Regular newspaper readers could not have missed the recent critical as well as laudatory reports on Higher Education Commission and its former chairperson Dr Atta ur Rehman. These started with Dr A.Q. Khan's letter criticising the former. A debate has arisen over the role and performance of HEC during the last six years of its existence. Experts and stakeholders have differing views about the working and implementation of the projects started by the commission.

HEC was established in 2002 through an executive order by the then president Pervez Musharraf. A Task Force was formed in 2001 by the ministry of education to review the conditions of higher education in Pakistan.

A report was released -- in collaboration with the World Bank and UNESCO -- in 2002 recommending, among other things, setting up of a central body "for facilitating quality assurance of higher education in both the public and private sectors, and linking funding by the Federal Government for public universities to the quality of performance."

The Task Force further recommended that HEC should replace University Grants Commission (UGC) on account of the latter's "erosion of credibility with universities." Availability of generous grants to the new-born commission led to the introduction of many new projects. About sixty to seventy per cent of the funds were, reportedly, spent on human resource development. While UGC was mainly a fund-distributing body, HEC administered the working of these universities.

Dr Atta ur Rehman's tall claims of phenomenal improvement in higher education have been both thwarted as well as acknowledged. Some recent news reports suggest that the budget of HEC has been considerably reduced. The current financial crunch in the country has further put into question the future of HEC. According to Sohail Naqvi, executive director HEC, "it is not true that HEC's budget has been reduced. As always, twenty per cent of the grant has been released. Out of the two major allocations of the budget -- expenditure and development -- the latter has been released."

Former chairman Dr. Atta ur Rehman hopes that the present government will not back off from the project and keep investing in education. "The prime minister announced in the parliament that that there will be no cuts of budget in education sector. You can see what UGC had been doing for the past 25 years and compare it with what we have done. The government has no choice but to spend on higher education," he tells TNS.

"HEC has been squandering money," says Ishaq Khakwani, former minister of State Information and Technology. "The heavy amount of Rs29 billion being given to HEC was absolutely disproportionate to what the other ministries were spending. Only three per cent of the country's population go for higher education; someone should think about the rest of the ninety-seven per cent." Khakwani claims to have proposed the refurbishing of primary education which would require only a small portion of the "non-existent six universities Dr Atta ur Rehman wanted to build."

Dr Rehman denies the allegation, terming it a "misconception". "Last year we spent Rs254 billion on education in total, out of which Rs28 billion went to higher education. Our higher education budget was less than the budget of National University of Singapore, which is spending Rs58 billion every year. Even now we are spending far too little."

Senior journalist Abbas Rashid, who has worked extensively on higher education, holds that we need to spend both on higher as well as primary education. "Basic education can't improve unless and until we improve higher education because that is where our text books, our faculty and our expertise are coming from. The issue is not if higher education should get more; the issue is: we are not giving enough to education."

Lawyer Salman Raja, member Steering Committee on Higher Education before HEC started work, thinks the problem needs to be addressed from both ends and HEC was exactly on the right track. "Today, we have the lowest number of postgraduates in the world, even less than Rwanda. It is foolish to say primary education is more important. We need PhDs now more than anything. The government has been working on primary education for years. HEC's was a focused attempt and hundreds of PhD students on scholarships are a testimony to that effort."

Higher Education Commission, in the words of Dr Atta ur Rehman, has been termed as a model to be replicated by other developing countries. He invites his critics to challenge it. "World Bank's team has given Pakistan a complimentary three stars. It is because of the efforts of HEC that access to higher education has tripled since 1947-2002. The number of enrollment has increased from 113,000 to 320,000 as a result of our projects. British Council Report was also extremely laudatory of our performance. They have given the rising star status to Pakistan. Since 1947 to 2002 not even a single university could make it to the top 1000 in international ranking whereas, today, three of our universities are in the top 600."

"It was a positive achievement," acknowledges professor and chairman Department of Physics Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, "to have increased access to higher education in a country where enrollment is abysmal. Infrastructure was improved, and the number of public universities nearly doubled between 2002 and 2008. Unfortunately, there was no way to provide an adequate number of properly qualified teachers and so they were largely ineffective. One feels that same resources spent on vocational or college education would have yielded greater dividends."

One of the major aims of HEC is "to promote the international visibility of research originating out of institutes of higher education in Pakistan." Online archives of M.Phil and PhD theses have been maintained, aimed to raise it to 3000 theses. According to Dr Rehman, the total number of international publications during the 1990s was 500-600 while last year it crossed the 2400 mark. 45,000 text books from 220 publishers are available online to university students. "The number of papers increased but the citations did not," says Hoodbhoy. "Junk research was rewarded and academic crookery grew by leaps and bounds. Today academic plagiarism thrives in Pakistan because of the per-paper rewards schemes."

According to the initial plans of HEC, six campuses of international universities were to be set up in Pakistan. The projects aiming to set them up stopped because of the increasing security threats in the country in the wake of repeated bombings.

Hoodbhoy says that fantastically expensive Pak-European universities were planned and partly paid for but not a single one was ever built. "Scientific equipment worth hundreds of million rupees was purchased but still lies unused; PhDs were churned out en masse but there was a sharp degradation of quality; students were sent overseas for advanced studies but the selection mechanism allowed thousands of poorly qualified candidates to be sent; and there was false advertising all around."

A lecturer at the University of Punjab tells TNS, on conditions of anonymity, that people at the university objected to the policy-makers at HEC. "Most of these people were foreign-qualified who were trying to implement the format of those universities in Pakistan. These people were not familiar with the ground realities and imposed the foreign models here. Many of the rules they made did not fit our education system." Among such rules was the semester duration and credit hour system. The interpretation of semester system varies, not only within universities but within departments of the same university.

"HEC is a recommendatory body, but it has assumed the role of a dictatorial body because it follows bureaucratic traditions." He also refutes the HEC's claims of promoting research saying that in a culture where teachers are working all day long, research can not be promoted.

Abbas Rashid says that the composition of HEC's Quality Assurance Cell -- which examines the quality of research -- was not proper. "Departments are the most important units of a university and sometimes there are as many as fifty departments in a university. How can a person who has studied physics evaluate the research work in, say, literature department?"

The faculty member of Punjab University acknowledges the "positive work done by the commission including the incentives for research and an award of Rs50,000. Not many teachers availed that award, though, because of the politics within the university. Since the vice-chancellor has the authority to nominate people for that award, it raised more questions than benefits. HEC has done a commendable job by setting a uniform curriculum. As a result of this policy a Masters level student in Jamshoro studies the same text as student in Lahore or Karachi."

Abbas Rashid says it would be difficult not to do any good with the kind of budget HEC has. "The question is: are they any close to where we should be? The answer is no. HEC started working at a time when there was a crisis but it failed to address it meaningfully -- not only at higher education level but in vocational training and expertise as well. We needed action for secondary, primary and vocational training because these things will bring an overall impact and not just one sector. As for research, I don't think that relevant research has propagated." Rashid thinks that HEC gave people a "false sense of security. We are nowhere even close to being on our way."

One is pleasantly surprised every time there is a dance performance by the local dancers in the country. In the recently held Youth Theatre Festival organised by the Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop four groups participated, all of whom had been trained by dancers who have lived through very difficult, even hostile circumstances. Sheema Kirmani and Bina Jawad have struggled in the last forty odd years, teaching in schools and self-managed one-room outfits to keep the dance form alive in the country. It was a great relief to see that their knowledge of the form is being transferred to their shagirds who gave glimpses of their skill in the festival.

Dance in Pakistan has developed in all possible directions. In the absence of any mediated design, it has borrowed and imitated with impunity from all sources to have a variegated shape all its own. It has been ironic that while dance in film was permitted by the censors it was not permitted on television, which was state-sponsored, or by the arts councils which too depended for finances and directions from the government; the exception being the Alhamra, where dance has been taught since the days of Maharaj Ghulam Hussain Kathak. The classes somehow survived, albeit in a very trimmed and hush hush form, stashed away in the safety of the basement. After the death of Maharaj Kathak, Naila Riaz has been persisting with the task of training batches of students. In our society, dance is still associated with the salons and most people in their hour of merriment, celebration or even grief engage dancers for a private performance. The scene usually gets raucous by the minute with drunken people showering money on the female performers. The form of a concert dance performance has really not caught on and is still an alien institution.

In Pakistan film is meant for the masses where much is done to please the gallery, while televisions and arts councils are supposed to be the arbiters of taste. In films, dance borrowed from all sources, most of all from the Bollywood films and presented them with much less finesses on the screen. The choreography in Bollywood, too, is not very original. There is much that is borrowed from all over, especially the West, and the more popular and current forms of dances and its impact on Pakistan can be said to be twice removed. With the decline of the films, dance numbers constitute theatre.

Naheed Siddiqui, the most famous Kathak dancer, who for about a decades and a half lived outside the county, only paying occasional trips to the home country and performing as if it were on the sly, has for some time been moving away from her solo traditional Kathak numbers and switching into group dances. These have been built round either a poem or the mood of the raag or some situation which require a dramatic conflict. She has retained the essentials of Kathak and has added the dramatic element, without going as far as reducing it to a mere tableau.

She spends most of the time now in the country and insists on maintaining the rigours of her training but, in the absence of any performance, even her steely resolve is shaken at times. Earlier this year, she performed in India and was highly acclaimed for her traditional kathak but in Pakistan she hardly gets the chance to display her immense talent. She has been conducting kathak classes at Chitarkaar, a privately managed and funded Unit. That is always in dire need of support.

Recently the music videos have hit the markets with unprecedented success and besides music there are rapid bits of dance, inserted at great speed and regularity. If one is generous, then one can say that it is the beginning of a new form made possible by the video and the computer. Technology has propelled or initiated many a new forms in the arts and this one seems to be going through its birth pangs right now.

Sheema Kirmani and Nighat Chaudhry who have had to battle it out fighting more the adverse circumstances than paying due attention to their creative work, have been moving in the same direction but have not been fully able to keep the illustrative simplicity of the tableau out of their performances. 'The Song of Mohenjodaro' by Sheema Kirmani was a task too great as she traced the tradition of dance over a period of thousand of years focusing on its centrality to the flow of civilisation, but here too she relied heavily on the narrative rather than on integrating the story to the technique of dance. Sheema, of course, is not a Kathak dancer but has had been trained in Odissi, Manipuri and the Bharat Natyam and she attempts to marry them with contemporary forms of dance.

Nighat Chaudhry, too, has been integrating the folk dances into a more stylised form like Heer Ranjha, a ballet that she did with background narration and some basic enactment but these were so few that it could not be qualified as dance drama. But with singing overlapping the performance not necessarily from Heer, but of lyrics which may have had some link with the central theme of the play, it was held together by story telling.

Ammi Minwala has been teaching dance in schools for the past couple of decades and a large number of amateur dancers have been her shagirds. The moments the girls leave school or hit puberty, restrictions are clamped on them by the family barring them from taking it up at a more formal level. The result being that it does not go beyond the stage of cultivating a hobby in school.

Fasih ur Rehman a young male dancer has, however, been more faithful to the traditional forms of Kathak. He dances in the Luckhnow ang and has the purity which is probably missing in most of the traditional forms, which though traditional have changed with time. If he continues on this path, then it will be another dimension, that of a constant, in an environment which is changing so fast as to lose its central reference point.

As the shagirds of Sheema Kirmani and Bina Jawad, Suhae Abro, Mohsin Baber, Umair Arif and Ismet Jawwad performed, one could only pay homage to the resilience and courage of the dancers of this country.

The Asian art was 'discovered' by the Japanese, particularly the curators at Fukuoka Art Museum who organised the first Asian Art Show in 1979, the year the museum was set up. The idea of Asian art, an entity distinct from European or American art, is acceptable now but one can imagine the sense of strangeness and oddity attached to the term in the late 1970s and immediately after.

Terminology apart, the concept of Asian art is important for many reasons; since its inception in 1979, several Asian art exhibitions have been held in the region, conveying shared narratives and strategies across the continent. Various exhibitions focusing on Asian art started after the Japanese initiative. It would be interesting to note that like tradition, heritage and culture, the concept of Asia itself held different meaning in diverse situations.

For instance, the Japanese perceive (prefer) Asia as a group of nations, near their own land; likewise, the Australians have been concentrating on the part of Asia that is connected to the Pacific Rim. Although many countries outside these boundaries do participate in the exhibitions held in these two centres of Asian art, some countries such as Israel or the Central Asian states are never seen.

Hence, like history, faith and fiction, geographical divisions are also subject to varied interpretations; so the notion of Asia changes according to the political designs and cultural goals of each country. However, this is not the case with Bangladesh; in its scheme of things, especially for art, the idea of Asia spreads out to Romania, Italy and Chile as shown in the works exhibited at the 13th Asian Art Biennale being held this fall at Dhaka.

Regardless of the diverse definitions, any exhibition based upon such a concept helps to bring artists from the region close to each other. Though they do meet at other events, held in Europe and America, but being in Asia provides a platform for interaction. It is an assurance for the artists that they can rely on their own resources and region in order to identify with each other. Thus the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka has been contributing to establish links within the area and to make bonds among artists and organisations with similar concerns.

Artists get a chance to compare their art practices and see art of other places in the region, an opportunity hardly available otherwise. Despite our physical closeness, students of art in each Asian country learns more about western art than what takes place in their neighbourhood. Such events update the participants and viewers about Asian art, and help break stereotypes about art especially from a developing country.

Thus, contrary to all expectations, entries from Oman, a tiny state in the Gulf, were impressive due to their innovative concepts, extraordinary imagery and unusual mediums: Especially the video installation of Budoor Al Riyami, with its ambitious scale and imaginative use of T-shirts as the white screen for projecting the image. (The work has been awarded the Grand Prize, shared with two other entries). The video begins with writing on the bare back of a man, which is constantly washed down with blood being poured from the top. Several hands are engaged in wiping the blood from the back, while Arabic chants accompany the whole process.

The other Omani video work deals with the theme of ambiguity, as two characters are placed on a beach. While one drinks from the regular cup, it seems the other person is swallowing a small gold fish. One sees the movements of hand and the close-up of the face, yet the actual shot of putting fish in the mouth is not shown. Thus the video -- displayed with large scale digital prints of the same visuals -- invokes the sensual elements and communicates a feeling of uncertainty.

Both these works signify the change that is taking place in the sensibilities and aesthetics of art in the Arab world, even though the exhibition at Dhaka had ample canvases with floral imagery, abstract compositions and colourful surfaces/textures -- all associated with Arab artists. Oman indeed offered a pleasant surprise.

If Omani section was impressive because of its cutting edge art, Pakistani pavilion was disappointing due to its conventional approach. It included works by known and new artists, such as Nahid Raza, Qudsia Nisar, Ali Kazim, Summaya Durrani, Akram Dost Baloch, Jamil Baloch, Aqeel Solangi and Ayesha Siddiqui, a majority of which conveyed an overall conservative approach towards art making in Pakistan.

It was not about the medium or the scale of works; the entries from Pakistan revealed a dated vision of art. Even though Jamil Baloch got the 'Honourable Mention Award', the Pakistani section, by and large, failed to leave a mark on the viewers. The art works only denoted decorative surfaces, religious content, or surrealist imagery as meaningless exercises in multiple mediums.

All works, with the exception of Solangi and Siddiqui, represented famous artists of the nation who have many solo exhibitions to their credit. But what the viewers must have thought to be the best art of Pakistan did not include our contemporary art which is in great demand internationally -- at auctions, in international exhibitions, for museums and private collectors.

One can only lament about the selection of works for Dhaka and how the opportunity to project our best side internationally was wasted. One is not sure if it feels better to realise that the Indian section at Dhaka was no better either, since they also excluded their best contemporary and exciting artists from the show. So, for once, India and Pakistan were in perfect harmony and synchronisation.

Dear all,

I recently read in The Guardian a fascinating story about a man, George Hall, who discovered his blood family at the age of 90. He had been adopted in 1922 at the age of four. When he tried to trace his mother and was unable to, having very few clues or leads to work from, he lived his life, married, had a daughter, lost both his wife and his daughter to cancer, settled into his old age, and then one day got a phone call from a relative of his adopted parents, who was tracing his family tree and wanted to meet.

They met up and became friends and the young man said he would help George Hall to trace his mother by using his adoption certificate. Just two months later he called, told him he'd found out his mother had married again and had three children. Soon George was able to meet a brother he never knew he had.

The brother, David, was sceptical at first but then learnt from a relative that his mother did indeed have a long lost son. He came to visit George, and the meeting was extremely emotional. From his half brother George learnt more about his mother's story. He saw her picture for the first time. His brother gave her a lock of his mother's hair. He recounts: "To never know what your mother looks like and then at the age of 90, to be given a photo of her is a feeling I cannot put into words."

Suddenly at the age of 90 George Hall had a whole new family. And did he have regrets? Well his response was, "Some people say it's a shame we were not reunited all those years ago, that it's such a waste. I say better late than never."

I have never really understood the logic of the phrase 'blood is thicker than water' (why compare the two anyway???), but there is no doubt at all that blood relatives can give you a strange sort of comfort and, often, unconditional support. That is why I found the recent story of a young victim of the October 2005 earthquake very sad indeed.

The journalist Ehsaan Dawar spoke to a 12 year old boy named Abu Bakar from Batagram who was orphaned by the earthquake. Abu Bakar and his sister survived the earthquake but they were later separated. The sister was taken to Karachi by an uncle, the boy was left in the Batagram area where he has been staying in various people's houses. Before the earthquake, the little boy had a family and went to school; now his whole world has been turned upside down, his parents are gone, he hasn't been to school in three years, he is not in touch with his own sister. I found the last detail particularly sad -- because many things are bearable if you have a sibling or parent to love and help you. That's why it is so sad to hear of brothers or sisters who are separated for adoption.

It's tough getting through childhood with scars and traumas along the way. But how do we deal with the fallout? A friend recently forwarded me an outraged petition demanding that the two children who tortured and killed a two year old boy, Jamie Bulger in 1993, should not be granted anonymity in their new lives in Australia. I'm not sure what people want from these boys who were 10 and 11 when they committed the crime, and who must live with that knowledge for the rest of their lives, and who have spent time incarcerated. Do we want to lynch them? Do we allow them to start a new life or should we hunt them into the ground?

What does such a petition seek to achieve?

Best Wishes

Umber Khairi