rods containing seeds, which drew on daylight to illuminate the interior of the pavilion. The seeds demonstrated the concept of sustainability, diversity of nature and the potential of life. At night, light sources embedded in each rod made the entire structure glow. It was therefore no wonder that a mass of humanity waited patiently to get inside this incredible pavilion, which I only saw from the outside.

However, a visit to the C-shaped Canada Pavilion was delightful as it lived up to its theme ‘The Living City: Inclusive, Sustainable, Creative’, dispelling the expectation of the visitors to witness Canada’s vast wilderness, it provided a very creative audio-visual treat through entire walls of enchanting special effects.

The South Korea Pavilion was another extremely creative structure composed of 20 basic letters of the Korean alphabet. This colourful “inside-out” pavilion, made up with thousands of square-tiles, showcased blueprints of future cities along with the country's most advanced technology as well as its traditional culture.

The Chile Pavilion was also a treat. Its focus was on exhibitions on Chilean understanding of the city, including how to build a better city and how to improve the standard of living. The innovative use of wood and glass for its interiors, as well as the creative displays, were superb.

The Mexico Pavilion featured a Kite Forest combining hundreds of colourful kites and green grass. This was Mexico’s idea of representing the future of urban life.

African countries together had an African Union Pavilion which offered an insight into the continent’s primitive history through its sculptures. Development of some of these countries vis-a-vis urban transformation, trade and industry was also represented. Standing between the past and the future of Africa was an interesting experience: one could clearly see how the oppressive and corrupt governments of some countries have made them lag far behind in terms of economic development and prosperity for their people, also in terms of environmental protection and the use of clean energy, while others are fast moving forward. It was also interesting to note the behaviour of the Chinese visitors as they lined up to have themselves photographed with the ethnic Africans.

All the country-pavilions that we either saw from the inside or from the outside provided their own citizens special entry, bypassing the long queues. Our very own Pakistan Pavilion, however, did just the opposite. Much to our frustration and chagrin, the Pakistani ‘guard’ of the Lahore-fort-like pavilion refused to allow us special entry past the sizable queue. There were no other Pakistanis in sight for miles around, but in a typically bureaucratic style, he managed to keep us out. We chose to just move on.

The Expo 2010 has left several intangible legacies for the Chinese people, including a keen spirit of volunteerism, personal and group discipline, caring for the environment and an exposure to best practices in innovation from around the world. Shanghai has now announced plans to build a World Expo Museum with the intention of exhibiting Expo exhibits and popularising World Expo history. Being the second Asian country, after Japan (Expo 2005 in Aichi), to stage a world exhibition in the 21st century, China has indeed come out with flying colours!

Text and photos: Rumana Husain (published in The News on Sunday on 16 January 2011) http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/jan2011-weekly/nos-16-01-2011/foo.htm#3

Tehrik-e-Niswan's "Tees aur Aik Saal" 24, 25, 26 December 2010

2011-01-05T15:31:00.031+05:00

Tehrik-e-Niswan's "Tees aur Aik Saal" 24, 25, 26 December 2010

Tehrik-e-Niswan (a Karachi-based movement for women's rights through performance art) celebrated its 31 years of existence by holding an international conference on performance art and gender politics. This was in collaboration with the Oxford University Press Pakistan.

It was a most engaging and gripping conference where papers were read, presentations made, short dramas, and songs and dances were performed. The discussions that followed each of the sessions were also thought-provoking.

My paper was titled Gone and Forgotten: Some Unforgettable Women Performers. Also, I had put up an exhibition at the Conference, of 30 selected posters out of the original 72, that I had curated back in 2002 called Women @ Work for my former organisation, the Children's Museum for Peace and Human Rights.

Women @ Work

Gone and Forgotten: Some Unforgettable Women Performers
Women associated with the performing arts were traditionally not looked at favourably in Pakistan; as acting, singing and dancing were attributed to those who did not belong to ‘respectable’ backgrounds. Thankfully, things have taken a turn, and with a changing social backdrop where even the underprivileged sections of the Muslim society are taking tentative steps towards modernization, women, despite opposition from the more conservative forces in their families, are breaking the mould. For those who are interested in various creative fields, whether it is the performing or the visual arts, more and more opportunities are coming their way vis a vis art schools, galleries, theatre, radio and television. Sadly, the film industry is almost dead, except for a film or two made once in a while, which is worthy of any mention.

I want to look back and remember just a few of those extraordinary women of the past 60 years, who brightened the big silver screens; or television sets in our homes, and the stage, and briefly discuss how most of them, if not all, were later lost to oblivion, forgotten.

Madam Azurie, as she was known, was a popular film dancer of the subcontinent in the pre-Partition era. Her real name was Anna Marie Gueizelor. She was born of a German doctor and an Indian mother. Right from her childhood she was encouraged to play the piano and to study ballet with a group of Russian emigrants. However, she got interested in Indian dancing but apparently her father did not allow her to learn the Indian classical dances. Upon reaching her teens, Anna and the family moved to Bombay, where her father became a member of the Three Arts Circle organized by Begum Atiya Rahman, better known as the artist Atiya Faizi who later moved to Karachi. Atiya Faizi arranged for Anna to study the arts of the subcontinent and after her father's death, Anna, who later came to be known as Madam Azurie stayed with Atiya Faizi. Having studied different schools of dance from renowned teachers of those times, she joined the Bombay film industry and was featured in numerous films. She got married to a Muslim man and migrated to Pakistan where she worked in a few Pakistani films.

Azurie opened the first Academy of Classical Dance in Pakistan. She toured a number of foreign countries, taking a small troupe with her. In Islamabad, Azurie was a member of the board of the National Council of the Arts. In Karachi, she was founder member of the Pak-American Cultural Centre, where she taught classical dance for a number of years.Madam Azurie died twelve years ago. Some of her famous films as a dancer include Yaad (1942), Tasveer (1943), Rattan (1944), and Shahjahan (1946). She was unable to maintain the star status that she had achieved, and during the last years of her life, she died a pauper in a sparsely furnished flat in Karachi where she lived.

I had a hard time finding information about her from any diverse sources as there is very little material available. And as you can see, there is only a postage stamp size photograph that I have here, taken from the Internet, as even a major and oldest print media of the country did not have any images of Madam Azurie in its archives.

However, another free-spirited woman, associated with the performing arts, Begum Khurshid Mirza, has been luckier as her memoirs, 'A Woman of Substance’, edited and compiled by her Lahore-based daughter, Lubna Kazim, was first published by the Indian feminist publishing house, Zubaan, and later by the Oxford University Press in Pakistan.

Khurshid Mirza also enjoyed a privileged background. She was the daughter of the founders of the Aligarh Women’s College. The book, like a social document, highlights Khurshid Mirza’s rich life as a radio and television artist, a writer and an activist, creating her own space, getting a voice of her own, and working towards the fulfillment of her dreams.

Khurshid Mirza did the most unbelievable thing for those days. It was like fiction, like a story right out of her films…leaving the protected world of her family in Aligarh and pursuing a career in films in Bombay when it was not considered a respectable profession for women. But she refused to be tied down by any social norms and besides doing the unthinkable, she also adopted a celluloid identity, a Hindu name, Renuka Devi.

One can only imagine what her parents must have gone through with the kind of uproar created against this in the Muslim community of Aligarh; against the founders of the first Muslim girl's school in the city. Mirza’s act was considered as an appalling example for other educated Muslim girls. In order for the uproar to die down Khurshid Mirza apparently visited her family in Aligarh a few years after the release of her second film 'Bhabi' in 1938, which had made her famous.

I find it relevant to quote a passage from the book in the light of the fact that most Muslim women in those days observed purdah: “It was Khurshid Mirza’s mother who stopped her and her younger sisters from wearing the burqa, though she herself wore one. Mirza's mother believed that girls who wore the burqa were more prone to tuberculosis as it prevented them from breathing fresh air.”

Mirza worked with famous actors and directors of the time, but the Partition brought her film career to an end and she migrated to Pakistan. When Pakistan Television came into being, it provided her yet another opportunity for her talents. Her first serial, ‘Kiran Kahani’, written by Haseena Moin, was followed by another by the same writer, ‘Zer Zabar Pesh’ in which she played foster mother to Roohi Bano, who was in the lead role in both the serials. They became super hits and Begum Khurshid Mirza became one of Pakistan’s best known television artistes, winning many awards including the Pride of Performance. She passed away in 1989.
But breaking the mould, fighting against all odds, flouting tradition, a trait Khurshid Mirza had inherited, is something that all women from educated families who chose the performing arts as their vocation had to face in those times, and perhaps it is the same status quo for many even today. Dance, in particular classical Indian dance, is still hugely a taboo.

As we all know that Roohi Bano, the television star of yesteryears, was once a household name across the country who ruled the mini-screen for nearly two decades.

Television had not found a greater actress until she appeared on the scene in the early years of PTV’s existence. Her repeatedly sensitive and outstanding performances in ‘Qila Kahani’, ‘Zard Gulab’, ‘Hairat Kada’, ‘Darwaza’, ‘Kiran Kahani’ and several other serials and long plays set her head and shoulders above many other actors. She earned several awards, including the Pride of Performance.

“You remember ‘Gardish’? The events in my life have been similar to ‘Gardish’: I keep reeling from one misfortune to the next.” Half smiling, half sorrowful, Roohi Bano had recalled the television play she had acted in, sometime in the eighties, when I met her some years ago for an interview. Its story emphasised that all humans are selfish, wretched captives of their needs.

Roohi’s life story is perhaps as tragic as some of her roles in those PTV plays. A systematic lobby was created against her, which ultimately ousted her from the position she was enjoying.

One can cite many examples from the country, of icons fading into oblivion for one reason or the other. However, a few very talented women went away from the stage of life, in the prime of their careers, pulled away by the hands of cancer…and death. Tahira Naqvi of PTV Lahore’s plays ‘Waris’ and ‘Zindagi Bandagi’ was one such performer.

Much later, in 1996 Khalida Riyasat breathed her last at the age of 43. She came on television in the late '70s and in a short period made a massive impact on the audience. She performed in short plays, long plays, in serious as well as comic roles. When I was an art student in Karachi, Khalida was also enrolled there but only for a brief period.
She was not only outspoken but also jovial and entertained us all by her lively antics. Some of us may recall her detective series ‘Naam Daar’ in which she and veteran actor Shakeel played the lead roles.
Yasmin Ismail was another superbly talented actor cum director who died in 2002. Year after year, she gave us an opportunity to sit with our children, learning some useful lessons together with them: lessons of harmony, love, empathy for the environment, for the deprived… and the wonderful part of it all was the fact that we were not given these doses of morality in the usual manner that our educational system is so fond of doing. Instead, thanks to Yasmin we laughed till our sides ached, enjoying every moment of the musical magic that was woven in front of us on stage.
In this crassly commercial city of Karachi, it is not easy to make a name for one’s self by dedicated work alone. One has to be a fighter as well. To make people sit up and take notice of a woman director, someone who was associated with the highly neglected field of children’s theatre, was indeed a feat. Yasmin Ismail, the director of the Gripps Theatre, had achieved that and much more.

Almost two generations of theatre-goers, young and old, have enjoyed ‘Choti Moti Tota Aur S.M.Hamid’, ‘Hawa Ko Dawa Do’, ‘Haspataal ka haal acha hae’, ‘Langda Aam Khaas Hota Hai’ and several other such plays. And that was not all. Yasmin Ismail was also a talented actor. She acted in English and Urdu stage-plays, and also in a few television plays.

I started this presentation with the dancer, Madam Azurie, and I want to end it by mentioning some other women dancers who entered the Pakistani film world some years later, such as Panna, Amy Minwalla, Niggo, Tarana, Chum Chum, Meena Chaudhry, Parveen Qasim...Many of them were taught Kathak by Ashiq Husain, also known as Bhuray Khan, of the Lahore gharana. He had also taught Tara Chowdhry, Shahzadi, the Indian dancer Kamudini Lakhia, and also Madam Azurie.
There are three main factors which are cited for the decline of Pakistan’s film industry: the loss of East Pakistan; the inception of television; and the infiltration of non-artistic financiers. So with the demise of the film industry, only a handful of women actors got absorbed in television. The rest were just ‘lost’, forgotten. And not much is known about how most of these women have fared after their hey days were over.

However, recently a news item in the national daily Dawn reported that a six-month classical dance workshop is being conducted by Panna. This workshop was initiated by the Federal Ministry of Culture at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (the PNCA). The PNCA was once known as the PIA Arts Academy, which was set up in the early 70s under the directorship of distinguished actor Zia Mohyeddin to promote Pakistani dance and music. The Ministry has also decided to hold monthly classical dance evenings at the Shakir Ali Museum in Lahore. This is good news, but we need numerous such initiatives in several other cities to truly bring about a change in cultural outlook.
Conclusion
Similar to the kind of treatment meted out to Madam Azurie, several other talented women performers who were once called living legends, have suffered a fate of oblivion and misery. There just isn’t enough documentation about their lives, and as I said before even our frontline print media does not have images of all those women in their archives, which is such a shame!

One can only hope that with the facilities now available in this digital age, whereby the new media has provided opportunities of clicking and blogging and instant sharing and so on, we will at least do justice to documentation, archiving as well as dissemination.
By Rumana Husain

Nagori’s colourful canvases depict dark themes

2010-12-21T21:34:00.005+05:00

Abdur Rahim Nagori was born in 1938, inheriting roots from Rajasthan, Sorath and Sindh. He now lives in Karachi with his wife, a daughter and son. His late father, despite hailing from an orthodox religious family, was a secularist/humanist before the terminology was in vogue. As he worked for the forest department, he often allowed his wanderlust son to accompany him on his assignments to the Gir Forest. On several occasions though, instead of taking the young boy deep into the unpredictable jungles, he left him in the care of the sadhus who lived at the periphery of the forest. Nagori became an ardent listener of the mysterious stories woven by the mystics, and has even used the allegorical figures from those tales in his paintings. “They (the sadhus) told me about beautiful women - the Apsaras - who descended from the heavens to take men away to paradise, posthumously rewarding them for their sufferings in their life on earth. The Apsaras were a mystery to me as a child, and they remain a mystery to me now, when I am over sixty!” Professor Nagori said with a tinge of mischief.

He has deeply researched the lives of the nomadic tribes of Sindh – the Bheels, Kohlis and Meghwads – the exploited and enduring common folk who are perhaps descendents of the great Indus Valley Civilization. Nagori has dedicated his canvases to their miseries.

As a pioneer ‘political painter’ of the country, A. R. Nagori’s works may have been noisy, but today his life is rather quiet. His artistic outpourings have lessened due to health problems.

He has held grade 20 posts and served many leading educational institutions. His last job was as Director, Pakistan National Council of the Arts (the PNCA, between 1996-’97) after a premature retirement from the University of Sindh. Presently, Nagori lives in an old style house on a quiet street behind Islamia College. As you turn for his street, look back from the main road, and you will see the dome of the Quaid’s tomb in the distance. A mosque minaret soars upwards on the left, and a huge world globe stands in the middle of the wide road. Some of these prominent landmarks also appear on the canvases inside his home.

Some art is created as social criticism, not just to record the events for posterity but to provoke a reaction to political or cultural situations. Nagori says, “For me art also has a social purpose.” He rose to prominence when his paintings called the ‘oppressed people of Sindh,’ protesting militarism and violence during the Zia-ul-Haq era, were censored in 1982. Afterwards, his exhibition was sponsored by the Federation Union of Journalists, in 1983. But it was his anti-dictatorship show at Ali Imam’s Indus Gallery in 1986, which created a stir in the local as well as international media. Nagori said that neutral observers, as well as the Manila Bureau Chief of the ‘Los Angeles Times’ and the New Delhi Bureau Chief of the ‘Time,’ magazine were directed to see that exhibition in order to understand Pakistani politics. “Perhaps no where were those troubles placed in sharper focus than in the Indus Gallery in Karachi, where an exhibit by artist Nagori sought to document Zia’s legacy in a series of angry paintings,” wrote Mark Finemann in Los Angeles Times.

The series of paintings based on the English alphabets rudely reminded the onlooker how obsolete the words ‘A for apple’ and ‘B for butterfly’ have become for our children. Nagori replaced them by ‘B for Bomb Blast,’ ‘C for Crime/Corruption,’ ‘D for Dacoits,’ ‘H for Heroin,’ ‘K for Kalashnikovs,’ ‘R for Rape’ and ‘Z for Zindabad!’ “But ‘Zindabad’ for whom in the end?” asked the artist indignantly.

Writing in the ‘Pakistan Times,’ Lahore, (November 7, 1986) artist Ali Imam observed “… It is strange that a painter of such committed sensibilities should remain isolated because of his non-conformism or self-imposed censor. His contribution to art in the sub-continent stands out, as no other painter has made such consistent attempt to focus attention of socio-political ills in the country.”

“Nagori is an angry artist who exposes the hypocrisy in our society,” says art critic Niilofur Farrukh about him. “He is bold, courageous and honest when depicting his feelings for the oppressed and down-trodden,” Niilofur then added, “his lack of diplomacy, perhaps not a good trait, makes him suffer. He cannot sell his paintings. Some others - much lesser artists - manage to do so with flair.”

When I mentioned this, Nagori had a sardonic smile on his face. “Yes, I know it. But I cannot mince my words to please my critics or my fans. I say whatever is in my heart and paint what I feel passionately about. It is also said that people do not want to put up my paintings in their homes because of their subject. But that’s fine by me. I could not have painted pretty flower vases and beautiful sunsets when my city was rife with fire and blood.” It is not entirely true though that his paintings do not sell. His show “Black amongst Blacks,” first exhibited at Chowkhandi Art, Karachi, and at the Lahore Art Gallery, was completely sold out in Lahore. “A record for any non-Lahori desi,” confessed the Lahore-trained artist from Sindh, whose paintings have been auctioned at Sotheby’s in London, and also acquired by the Pasadena Museum in USA.

A keen observer, vociferous reader of books, and a scholar of art history, Nagori abhors violation of basic human rights by certain feudal and political scoundrels - particularly of women and children - bonded labour, torture, hunger, poverty, discrimination and destruction found an earnest content in his canvases.

Nagori went to a private school in Hyderabad – the Jaffery Institute - and after his matriculation and intermediate from Sindh University, he moved to Lahore at the behest of his teacher, guide, and journalist friend, Syed Nayab Hussain Naqvi. He initially went to Mayo College (the National College of Art & Architecture – NCA), but instead of obtaining a diploma from the NCA, he decided to enrol in a degree programme at the Punjab University. Nagori says one day he walked over to the campus, and was curiously watching the students (mostly girls) sketching outside in the lawns, when he was escorted by someone to Khalid Iqbal’s office in the fine arts department. Anna Molka Ahmad, the forbidding Head, Fine Arts, (whom Nagori referred to as ‘baghair moustache ki Stalin’), was known to be a disciplinarian who was extremely intolerant of aimless strangers loitering inside the department. Khalid Iqbal, convinced that Nagori wanted to be an artist, led him to meet her.

“For my art education, I owe Khalid Iqbal a lot,” Nagori said about his mentor - the Slade School of Art London-educated artist and teacher, who has been a great influence in his life. “Yet, I chose to walk on a completely different path, and his greatest contribution was that he allowed me to differ with him.” Khalid Iqbal has left a profound influence on many of Lahore’s landscape painters.

In 1965 Nagori acquired his Master’s degree after Hons, from the Punjab University. For his thesis he chose mural painting, using tempera as his medium. After he graduated, he was appointed lecturer of western art history. He had been trained intensively by Ms. Ahmad for the job.

Nagori resigned from the Punjab University because of economic reasons. He was Founder, Head, Fine Arts, Cadet College, Kohat, and later he worked as Education Officer, Pakistan Air Force, until 1970. “What an odd choice to make for someone like you!” I could not help exclaiming. Nagori said he took up the PAF job so that all the members of his family could be accommodated in the defence services. That was his priority then. Career or artistic pursuits took a back seat.

In 1970, Nagori was invited to set-up a Department of Fine Arts at the Sindh University at Jamshoro. I asked him to respond to the accusation levelled against him by some, that he had not produced any artists of high calibre during his long association with the Sindh University where he served as Head and Professor, Fine Arts (between 1970 to1995). Nagori retorted that neither should art institutes be credited entirely for the brilliance of the canvases produced by their students, nor is it fair to compare the situation that prevailed at Jamshoro with that of Lahore and Karachi. He then added, “Let history determine the impact of the department I founded at Sindh University.”

I paused on my way out, to admire the old, patterned floor tiles - known as ‘Nusserwanji tiles’ - as well as the coloured glass in the arches over the doors and windows of the artist’s house. The doorways, porches, and lintels of the artist’s Karachi house display the sensuous curvilinear precision of the draftsman’s tool called a French curve. It stretches languorously amidst a front yard filled with beautiful lush greenery of potted plants and creepers. There are several portraits of Nagori’s wife in the house, painted by him. He lives quietly with his paintings and his family.

By Rumana Husain (Published in Dawn's 'Gallery' on September 15, 2001)Photographs by Asma Husain

A Woman of Two Cultures

2010-12-20T20:24:00.005+05:00

Title of book: Mama Kuma - one woman, two cultures
Author: Deborah Carlyon
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, Australia
Pages: 180

Kuma Kelage was born to a Warrior Chief in a remote village in the Chimbu Province of Papua New Guinea. She “drank milk from her many mothers, and grew; leaning against sculptured spears, clothed in possum fur, pig grease, and Bird of Paradise.” When Kuma married a mangare gage – a white man called Malcolm John Warrick, her Sina Sina people worried that her baby “would be born with two separate skin colours: half Kuma’s rich, chocolate-brown colour and half Warrick’s fair, light skin, vertically or horizontally separated by an invisible line.” Curiosity and imagination about the unborn was limitless.

There are just a few books written by Papuans about Papuans, particularly about women. Mama Kuma, written by Kuma’s grand-daughter, Deborah Carlyon, provides a wonderful insight into that mysterious and magical land. Mama Kuma was first published in 2002 by the University of Queensland Press, Australia, but the book received the 2001 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer.

The author, Deborah Carlyon, was born in Goroka in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1970. Carlyon’s rite of passage into womanhood was celebrated in a somewhat similar tradition as that of her grandmother, Mama Kuma, before she left Papua New Guinea to attend boarding school in Brisbane. Carlyon had made up her mind in 1988 to write a book about her grandmother. In 1994, she was awarded a grant by the Australian Government to complete her research and write the book.

Carlyon’s remarkable story of her beloved and extraordinary grandmother is full of tenderness, but it is an important document about the first Sina Sina woman to have married a white Australian. Warrick, the mangare gage (spirit in different skin) who arrived in the Highlands in the 1940s, was a census officer. The news came on the wind, yodelled from one hilltop to the next: “the mysterious spirits in a different skin had materialised, bearing powerful magic sticks.” The tribe feared the mangare gages had come to take their women because “they appeared without women of their own.”

When young Kuma and her friend Garia came face to face with the mangare gage for the first time, Kuma told Garia to put her arm around her, as “we will stay.” Garia felt her own skin “shake from within like an earthquake,” but Kuma held the stranger’s (Warrick’s) hand tightly and did not let go…

“Overcoming her own fears and shedding those she had shared with the tribe, Kuma allowed the strength of her mind to rest in her palm. In that instant she learned that fear or strength could be chosen in a flash of conscious response,” writes Carlyon about her curious and courageous grandmother who notched up many firsts in her life.

Papua New Guinea, as described in Mama Kuma, seems as strange a world to us as the ways of the mangare gages must have been to Kuma and her tribe. Defying her father, Kuma went with the patrol officer and his carriers to their base; riding on the “large pig” they called a horse. She also became the first of her tribe to enter the stomach of a great metal bird whose roaring made her relatives wet themselves in fear. Kuma was there when the world changed. Her incredible thirst for adventure and her strength of spirit made her take that change by the hand and lead it.

Carlyon’s narrative of her grandmother’s journey through two cultures is simple yet exotic. Where else would you find women who breastfeed piglets; amputated fingers tally the deaths of loved ones; girls delight in having the cartilage of their nose pierced for wearing a smooth stick across it; banana leaves are warmed above a fire and wrapped around a newborn’s body for good health; to present their brides with the elegant velvet tail feathers of the Bird of Paradise, men go in search of the birds who live high in the mountains…

Ba (Carlyon’s mother) was placed in a Government kindergarten in Goroka. A relative living in town would carry Ba to school each day on his shoulders. Occasionally, she would run away from school and walk in the direction of home. Inevitably, someone would find and return her to the warm embrace of her family. Carlyon’s going to a boarding school in Brisbane was not incidental, as her mother – Ba – had also attended high school at the Brisbane boarding school.

“…After Ba’s successful years at primary school, the Goldhardts asked Kuma if Ba could accompany their own children to Australia – the faraway land of Ba’s father – for ‘high’ school. Kuma gave her consent and her people killed more pigs to show their gratitude to the Goldhardts.”

Warrick, Kuma’s husband, had gone off to fight the Japanese and Kuma returned to her village to have his baby. Warrick died soon after, (during World War II) and Ba grew up without ever seeing her father.

The book, replete with photographs and illustrations that appear to be of an indigenous style, reads like a fairytale, yet it is not. The rituals and events seem bizarre, but they are authentic. Carlyon’s fastidious research and her affectionate documentation make Mama Kuma an unforgettable book.
By Rumana Husain (published in Dawn's Books & Authors on March 2, 2003)

A Whiff of the Past at Eidgah

2010-12-17T09:41:00.004+05:00

The old central business district of Karachi, M.A. Jinnah Road, is still popularly known by its old name - ‘Bunder Road’- changed nearly fifty years ago. This area is in its own league, with distinct characteristics, representing the exuberance and energetic spirit of Karachi. In a dyspeptic frame, one is likely to feel a revulsion for the noisy hustle-bustle and the pollution, but for those who are in a better mood and also looking for an old-world charm tucked inside the vibrant, crowded bazaars and forgotten mansions; it is a treat to be walking around here.

I was at the Eidgah Maidan area of M.A. Jinnah Road to order a replacement of chiqs (reed blinds) for my house. This area, only a few years ago, had scores of shops that sold and made-to-order such blinds, but now only some of them make use of the natural sirkanda which is imported from Kasur, Punjab. Most of the original shops have begun dealing in plastic merchandise. There are now shops selling plastic durries, mats and table covers. The chiq-makers too use plastic pulleys instead of the handmade wooden pulleys that were traditionally a part of every chiq.

Walking up and down the area, I came across smallish mosques and dargahs in the narrow lanes. Facing the shops selling flowers and chaadars for reverence to the saints, amid the rose fragrance there are shops selling an eclectic range of forged and cast iron-ware. However, I was pleased to note that the atar shops are still there along the main road. The atar-walas manufacture incense and distil atar for festivals such as Eid. Atar continues to be in use today, with different communities using unique concoctions. The famous patron of atar was the empress Noor Jehan who was known to bathe in rose water. Some of the Eidgah atar shops also sell creams, lotions, masks, ubtan and henna…all ingredients for a fair and lovely bride-to-be.

Viewing the road-crossing at Eidgah from the relative safety of the footpath, I observe the traffic madness - the speeding of buses, the zig-zagging of motorbikes and scooters, the bravado of pedestrians, the boldness of hand-drawn cart-walas such as the bihishtees, the impudence of taxi-drivers and private car owners, as well as the racket caused by the rickshaws. Nevertheless, oblivious of what goes on around them, women – most of them burqa-clad housewives - flock to the shops selling footwear, vinyl floor coverings, plastic mats, iron utensils and rolling pins. They are also out to buy fabrics and other bric-a-brac at the Jama Cloth Market close by, or to fulfill a mannat at one of the dargahs. Whatever it is, if you do not already belong to the old city, you will certainly be transported back into another era.

Text and Photographs by Rumana Husain (published in Dawn's 'Review', 2008)

The Inherited Talent - A Long Innings: Khayyam Sarhadi

2010-12-13T19:07:00.006+05:00

“I have seen you on television for as long as I remember watching television itself.” I say to the veteran actor as we sit down on a quiet afternoon for this interview, overlooking the creek and those of the mangrove trees still left there. He nods. It looks like he acknowledges albeit with a touch of embarrassment.

I then ask him if he has any links with the ‘Harkatul Mujahideen Al-Almi.’ He is shocked. “Don’t you know there is a ‘Khayyam Sarhadi’ belonging to that group who was arrested on September 11 this year? The only difference is that there is a ‘Nawab’ prefixed to his name,” I inform him, recalling the name that had struck me after reading the news item in a national daily. We laugh about the coincidence, although, perhaps it is no laughing matter.

“So you do actually belong to the ‘Sarhad’’ don’t you?” I ask, to which he replies that his paternal grandfather was from Peshawar; he imported green tea from China, while his maternal grandfather, Rafiq Ghaznavi, (the famous music director) was from Afghanistan, but worked in Bombay (Mumbai). “My father was sent to Bombay in the early ‘30s, to look after the tea business there.”

“Zia Sarhadi?” I ask.

“Yes, but his name was Fazl-e-Qadir; he changed it to Zia Sarhadi, as most people in Bombay were known by their places of origin…Jalandhari, Lyalpuri…” He then spoke at length about his parents.

I only vaguely got to know the purpose of Sarhadi’s visit to Karachi: recordings for serials, one directed by actor-turned-director Mahmood Akhtar, and another one by Mehreen Jabbar.

Sarhadi’s father was a story-writer, lyricist and director. Well known for his Hum Log (1951), the film that won a number of awards in the Russian film festival held during the early fifties. Also for Baiju Bawra (1952) for which he wrote some spirited dialogues, and for several such landmark films. “My father was associated with the leftist group in Bombay that was active in IPTA – an Indian Peoples Theatre group that included people like Raj Kapoor’s father Prithvi Raj, Balraj Sahni, Durga Khote and others. When Dad wrote his first film script – a story called Mun Mohan - he got in touch with director Mahboob, who took him to a financier for the film. He listened to it rather indifferently. Suddenly, during the story-reading session, they heard someone sobbing from one of the rooms inside the house. It appeared that the daughter of the financier had been listening to the story and was immensely moved by it. The man was then convinced that the film would be a success.”

I conjecture that it was perhaps natural that the son take after his father and enter the world of showbiz. “No, it wasn’t that simple,” Sarhadi says with a misty look. “My mother wanted me to be what I am. She has been dead for thirty years now;” he looked to his right towards the sea and continued, “buried there in Manora. She is the most wonderful person I have ever known, and I have a most unique relationship with her. Believe it or not, I still speak to her…” I am unprepared for this, but I let him speak without interrupting. “After she was dead, I asked her whether I should enter television and the theatre. Her answer was positive.”

“From Bombay, where I was born and grew up, we came to live in Lahore for some time and then moved to Karachi in 1956. My mother, Zara Sarhadi, who was a writer as well, started the PECHS Girls School here together with Begum Majeed Malik and others.”

Apparently, life became hard for the family as Ayub Khan’s martial law cracked down on communists and Zia Sarhadi was hounded. The young Khayyam, at age fourteen, was sent to the USA by his mother. He relates how miserable he was in New York City where he was living with his father’s cousin. He wrote long letters to his mother about the endless boulevards and sky-high buildings of NYC, and how much he missed her. “Those were tough days. Communication was not easy. I lived from letter to letter. When my mother wrote back – and she had a unique style – I found solace and lived on for a few more weeks until her next reply. Did I tell you I left my uncle’s house and was on my own? It was not easy, but I learnt a lot of lessons quite early in life.” However, coaxed by his mother, he went on for a Master’s degree in cinematography in the US.

“I was also in Germany for some time where, together with a friend, I made some documentaries, sneaked into Yugoslavia during Tito’s rule there, and staged a few plays as well. I don’t think I have come across better actors and plays since those days in Yugoslavia.”

He came back from the US when his mother died. Staying behind, Sarhadi decided to see the country and bought a Khyber Mail train ticket from Karachi to Peshawar. On the way, he got down at Lahore and asked a tonga driver to take him to Gulberg. The family had lived there briefly several years ago when his father was making a film in Lahore. On reaching his old neighbourhood, he sought out architect Nayyar Dada who he had known during that brief period spent in Lahore.

“Dada then informed other friends who had known me, including Sarmad Sehbai, who took me to PTV the following day. I was sitting with Sarmad when the producer of a Punjabi comic play offered me a role in it.” Sarhadi could neither speak Punjabi, nor read the Urdu script. Nevertheless, the producer and those present in the room were bowled over when, after listening to the script, Sarhadi mimed his part. Thus began his journey into television.

Dr. Anwar Sajjad, who was a fan of Sarhadi’s father, then asked him to play a part in an Urdu stage play, Aik Thi Maina, which he had written. “Samina Ahmad, Shujaat Hashmi and other co-actors helped me learn the lines for that play. My first wife, Atia, also acted in that play.”

Sarhadi has four daughters, one from his previous marriage, who is a doctor in the army, whereas the other three were born after he married film actress Saiqa. “She had come to watch a stage play in which I was acting. Atia and I were going through our divorce during that period. Saiqa met me back-stage, and in a few days we realised that we were made for each other. We have been married for twenty-two years now.”

Sarhadi’s father died in Madrid, Spain, where he was visiting his daughter. Sarhadi says his father left him a dozen film scripts which, some day soon, he will use for his own productions. It seems that a fourth generation of artists is now in the making. “My youngest daughter, Zharghuna, just thirteen, wants to become a director.”

Khayyam Sarhadi firmly believes that art has to be nurtured on the physical starvation of the body. “Only then can the finer senses develop, mature. One has to taste hunger and poverty first.” Perhaps his daughter would adopt her father’s philosophy, and direct the films scripted and left behind by her grandfather…

Interviewed by Rumana Husain for Dawn's 'Images'. Published on December 1, 2002.

‘An Island in the Sky’: A Children's Book Festival in South Korea

2010-12-11T12:47:00.014+05:00

On my return to Karachi, I found a music CD called ‘An Island in the Sky’ in the complimentary package given by the organisers of the NAMBOOK 2010 – the 5th Nami Island Children’s Book Festival (October 1 to November 14).

‘What an appropriate title’, I thought, though perhaps it wasn’t referring to the 1953 film by the same name, starring John Wayne, nor a 1960 cartoon by Carl Barks by the same title, it indeed seemed that Nami Island, a small and beautiful island on the river Bukhan some 70 km away from Seoul in South Korea was ‘an island in the sky’. Its beautiful landscape, tranquil quality, and a long row of spectacularly tall metasequoia trees, seemed to touch the sky.
As we began to leave the large city of Seoul, along the way the rural landscape of Gyeonggi Province began to emerge. After almost three hours our bus rolled into a small wharf in the town of Gapyeong from where we took a ferry to reach Nami Island, which was just under ten minutes away.

Named after South Korea’s valiant General Nami, originally Nami was not an island, but a small mountain. With the construction of the Cheongpyong Dam in the 1940s, a lake was formed covering all except the mountaintop, which is now an island. The fragrance of chestnut, maple, poplars, birch and ginkgo trees fill Nami Island, making it a perfect place for couples to come and relax here over the weekend, as this is also the popular place where the most romantic scenes of the film ‘Winter Sonata’ were shot.

However, during the first few days of the opening of the Children’s Book Festival, it was children and their family members, as well as school teachers who filled this island, overwhelmed only by the number of children’s books that the island was also filled with! The Nami Island Children’s Book Festival was first held in 2005, in part to honour the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen, and aimed ‘to create on this island a fairytale world in nature through books’.It was several months ago when I received a call from Syeda Basarat Midhat Kazim of the famous Alif Laila Book Bus Society, based in Lahore. Basarat, herself a children’s writer and promoter of children’s books, is an active member of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and is also a member of the International Organising Committee of NAMBOOK, South Korea. She told me about the Festival, and the decision of the organisers to publish a Peace Story picture book on the occasion of the 2010 festival. More than twenty countries will be participating, she said, and each country will contribute a peace story. Basarat invited me to illustrate her story, which was going to be the contribution from Pakistan. It was indeed an honour and a privilege, which I accepted enthusiastically, and thus ‘Pashmina,’ a girl from our beautiful valley of Swat, was born.

On our arrival in Nami Island we were met not only by the very dynamic President of the Organising Committee Woo-hyon Kang, who is the CEO, Nami Island and an illustrator, but also by the members of the Minn family who own the island. A few members of the NAMBOOK secretariat had met us in Seoul, facilitating our stay there, and later they accompanied us to Nami Island. What was striking about all the Korean people related to the Festival was their pleasant and humble demeanour. Right from the billionaire Minn family, who insisted on carrying umbrellas over our heads or carting our luggage, to the staff members, who remained at our beck and call, it was almost embarrassing to experience such genuine warmth, politeness and concern.

A children’s musical concert invoked the inauguration of the Festival after which the 22 authors and 22 illustrators from the 22 participating countries, as well as many other guests and members of the Organising Committee were asked to hold on to a white cylindrical rice cake that was hundreds of meters long.
We formed a large circle, holding on to it with both of our (gloved) hands, and then as soon as Woo-hyon Kang signalled, we were asked to pull and break this tube-like cake and eat it too! There were roars of laughter and enjoyment as none of us had experienced this kind of ‘ribbon-cutting’ which is a part and parcel of inaugurations around the world.

The other imaginative ways in which hundreds of thousands of children’s books were displayed, the large display panels of our Peace stories and illustrations in the woods, dolls, toys, handicrafts, music, food, exploration of the island, ferry ride, a fairytale dinner under the stars and under the unbelievably majestic metasequoia trees, my story-telling experience to school children in a scheduled session, peer discussions and friendships…are all part of my beautiful memory of that experience. Yet, one is painfully aware of the lack of such activities, on such a large scale, for our children in Pakistan, as well as the lack of importance meted out to them generally.

After spending three gorgeous days on the island, we returned to Seoul for another kind of experience over there, including a seminar
“PEACE: The Story of My Creation,” which was based on anecdotes from seven authors and artists about their Peace Story experience. Basarat and I were happy to be a part of this seminar held at the National Children’s Library in Seoul, in which we were able to share our thoughts about Pashmina, Swat, Pakistan, and our struggle for peace…“For 45 days you can become a hero of our favourite fairytales - crossing the boundaries of nation, race or religion - sharing smiles and ideas of peace. When you cross the river - through the realm of the sky - and encounter an island lit by the magical foliage of autumn, you will have entered into a fantasy world, festooned with fascinating and enlivening picture books,” said Woo-hyon Kang in one of his speeches. We realised that he had quite literally meant every word of it!
By Rumana Husain (This is the full version of the shorter piece published in Dawn's 'Young World' on December 11, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/2010/12/11/children%E2%80%99s-book-festival-an-island-in-the-sky.html)

“When Ignorance is Bliss, ‘tis Folly to be Wise.” Why Educate Our Children?

2010-12-10T10:01:00.005+05:00

Ignorance is bliss. Isn’t that an age-old dictum? Why then are we, the Pakistanis, trying hard to disprove it? Look around and you will find parents sending their little ones off to schools and madrassahs. Turn any corner and you will find a school of a different hue and shade. As if that wasn’t enough, we even opened ghost schools. What next?

Ah, ‘education, knowledge’…the opposite of ignorance, of true bliss…when will we, as a nation, finally abandon our quest for this scourge, this menace?

As soon as a child is born, the new parents start to worry about selecting a play-school or a Montessori, although they have absolutely no right to do so. After all, it is the prerogative of the school’s administration to select them and their child, not the other way around. Parents are audacious enough to go and have the name of their two-month old (and in some cases week-old baby) ‘registered’. With our population already bursting at its seams, how can they expect to be so careless if they really want their new-born to be accommodated in a good school? Many schools are already telling them that they should have come when they were planning their weddings, rather than wasting time shopping for clothes and furniture. Why can’t parents see the value of happy-go-lucky children running around joyfully in the streets, observing other people hanging around, instead of those who stare at their boring books and the lifeless teachers who pretend to ‘impart knowledge’. Parents can be so stupid! They cannot see through teachers who have hardly anything worth ‘imparting’ and are actually only looking for scapegoats on who to unburden themselves. These poor, innocent children are continuously made to believe the opposite of what some very wise men and women realised hundreds of years ago when they pronounced that, preferably, ignorance is what one should strive for!Every other person one meets these days is in the business of running schools in Pakistan: established businessmen and young entrepreneurs, good people and scandalous people, rich people and the poor ones, people with tall claims, mullahs and pop singers…the list is endless.

The question is, why is everyone hell-bent on providing ‘good education and sound knowledge’ to children. Surely there are other businesses that are similarly lucrative? There is bound to be a conspiracy at work behind this. Can we blame the well-wishers of our nation if they point their fingers towards all those who plot against the very existence of our country? We should let them identify the hands that are pushing us towards acquiring education so that we lose our state of blissful ignorance.

Have you ever paid attention to the costs incurred in the name of education? We can feed all the poor and hungry people in our blessed homeland if we divert the funds spent on schools to other, more urgent and important issues. We can make our lives and our children’s lives idyllic if we let them sleep it off every morning, instead of pushing them into cage-like contraptions called school vans. We will also have more straight-backed children if they are not burdened with heavy bags which, as research shows, are useless because essentially all students — even the ‘best and the brightest’ — have predictable difficulties grasping many of the ideas that are covered in their textbooks.

To achieve our ambition of acquiring powerful positions, roaring SUV’s in which to move around at aggressively high speed, and other trappings of material wealth can come without much difficulty in Pakistan with the help of a gun or the power of good contacts. Why bother with ‘education’ then.

Lately, an army of self-styled saviours has risen in the north of our beloved country. They are systematically blowing up schools for girls, and seem to have wide support and, therefore, resounding success. Now what we can all do as good citizens of this country is to further support them actively, or encourage them in their self-righteous cause by passively staying put.
One of our heroes, Mahmood of Ghazni, took a coastal land route to destroy the idols standing in the temple of Somnath. He travelled from Sindh into Gujarat. Now we, across the country, await our saviours, our new heroes. We hope they will soon be on the shores of the port city in the south and rid us of these somnaths of useless facts and figures, and of iniquity. Thus supremely unaware, uninformed and uneducated we, the chosen faithful, the guardians of Islam and the champions of the Ummah, shall move forward and one day conquer the world.
By Rumana Husain (Published in Dawn on December 21, 2009)

Cities I Have Visited - My Travel Map

2010-12-08T22:59:00.001+05:00

Create your own travel map or travel blog

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On the Rocks

2010-12-07T14:29:00.006+05:00

Title of book: Beyond the gorges of the Indus – Archaeology before Excavation
Author: Karl Jettmar
Edited by: Ellen Kattner
Published by: Oxford University Press, Karachi, in 2002
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0 19 577979 7

Rock Art exists at numerous sites in Pakistan. The northern areas have been well-researched for it. The Kirthar range and the Kachho plains in District Dadu in Sindh depict hunting scenes, ritual practices and wild-life, especially the Ibex. The Ibex, it appears, has been fancied and revered by man in our region for centuries. “In the spiritual world, man and the wild goat (Ibex or Markhor) are considered as ‘doubles’. The domestic goat is held as a pure animal because it is a relative of the holy game – the Ibex or the Markhor – while the cow, lacking such connections, is regarded as unclean and bad,” writes the German archaeologist, anthropologist and art historian Dr. Karl Jettmar, referring to the rock art of the northern areas in his book: “Beyond the Gorges of the Indus – Archaeology before Excavation”.

Rock Art includes petroglyphs (designs that are scratched or cut into cliffs, boulders, or any natural rock surface) and are the oldest man-made signs on earth. The richest petroglyph sites perfectly adapt to natural surroundings. The ancient rock carving artists have left their humble signs behind, thus providing us a vision of their spiritual world. The carvings and paintings of animals, humans, as well as those of more material symbols, seem to have a clear language, which narrates the commonly understood relationship between the three.

The art of rock carvings and wall paintings is not new to the people of South Asia. Its roots go down to the second century B.C. The Ajanta Caves in Northern Maharashtra, India, are famous the world over for their wall paintings, while the Ellora Caves are masterpieces of sculpture. Just as the twenty-nine caves of Ajanta are well-preserved due to their isolated location – cut into the steep face of a deep rock gorge in the Waghore River – some of the rock carvings in the northern regions of Pakistan, from the early historic periods, appear to have hibernated at various sites along the raging Indus river.

According to a Karachi-based Pakistani archaeologist, the petroglyphs in the valley of Harrar, the heights of Damro pass and the gorges of Sita in Sindh help in understanding the range of activities of the prehistoric people and the level of their material culture. In Balochistan too, the Zhob valley has petroglyphs and also paintings with organic pigments. These depict the fairly developed material culture, as sword-bearing mounted warriors or hunters can be seen busy in their ‘chivalrous’ engagements.

Grants from Germany have enabled many years of pioneering work in the north of Pakistan by Dr. Karl Jettmar. There is a need that the government, other big enterprises, and the rich must allow similar grants for students and scholars to pursue research activities in other regions of the country, and come back with their reports.

Dr. Karl Jettmar has been a member and leader of many ethnographic as well as archaeological expeditions to the mountain areas of the Karakoram and the Hindukush. He became Head of the Department of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in 1964, from where he retired in 1986. To honour his outstanding scientific contributions, he has been awarded the coveted ‘Sitara-i-Imtiaz’ by the Government of Pakistan.

Jettmar’s book, Beyond the Gorges of the Indus – Archaeology before Excavation, was to be printed in the early nineties. But, according to the author, it was delayed for several years as his wife, Dr. Senta Jettmar – who supported his scientific work for almost fifty years – fell seriously ill and he had to look after her until she passed away in 1999. His book is a result of almost fifty-years of research. He first came to Pakistan in 1955, as member of an expedition which was sponsored by the German Research Foundation. Shortly after the opening of the Karakoram Highway to foreigners, Jettmar started “a systematic programme for the documentation and interpretation of sources together with Professor Dani as official counterpart, and in close collaboration with the Lok Virsa and the Department of Archaeology. The immediate result was the discovery of one of the major rock art provinces of the world, with more than 20,000 carvings or groups of carvings spread over the Northern Areas (i.e., the Gilgit Agency and Baltistan). The unique speciality of this province is the occurrence of many Buddhist carvings, and the connection with inscriptions in many languages: the local ones including the enigmatic Burushaski, still spoken in Hunza, Nager, Yasin, and foreign ones such as Sanskrit, Sogdian, Chinese, Bactrian, Middle Persian, and Tibetan.” (excerpt from the book)

The book describes the prehistoric petroglyphs, their ‘discovery’ and tentative interpretations (in particular of the animals depicted, as not all game pictured on the rocks lived in the area in the presumed period when these etchings or carvings were made). Amongst the several hypotheses presented by Jettmar in his book, his own hypothesis is concluded in these words:
“The supposition that influences from the northern and eastern parts of Central Asia were active in the Indus Valley and are documented by an integrated complex of rock-carvings, can be supported by the result of excavations in not too distant areas.” He then adds, “If we accept my hypothesis concerning the Far Eastern contact – like in Swat and Kashmir – then most of the prehistoric carvings should be assigned to the second millennium BC. “

The book has been divided into ten chapters that describe not only the expeditions and explorations, but also the social and economic process of the northern areas, like Chilas, Tangir and Darel. Chilas, as we know, appears in old travel books as one of the important trading posts located on the ancient pathway, frequented by caravans going up and down the Babusar Pass. Today Chilas and its neighbouring valleys are well known for the rock carvings. The chapter on “The Gilgit Manuscripts” (the manuscript leaves were presumably made of birch-bark) and their discovery makes interesting reading. There are over twenty colour illustrations showing petroglyphs from various periods. These include rock carvings from the Buddhist period displaying religious rituals. In a book of this size perhaps a much greater number of photographs and maps could have been included. Such maps and flow-charts would have added interest and made it easier to follow the various historical developments.

It may be pertinent to mention here the “bas-reliefs” discovered in 1845 by a French explorer – Joseph Pierre Ferrier – while travelling southwards on the Kabul road in Afghanistan. Ferrier, in his book “Caravan Journeys and Wanderings”, mentions …”I remarked an enormous block of rock, turned to the sun, on the smooth surface of which were sculptured several figures and inscriptions. The former were in a group; one represented a king on his throne administering justice…” Apparently, these ‘bas-reliefs’ remain unlocated, and the whole of Ferrier’s route between Sar-i-Pul and Zarni remains something of a mystery.

There may be a romantic, fairy-tale like quality to the subject of rock carvings, executed by men and women who were either just passers-by, or who built their shelters on the clearings and inlets between the rocks and steep cliffs of the northern areas. One can perhaps imagine the morning sun tiptoeing out of the river each day and spreading its wings, travelling high across the back of the blue sky all day and then dropping and splashing near the rocks in the river beyond the mountains. Surely the beauty and serenity of the forested mountains and the jogging of naughty wild goats and yaks must have inspired those artists to etch their spiritual drawings in stone. But this book does not take the reader through an easy, leisurely journey of the rock artists. It is a serious, historic, and scientific documentation. This is a subject that needs local researchers to build on the valuable pioneering research of Dr. Karl Jettmar, opening more and more windows that could look towards the ‘speaking’ rocks and boulders of the north, and also of the south.

Reviewed by Rumana Husain (Published in Dawn's 'Gallery' on May 25, 2002)

BUA - The Matriarch

2010-12-04T17:11:00.005+05:00

Her real name is ‘Kundan Mai’, but she is known by all and sundry as “Bua”. You might find her working for a few hours, then gossiping with other domestic helps around the block for several more hours. Bua has been a fixture in this upper-middle class neighbourhood for over two decades now.

Bua narrates her story in these words:

“I was born in a place called Khangah Mubarak, about 6 miles from the city of Bahawalpur - the only child of my parents for a long time, before the others were born. My village is also close to Samarsatta in southern Punjab. My father used to work in the railways during the British Raj, but became a farmer after the Partition. We lived in a katccha house that was built on the neherwala pul (bridge over a canal). I spent my childhood mostly herding goats and sheep for my parents.”

Bua says she was eleven years old when she got married in 1948, a year after Partition. Her husband was a year younger than her. I ask her to clarify if she was only betrothed or there was a rukhsati as well.

“Oh yes, there was! I was bundled off to my in-laws’ house in the same village. I remember that my brother was born at midnight on 14 August 1947. I was only ten years old at the time. The following year I was married.” She tries to connect these events, putting her life in perspective.

“Did you continue to be a goatherd at your in-laws’ house?” I ask. “No, there I collected grass, harvested wheat and cotton and cooked food for the family. I delivered a daughter at the age of thirteen, but she died when she was only two, of pneumonia. Then I had a stillborn son, but later I had another daughter.

“My husband died at a very young age. He was just fourteen. He too died of pneumonia. As a young widow, with a baby daughter, I returned to my parents’ house.”

I ask Bua why she chose to come to Karachi. She says that several of her relatives were coming to this city to look for work. She too decided to try her luck, as it was difficult to live off the small income in the village.

Bua and her daughter, (who was by then married but separated from her husband) lived in a jhuggi in the Defence Society area, together with Bua’s nephew, Ghafoor, who is her adopted son. Ever since, they have been working in people’s homes - dusting, sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing, gardening – whatever needs to be done.

Despite spending 21 years in Karachi, Bua continues to speak a mixture of Saraiki and Urdu – mostly the former – overseeing the lives of her nephew, his wife, (who is Bua’s niece) as well as other members of her sister and brother’s families. Her own daughter has been divorced, and she is back in the village. Bua says with a mix of remorse and pride that intermarriages have been common in her clan, although now the girls are not married before they turn fifteen.

Bua lives in a rented flat in Qayumabad. Six years ago she went to perform Haj, together with her nephew and sister-in-law, and attributes this privilege to her hard work. She however regrets that although she has tried to approach the area Councillor many a times, persons like her get overlooked when zakat is distributed to the needy.

Quite a chatterer, Bua’s voice can be heard in the street nearly all day, every day.
By Rumana Husain (Published in Dawn's 'Review' magazine Dec.30-Jan.5, 2005)