Amir Munir, a 20 year old resident of Kasur district, joined Manawan Training School of Punjab police as the under-training constable on Feb 11, 2009. He was among the unlucky seven recruits who were killed during the terrorist attack on the school on March 30, 2009.

"His job had brought a lot of joy to our family, especially for his sisters and mother. They had already started talking about his marriage," said Muhammad Munir, his father, sitting on the front seat of the ambulance that was to take Amir's body back home to Kasur from Police Lines Lahore after the state funeral of the martyrs.

Manawan is the second major terror incident in Lahore in one month. On March 3, the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked while on way to the stadium, leaving six policemen dead. Both the incidents have clearly shown the failure of our police force to fight terror. But the police officials present at the funeral of martyrs of Manawan including Inspector General of Punjab Police Khawaja Khalid Farooq glorified the incident as "a big win" against the terrorists.

Police high-ups in Lahore are not ready to admit they lack the wherewithal. Even Rehman Malik, PM's advisor on Interior, congratulated police as well as other security forces including Rangers and Pakistan Army over its performance. "If it was a security lapse, how could it be possible for police to overcome terrorists in just hours? This shows that police was alert and knows its job," he said, while announcing the establishment of a new force to fight terror in the provinces.

"Police force in Pakistan neither has capacity nor training or resources for combating terrorism. They are fighting this war against terrorism without having proper equipment and skill," ex-interior minister Lt General (r) Moinuddin Haider told TNS. "Political appointments and postings would only worsen the situation". Along with providing resources and training to police force "we will also have to develop a very sophisticated intelligence network to fight terror."

More than 1600 people have been killed in Pakistan in the last two years in terrorist attacks. "Police are a favourite target of these terrorists as the number of attacks against police officers has increased from 113 in 2005 to more than 1500 in 2007. In 2008 alone, 33 police officials were killed in Punjab, 97 in Sindh, 95 in NWFP and 20 in Islamabad during terrorist attacks," said a senior official of National Police Bureau while talking to TNS on condition of anonymity.

He said terrorists are better-equipped and better-trained than police. "A lot of finances are available to them and their morale is quite high."

According to him, of the total 380,000 regular police force in Pakistan, only the elite force (which is only a few thousands) is trained enough to fight with highly skillful opponents like terrorists.

Another high police official, requesting anonymity, explained the shortcomings faced by the police. "The resource availability is so poor that we need to request military or intelligence agencies to trace a mobile phone call. At present, we only have six police forensic laboratories throughout the country, when there should be a hundred. These too are ill-equipped and do not have enough trained staff."

He admits that the morale of police officials is down. "After Manawan, police has arrested 59 suspected terrorists from different cities including Lahore, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Gujjar Khan, Dera Ismail Khan and Sukkur. Many of them were carrying suicide jackets. Two such jackets have been found from an Afghani settlement on Bund Road, Lahore. These arrests have been made on the information we extracted from the already arrested terrorists, especially from Hijratullah Khan, the man caught from the spot."

Sources in Punjab police shared with TNS the security situation at Manawan School. "Only four under-training policemen were deployed at the main gate of the school. No police guard was deployed at any other spot at the school on March 30, which clearly shows that no extraordinary measures were taken even after the intelligence report of the criminal Investigation Department (CID) about the possibility of terrorists attack on important police installations in Lahore. CID wrote a letter to the Principal of Police Training School on March 25 informing that a possible "Mumbai style" terrorist attack could be launched on some training school of Punjab police including Manawan," the sources revealed.

Sources divulged that there were no patrolling squads or police pickets around the Manawan Police Training School where more than 900 police constables were present for training purposes. "Only seven Machine Guns with some hundred bullets were available in the training school at the time of the attack. There were two-dozen other 303-bore official rifles available to police officials for training purposes but they were old and rusty."

SSP Police Training Chuhng Major (R ) Mubashar, also Incharge Manawan Training School, admits that security arrangements of all police training schools in Lahore are being supervised and done by the under-training police officials of that particular schools. "Four trainee police guards were deputed on the security of Manawan centre that day," he told TNS.

The arrangement for the security of training school is still the same. "Now we have deployed those trainees who are in their final stages."

There were speculations about the number of casualties the entire day but Mubashar confirmed that seven police officials and two civilians were killed in the attack. Though, he did admit that more than 100 trainees were still missing. "It means that they left the school on March 30 in a hurry without informing anybody and have not reported to us so for. It does not mean that they have been killed during the attack. On the night of March 30, more than 450 trainees were missing but more than 300 of them have already reported back and we are hopeful that in a day or two the remaining people will also come back."

Senior analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai opined that terrorists have proved more intelligent than the security forces. "They have been changing the modus operandi to launch attacks. They think ahead of security forces because they have a very long experience of fighting a guerrilla war both in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Their motivation is also high as they are fighting for religion while on the other hand police officials are fighting because they get salaries."

Yusufzai does not agree that families of suicide bombers are getting hefty amounts as a reward of their sons' 'sacrifices' "I have met families of three suicide bombers in NWFP. None of them admitted to getting a reward; even the people living in their surroundings told me they had not found a change in their lifestyle after the 'sacrifice' of their sons."

A new force to curb terrorism, as announced by Rehman Malik, will have more negative impacts than positive, said Yusufzai. "It means you are dividing the police force by saying that this new force is more capable while the earlier one is incompetent."

Yusufzai criticised the security forces' celebrating the Manawan tragedy as a victory. "It's a shameful defeat at the hands of a few terrorists. What were they celebrating? Their failure to stop them from killing at least seven policemen and spreading terror throughout Pakistan for a whole day? They did not even kill them; the terrorists blew themselves up."

Muhammed Hafeez belonged to Talwandi, a place that has special resonance for the music in the subcontinent. Situated in now the Indian Punjab, it was considered to be one of the centres of music in South Asia. For the correct sequencing and intonation of the sur, Talwandi musicians were considered to be the ultimate reference point. It was also one of the four major centres of the dhrupad in the Punjab -- the others being Sham Churasi, Kapurthala and Haryana.

Hafeez Khan was a very troubled and unhappy soul and it was not difficult to gauge as to why he was temperamental, irascible, irreverent, bitter and disrespectful to other musical traditions. He was practitioner of an art form that had no takers in Pakistan.

Dhrupad, once the pride of forms had gradually declined and lost appeal even among the initiated. It was creditable that Hafeez Khan and his brother Afzal Khan persisted with the form due to respect for tradition and an obligation to the elders in the family.

Hafeez Khan found himself in a society that had no ear for the dhrupad, and then in a society that had little respect for the performing arts and artistes. All his life, he fought a lonely battle against the musicians for the superiority of the dhrupad over the prevalent classical forms, and with society on the 'role' and function of music.

Seeing obvious discrimination, many among scholars and practitioners have attempted to find a place for music within religion. The general assumption being that the status of music and musicians can be enhanced if a link is discovered or developed between some essential religious value and the philosophy embedded in music. Many a scholar have written about the mysteries of music akin to the grand mystery revealed through the batin and have similarly emphasised the role that music played in the rituals of the shrines run by a number of Sufic orders. There have been references to certain sayings of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) and other instances from history cited to legitimise the practice of music. Historically, it has been more acceptable as some abstract entity that emphasises order and harmony among the spheres but not so acceptable in its practical form.

Among the Muslims, music became one of the courses of scientific study as the technical nomenclature musiqi was directly borrowed from the Greeks. Where no Arabic equivalent was found or known, Greek terms were simply transliterated with some adaptations and hence musiqi came to represent the theoretical aspects of music and ghina was reserved for its practical art. Perhaps the line of reasoning aspired to construct a case on the lines of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu formal religious practices but has always fallen short of expectation because it has never been sanctified by what symbolically is akin to the High Church.

Hafeez Khan too has constructed his own history of music and its relationship to religion. Because he was not educated in the formal sense, most of it appeared to be naïve and puerile fabrication. But he was insistent and drew his lineage from the beginning of mankind. Actually Talwandi musicians trace their lineage back to the era of Akbar, the golden era for music, and to the legendary Chand Khan/Suraj Khan who were probably Sudhakar Pandit and Diwarkar Pandit. Hafeez Khan used to say that there was another gayak with the name of Malak Nathanji to whom Akbar gifted the village Talwandi as a gesture of his greatness. According to another source one Nayak Khanderi, who lived before Amir Khusro, originated the style and the lineage or the disciples include such luminaries as Baiju and Bakshu.

It is not surprising that a number of musical schools and families of musicians draw their lineage from Chand Khan and Suraj Khan, and through centuries and many a missing link, arrive in more recent times when one Qalander Buksh was considered to be a significant presence among musicians of his time. His nephew Maula Buksh too was a musician to be reckoned with. He married his daughter off to Mehr Ali, who was also, in the middle of the twentieth century, an exponent of the dhrupad in the Punjab. Mehr Ali's Khan sons, Hafeez Khan and Afzal Khan, continued to persist with their families singing style throughout the period that was becoming more and more indifferent to dhrupad style of singing.

Talwandi dhurpadias followed the khanderi bani from among the four standard styles of the form, the others being dagar, nauhar and gaudi banis and continued to reign supreme especially in the Punjab where kheyal only crept in silently in the latter half of the nineteen century, almost half a century after its acceptance and elevation in Delhi, Gwalior and Hyderabad Deccan.

Hafeez Khan broadcasted occasionally from the radio and was invited to perform at some concerts and as a teacher imparted training to a number of students. He was treated more like a relic or a conjurer who had the power to evoke the past. His knowledge of music was immense and there was always a method to his singing. His father had trained him in the old school and he complied with that religiously.

Finding an indifferent audience often provoked his ire. There has been a revival of sorts of the dhrupad and the Dagar brothers, who have also stuck to their guns, followed the upswing from Paris to India but no such revival took place in Pakistan.

In this day and age when purity of tradition and of form are becoming irrelevant critical canons as it is more about borrowing, fusing and juxtaposing the taste in music too has become very eclectic. Hafeez Khan found himself out of synch with the times.

While Lahore celebrates spring, with streets, roundabouts and other public spaces embellished with a variety of flowers, the city's art galleries display an abundance of miniature paintings. Although the makers of miniatures are active throughout the year, for some reason their works are displayed in spring.

An exhibition of miniatures opened on March 25 and remained open till April 4, 2009 at the recently inaugurated Vogue Art Gallery (part of a furniture shop) in Lahore. Ten artists –including the early exponents of this genre like Nusra Latif to some more recent graduates of NCA – displayed their works at the gallery.

The exhibition was an attempt to showcase and document the development of miniature painting in Pakistan, as suggested by the show's title, 'Travelogue: New Adventures in Miniature Painting'. In fact, the exhibition illustrated the mind frame of the contemporary practitioners of miniatures and their scheme of handling this historical genre. As the painters responded to the material, technique and imagery of this art form, their urge to investigate both the past and tradition was quite evident in their works.

The gallery displayed paintings, sculptures, mixed media works on paper and installations, yet all were branded (if not brandished) as miniatures – mainly because these were created by trained miniaturists. Thus the brick sculpture of Noorali Chagani, installation of Ayesha Durrani, perforated sheet by Hira Mansur and paper construction of Huma Iftikhar were all defined and displayed as miniature art.

This situation alludes to a number of observations and invites a few reflections. The fact that neither the miniature artists are restricted to the traditional aesthetics of miniatures nor they are bound by the rule, scale, medium or method when they are making inventions in the age-old art, is important as they are fabricating an unforeseen vocabulary. Not that the works they produce are extraordinary examples of art but because such works are unexpected. For instance, the brick construction of Noorali: its pulsating shape, made of tiny bricks joined together, that looked like a rug could not have been imagined by miniaturists such as Bashir Ahmad or others like Imran Qureshi (the only one involved in teaching it full time in an academic environment), Aisha Khalid, Talha Rathore and Nusra Latif. Compared to the newly-trained miniaturists, they were orthodox in their choice of scale and technique, despite their unconventional and imaginative approaches.

Similarly, the installation of Ayesha Durrani, with the mannequin, flowers and ropes (a kind of extension of her painting imagery into three dimensions) could not have been comprehended by anyone closely observing the growth and popularity of miniature in our times. Likewise, Huma Iftikhar's paper cut outs of chairs, stuck on top of each other, and Hira Mansur's incised surfaces, with a back light blended two different images into one, could not have been imagined by viewers, critics or collectors of modern miniatures (who were greatly impressed by Shahzia Sikander's 'heroic' act of substituting visuals from her experience with the conventional imagery of miniature painting, at her degree show in 1991).

The works on display at Vogue were a natural outcome of the surge to create something new in the age old idiom. The makers of this new art not only address the tradition of miniatures from the Mughal and Rajesthani /Pehari periods in India but also react to the first or second generation of modern miniature painters in Pakistan. Their work is far more daring and divergent when compared with the work of Imran Qureshi, Aisha Khalid, Talha Rathore, Nusra Latif Qureshi or Saira Wasim. One factor behind this order of things is that the new entrants needed to devise their distinct voice.

So if it was the scratched surfaces of Hasnat Mehmood or graphic (in the sense of being minimal) imagery of Safdar Qureshi, these works indicated a desire to move beyond the predicted boundary/formula of contemporising the miniature. In that context, the older group of miniature artists like Hasnat and Nusra still ventured on the issue of transformation of miniature, with a conventional scale and pictorial stuff (scratched lines in Hasnat's works and multi-layered images of Nusra). However Nusra impressed the audience with her refined mode of modifying the traditional visuals in order to construct a contemporary narrative that included our colonial past/heritage too; but in case of Hasnat, the work seemed confusing, unresolved and too much burdened by the concept or ambition to be avant garde.

Nonetheless, the new entrants astonished the viewers with their experiments. These works, executed in small scale or on paper, were made part of a miniature exhibition on the basis of artists' background or education or intent. But certainly works by Noorali Chagani, Ayesha Durrani, Hira Mansur, Safdar Qureshi and Huma Iftikhar cannot be described or circumscribed as 'miniatures'. At best, these were examples of contemporary art – without any lingering notion or necessity to confine them to miniatures.

Dear All,

I am a very bad person. Or am I? If as a writer I sometimes write about people I've observed or situations I have experienced does that necessarily make me a despicable and vulgar person? Or does that make me, rather, an honest writer?

This is a tricky question. Writers need to be 'true to their art' in that they should convey nuances of emotion and observation and the complex connections of human life, yet if they write about themselves and their families then it all becomes intensely personal, and everybody is upset…

I am musing over this because of two books that have brought the question of 'family confidentiality and betrayal' into the limelight recently. The first is Julie Myerson's 'The Lost Child' which is an account of how she was forced to banish her drug addicted teenage son from the family home to protect the rest of the family. The book caused an uproar in Britain with many people abusing the writer for 'using her son's story' and destroying his privacy. The debate raged on in the press for weeks. Should she have chronicled her experience in the hope of it being helpful to others in creating an understanding of the situation, or should she have stayed silent?

Had she destroyed the teenager's life by writing the book or had he destroyed his own life by continuing with a drug addiction and destroying his family life? And should writers ever censor their own work? Is that honest? To what extent do you need to disguise the people and situations you are writing about to protect their feelings? Is it honest to downplay the trauma of a situation or the absurdity of a character because of the expectations of 'polite society'?

It becomes even more personal in the case of Aatish Taseer's book 'Stranger to History', a son's through Islamic lands because although the book is a sort of travelogue and exploration of ideas and environments in the V S Naipaul style, it is essentially driven by the writer's pain of rejection by his absent father. His father, Salman Taseer, is the son of the famous Lahore educationist and writer Dr Taseer. He has been a PPP politician and savvy businessman for decades, and has recently resurfaced after a period of political obscurity first by becoming a minister (unbelievably) in the interim pre-election administration set up by the military ruler General Musharraf and then as the PPP governor of a province that Nawaz Sharif and his party feel they should have complete administrative control of.

Aatish Taseer's mother was a well-known Indian Sikh journalist. His parents' relationship did not last and he did not know his father at all while he was growing up. Not only was his father absent, Aatish Taseer was a 'secret' in his world, a potential embarrassment perhaps to his father's political career. But as his book tells us there came a point in his life where he recognised that he needed to sort out a few issues and come to terms with his own identity, by gaining an understanding of his own cultural history and genetic inheritance. Hence his journey.

He travels through several Muslim countries including Iran and Turkey, and is a perceptive observer of the attitudes and customs of the people he meets. He raises interesting questions about what constitutes 'Muslim identity' and what it is that brings such disparate peoples together. Is it a sense of greater purpose and belief or is it a simply shared set of prejudices, a common bigotry and a sort of a paranoid victim complex?

When confronted by such questions in Aatish Taseer's book, Pakistani readers will tend to react in the same knee-jerk way that his father does (he accuses the author of buying into the western and Indian conspiracy to defame and misrepresent all Muslims and especially Pakistanis) but I personally think he raises some valid issues and exposes various contradictions with great honesty. These are all questions that we need to think seriously about rather than continuing to, defensively, blame non-Muslims for everything that Muslims do….

More than the actual travels what I find fascinating in the book are the sections which chronicle the young Taseer's exchanges with his (long lost) father, and his descriptions of time spent in the rather insular, often nasty, world of Lahore's 'beautiful people'. His father is afraid that the writer will chronicle his Pakistan experiences and embarrass him socially, so while Aatish Taseer writes about some Pakistanis he is careful to refer to them by title rather than by name. Hence Hameed Haroon is 'The Publisher' and Faisal Kachelo is The Mango King, but it is difficult to see quite what this achieves as they are so easily recognisable.

It is the intensely personal sadness underlying the narrative that really holds Taseer's book together just as it is perhaps the loss-of-a-child dimension of tragedy that drives Myserson's and makes it so intense. Writing is about experiencing, observing and attempting to make sense of. Honesty is an essential part of the process.

Or is it?

That's something to ponder….

Best Wishes

Umber Khairi