|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
  |
heritage MOOD
STREET TOWN
TALK A
theatrical mob
heritage Premises to keep Lahore is known for being home to the glorious shrine of Hazrat Ali Hajveri alias Data Ganj Buksh. But not many people know that the city boasts several age-old shrines within the premises of some of its very famous buildings. TNS identified at least seven such spots around the city By Haroon Akram Gill The Lahore High Court building houses the shrine of Sayyed Abdul Razzaq alias Shah Chiragh in its premises. History tells us that the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan was a great disciple of the 17th-century Sufi saint. The emperor wanted to marry one of Shah Chiragh’s granddaughters but the saint didn’t accept the offer. As per records, Shah Chiragh passed away in 1658 and the Badshah built a grand shrine at the place where the former lies buried along with his father and grandfather. With the passage of
time, the shrine has come to be surrounded by buildings and today it falls
within the premises of what is known as the Lahore High Court. Oriental College, Punjab University, houses the grave of the 14th-century saint Shah Shahab-ud-Din aka “Punj Pir”. It is said that the reason for the famed “Punj Pir” is the co-existence of five graves till the area was divided between Oriental College and Government College University (GCU), Lahore. Today, four graves lie in the area belonging to the GCU. Reports have it that the former Vice Chancellor of GCU Khalid Aftab demolished the four graves which were then shifted to the Miani Sahib graveyard. This is supposed to have happened almost 700 years since the graves were dug. Muhammad Akram, who has been serving the darbar for the past 25 years says the place is visited by people who come to pray especially on Thursdays. King Edward Medical College (KEMU) has two graves in its premises, right in front of its play ground. The saints buried there are named Khawaja Hussain Chishti and Hazrat Sayyed Gurz Ali Shah. Ghulam Hussain, a young trader from Gwalmandi, has looked after the two shrines for the past 14 years. He says the devotees look after the places on their own. This year marked the 147th Urs of the saints, he reveals. “But no one knows the age of these saints. Even the books on the history of Lahore do not have any references to this place.” The administration of the KEMU has only been able to reach out to the people who are taking care of the affairs of the shrines within the university premises. Ghulam Hussain says the Vice Chancellor will head the committee being formed to look after the shrines. The students of the
university are said to have no complaints regarding the activities around
the shrines. Hafsa, a 3rd professional, says the Urs “didn’t disturb
our studies although it happened on the days when our classes were on
[September 5-6].” Aitchison College has a strange story. Chacha Aurangzeb, who has been looking after the three graves housed in a two separate compounds for the last 50 years, says that the college administration attempted to demolish the compounds in early 1980s, but the “bulldozers were destroyed and the graves were saved.” Choudhary Ghulam Rasool [father of the famous Hockey player turned politician Akhtar Rasool] was the principal at that time.” Chacha further reveals that the names of the saints buried at the place are Bohar Shah and Pinjray Shah and they lived in Hazrat Mian Mir’s time. Pinjray Shah was the more famous of the two because of his large collection of birds. According to Chacha, the admirers of the two saints arrange an Urs every third month of the year which gets participation from people from Lahore as well as other cities of Punjab. Hazrat Sayyed Manzoor Shah Wali, who is said to be with Baba Fareed Ganj Shakkar during the latter’s ‘chilla’, almost 700 years ago, lies buried in the heart of the premises of the DIG Operations’ office building. Another sufi saint Habibullah Shah is buried next to him in the same shrine. Mehr Naeem, caretaker of
the shrine, says that Habibullah Shah was a Kashmiri saint who came down
to Lahore at the time of the Partition and brought with him a huge caravan
of refugees. According to Javaid Iqbal, the security in charge of the building, says the annual Urs of the sufi saints takes place regularly and the Police department provides for the security and helps with the arrangements. The building which has housed the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) since 1956 is also the last abode of Sufi Sayyed Mehtab Shah who lived in the times of renowned Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. Sakhi Muhammad, 75, who serves as caretaker of the place, claims that the Sufi saint was the “great-grandfather of my grandfather.” Sayyed Mehtab Shah, he reveals, was buried here sometime around 1857. Later, the elegant haveli of Nawab Liaqat Ali Khan was built on the land and the grave fell within its premises. Much later, the BISE was set up but the shrine lives on. Mayo Hospital also has the shine of Hazrat Sayyed Balaq Ali close to its Emergency Block and it is looked after by the Auqaf department Punjab. According to a letter written to Auqaf by the DCO Lahore, there are as many as 236 shrines in Lahore. However, the sources reveal that Auqaf takes care of only 60 shrines. Talking to TNS, Assistant Director Auqaf Asif Ejaz says the shrines are taken over following the Waqf Law 1979. “Usually, we go for a place where there is some dispute between two or more groups,” he claims. It is learnt that the annual grant given to the shrines by the department is as meagre as Rs300 per year.
The ideal safety net? By Hassaan Ahmed So you’ve shaken hands, kissed cheeks, exchanged pleasantries, sneaked a look at your mobile’s display (15 minutes down, 45 to go!) and are finally seated around the dinner table. Looks like this visit to your relatives’ just might wrap up without a single mention of the dreaded “m” word. Until, “Toh bataen ji, bhatijay ne engineering toh ker li, MBA ke kya plans hain?” (So tell us, now that our nephew has done his engineering, what are his plans for an MBA?”) Welcome to the new brain drain. Whether this is a
necessity of the ‘times’ or just plain old personal choice, the fact
remains that an alarmingly large number of our engineers are seeking the
gentler pastures of the MBA. Yes, moving to middle management and beyond
at some point of your career makes ‘sense’. Yes, it’s a sound, safe
career path, given See, I am an engineer; not by choice, but damn proud of it anyway. I know the effort, the real effort that needs to be put in to really rise above the teeming mass that is our yearly engineering graduates. And when these people start enrolling into MBA programmes barely two or three years after entering their professional careers, that means we’re losing out on potential MS and PhD candidates to groom our next generations, to research, to invent, to engineer. Granted, the technical/manager hybrid is all kinds of appealing to organisations at the moment, but somewhere in the future, the economic crunch is going to level out, get better, and then we’ll be left with a lot of ‘technical’ managers who would have been far better off in our universities and our research facilities. A major culprit, I’ve
observed, is the overwhelming lack of specialized jobs for our engineers.
I have a friend, an engineer, whose example ideally highlights this
predicament. She was one of the top ranked graduates in her department.
Yet, two years after she graduated from one of Now, we can find her entrenched in the LUMS MBA programme, another casualty, another brilliant research mind that was forced to make the change from science and technology to the managerial desk. As a fresh convert, she
now regularly argues the ‘rational’ points in favour of the
engineer/MBA mixture: finances, improved marriage prospects (the other
‘m’ word), lack of challenging technical jobs. But even she had no
answer when I pointed out that of our 10 closest mutual friends, all
engineers, everyone in The problem lies, predictably, in an industry that has been on the brink of stagnation for ages. The technology sector is going to have a boom soon, we are promised. But the boom never comes, leaving a vast majority of our engineers stuck in marketing or sales positions. Poring over the careers of my aforementioned friends, I find that three of the four in Pakistan who are now ‘aspiring’ to apply for MBA are doing so because they’ve been stuck in sales jobs for so long that attempting to break away from that would be financial and career suicide. A telecom sector that’s now lagging generations behind the rest of the world, an automation industry riding on the coattails of their foreign counterparts, an automotive industry that’s, hey! It’s doing really great (so long as you don’t look at anything the Japanese or the Europeans did. 20 years ago). On the other end of the spectrum, our universities provide no respite. Research programmes are either treading old stomping grounds (true to form), or inexplicably obscured from public eye. In conditions like these, who can really blame us for choosing the safety net? This type of brain drain is, I suppose, inevitable, so long as things don’t get better. And so an appeal must be made to our engineers: Persevere. Please. It may not seem so from the way you’re being treated, but this country really needs you. Stick with not giving up on your engineering careers. And the next time a phopo (aunt) asks you when you plan on betraying engineering for an MBA, tell her you will always bleed binary.
*Overload,
Qayaas, Moen Jo Daro and Topi Drama Live in concert at Alhamra Open Air,
on Oct 27 (today). Time: 6pm onwa *‘Ankheyaan Waleyo,’ a Punjabi comedy play by the University of Lahore Dramatic Club, will be presented under ‘DramaArtival ’13,’ a mega theatre festival, at UOL, on Oct 30. Time: 3pm. Directed by Syed Ghassaan Azhar, the play revolves around three blind characters who criticise our society. *Chatime opens its first outlet in Pakistan at MM Alam on Oct 27. One of the world’s biggest ‘Bubble Tea’ brands, with over 1000 stores across the globe, Chatime is a tea franchise that is also known as the fresh tea specialist. Guests and media are expected to mix with international Chatime delegation which is visiting Pakistan for the launch. *Art & Performing Arts Fest 2013, ends Oct 27 (today), at Aitchison College. Time: 9pm. Private delegations are allowed.
education The Khwarizmi
Science Society (KSS) gave away Galileoscopes to 20 schools in the public
and private sector across the country last week. KSS had received 30
Galileoscopes as an award for celebrating ‘International Year of
Astronomy’ (2009), the best from an IYA cornerstone project. The KSS has come to be
known for organising ‘falkayati’ melas in the province. By now it has
held 17 such melas in schools, colleges, universities, parks and Rohtas
Fort across the province. Three hundred schools,
minus the elite schools, were given forms to fill to gauge their
commitment to science education which were then given to a bench of judges
comprising educationists who selected the schools that deserved the most. The 20 schools to get
the Galileoscope were from Lahore, Faisalabad, Bhalwal (Sargodha),
Khanewal, Nankana Sahib, Rahimyar Khan, DI Khan, DG Khan and Quetta. The
ceremony was held at the Ali Institute of Education. The KSS held a workshop
on how to assemble and use the Galileoscope and distributed manuals and
CDs among the participants for the same purpose. The school
representatives — principals and teachers — were given forms to fill
after that to test their understanding of Galileoscope, on the basis of
which a principal/proprietor of a school in Quetta, Asif Nadeem was given
award for the most know how. He runs a school under a
shed of straw roof which has received more children with years but no
facility from the government. “We requested the DCO for a bridge but are
still waiting for one.” He is going on with his
mission to educate the children despite all the odds. The educationists
representing different schools were invited to come over to the dais and
address the gathering. It was an interactive session as expected of
educated people and the KSS must be lauded for bringing educationists from
such far away areas to the city. Principal of Qurtaba
School in DI Khan that secured top positions in the board said,
“Understand what you read, even namaz. I learnt about Islam after
learning physics. The word ‘reflect’ has been used in the Holy Quran
more than 750 times and when we reflect on something, we get to understand
that and by doing so are closer to God. The focus should be on making
children good human beings and on instilling in them love of learning.” Another school principal
from Quetta, Al-Mustafa High School said the Hazaras in Quetta are all
living in one area which has grown narrower with time, cut off from the
world outside. “They can’t go out of their homes after 8pm. Those who
can manage to get transferred are moving away. We have no one to look up
to.” He said all the
Shaheed’s children are studying for free. The KSS by bringing people
from far away also gave them a voice. The Khwarizmi Science
Society (KSS) aims at promoting a science culture in Pakistan’s
educational institutions and in the general public. Astronomy is just one
field where the society has succeeded in getting the public involved in
their activities. Lectures and activities in various fields have been
going on since 1997, since the society’s very inception and more and
more people are coming along. If you go to the KSS website, apart from
their different activities there is posted a series of experiments for
school children that help explain weather changes with the help of
illustrations. The KSS Maktab Project on the pattern of Khan Academy Model
is the new thing they have started and hope it will be well-received. Prof. Dr Saadat Anwar
Siddiqi, President Khwarizmi Science Society, says that the KSS didn’t
get tripods with the telescopes but managed to provide them too. It has
always raised donations from its well-wishers and membership-fee alone.
There is no government or foreign funding. Shahid Majeed, Rector,
Ali Institute of Education, talked about the contributions of Muslim
scientists. Khwarizmi, he said, was the greatest scientist of all times.
Some of his observations were: “Khwarizmi and Al-Beruni were basically
Zoroastrian. The astronomical charts now used by Nasa were actually made
by a Muslim scientist. We should be proud of our heritage and Muslim’s
contributions in the different fields of knowledge,” he said. There was a lecture on
the basics of astronomy, the many galaxies and our solar system, quite
informative for laymen. Syed Kumail Abbas informed the gathering that the
most research in the world is being done on astronomy and astrophysics. He
explained constellations and Big dipper stars, the units of time, laws of
planets and how we have four seasons because of 23 degree tilt in Earth.
That on Mercury there is permanent day on half of the planet and its dark
on the other half. Likewise, Uranus with 90 percent tilt has no season on
it. He guided the audience
on how to view stars, that the first star we see on sky at sunset is
Venus. A number of stars start with the prefix ‘Al’ which says that
they were first discovered by Arab Muslims. Kumail asked listeners
to “try to view the moon between the 3rd and 12th of the lunar calendar
when they are most visible.” He told the audience,
“Once the US sent ‘radio telescope’ in space to gauge where on Earth
nuclear activity was going on. Wherever such an activity is going on,
radio telescope gets the signal and records it. It was found recording too
many which was very disturbing. Astronomers were sent in space to find out
and what came out was that blasts are happening in space at great speed.
Around one lakh blasts were recorded, sending radioactive waves.” Distance of earth from
the blackhole is decreasing with time. There are a huge number of galaxies
and every galaxy has a blackhole but most of the universe is not
observable. The KSS activities can
be found out from its website. It welcomes people from all walks of life
as it aims to educate school children, teachers and people in general on
science. There is a form posted on its website inviting schools to apply
for falkayati mela in their school which anyone would find very
interesting. Kudos to the Khwarizmi Science Society.
A
theatrical mob A ‘flash
mob’ is a novel idea, as far as Lahore is concerned. Recently, Weekend
Theatre Festival (WTF) arranged one such event in the heart of Liberty
Market, as a prelude to the upcoming festival. Despite the growing
crowd of onlookers, the WTF team danced on to the sound of the bhangra
beats. Kids and street vendors walked alongside the mob as it entertained
people, whereas some even joined in. It began somewhere at
the start of the market and moved on until the team reached the end of the
semicircle where they then disbanded leaving nothing but scattered
confetti behind. Kanwal Khoosat, daughter
of the legendary actor Irfan Khoosat, is the director of the WTF. The
actor is also said to be participating in one of the eight performances
that will be staged at Alhamra The Mall from 22nd November 2013 through
12th January 2014. The WTF aims to revive
theatre by bringing back the force-retired veterans and contemporary
artistes sidelined to TV and pairing them up with upcoming actors. Amongst
the star studded team at the WTF are Sania Saeed, Nauman Ejaz, Nimra Bucha,
Sarmad Khoosat, Nighat Chaudhry and many others. “WTF aims to not just
revive theatre but to also bring people of all classes out of their
homes,” said Adnan Jahangir, Event coordinator WTF, at the Flash Mob. “We don’t just want
those who can afford a Rs1,500 ticket but also people from other classes
that are perhaps not so affording and would find our Rs200 ticket more
reasonable.” The flash mob at Liberty
Chowk was just the tip of the iceberg for what the WTF team has planned
for us. This was their first attempt at introducing the concept to the
public, in which a bunch of random people assemble suddenly to perform an
act, even though it may be pointless. When asked if the
attempt at flash mob had been successful, Adnan said, “We aren’t going
to see this as whether it was successful or not; we just want people to
see us out in the street and join in our cause.” He admitted that the
common public found the event to be strange. WTF plans to take flash
mob to Lahore’s malls and restaurants also. Besides the
performances, the WTF team has arranged workshops for the underprivileged
children and youth, hoping to encourage them to watch and enjoy theatre. According to Adnan,
unlike other organisations, Weekend Theatre Festival will not leave the
government behind and will instead try to involve them and gain their
support for the project. The main idea is to acknowledge the contribution
of our veteran actors and writers. The itinerary of the
festival has been meticulously designed and each individual play will be
staged at a different venue in Lahore, suiting its demands and screenplay.
Thus, giving the audiences a chance to revisit and reconnect with the
heritage of the city also.
|
|
rds.
The concert is meant to “create interfaith harmony between different
religious communities of Pakistan”. It will also include a 20-minute
dialogue, endorsing the peace process in Pakistan.
