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transport MOOD
STREET TOWN
TALK debut The
evocative and appealing faces of eve Overheard
at the LLF
transport So much for the ride There is little or no end to the commuters’ woes, despite the grand MBS launch. Precisely, what ails the bus service? By Sajid Bashir The Metro Bus
Service (MBS) is yet to operate to its full capacity, courtesy of its
‘premature’ launch recently. The lofty claims made by the city’s
transport managers regarding the buses running every three minutes, have
already been proved hollow as gaps of 30-50 minutes are reported between
the buses’ arrival and departure. TNS spoke to random
commuters of the MBS and found a mixed reaction. Whereas some of them
seemed to ‘enjoy the ride,’ a majority were harshly critical of the
many woes it has given them. Saad ul Haq, a passenger
of MBS at Chungi stop, said that he had to wait for the bus for a minumum
of 20 and a maximum of 40 minutes every single time. Haq came down hard on
the government for its “claims about the perfect timings of the buses’
arrival.” Besides, he said, the Intelligent Traffic Signaling System (ITSS)
also indicated incorrect timings. According to Ha, every
three minutes the time is revised on the ITSS and it restarts from the
zero second. Khalid Butt had a more
bitter experience. A resident of Model Town, Butt said that he had to wait
for “at least an hour [for the Metro bus] at the Model Town mor. It was
after a lapse of an hour that the bus finally arrived. Yet, I could not
manage to board it, because it was overloaded already.” Butt said that the
negligence on the part of the MBS management was the basic reason for the
delay of the buses, adding that the staff present at the various MBS
stops/stations “also misguided the passengers.” Narrating an incident,
he said how he, along with the other passengers, was waiting for the bus
“when we saw a female school teacher telling the MBS staff that she had
just got a short leave [from her school] and was supposed to visit a
hospital to see her daughter who was admitted there. But the delay in
bus’s arrival forced her to go back to school without finding the time
to see her daughter. “The lady had to
return her ticket, as she left the MBS station.”Khalid Butt was also
witness to “some senior citizens [who were] struggling to climb the
escalators which were not functional at any MBS station.” The commuters’ issues
do not end here. Ever since the MBS was inaugurated, as many as 27 routes
for the city transport have been diverted by the Punjab government. A
majority of the routes which were earlier operating on the Ferozpur Road
and its adjacent streets have been completely diverted. The commuters were
of the view that if they wanted to travel to other parts of the city,
instead of the Ferozpur Road, they had to switch between other
public/local transports to reach their destination. What’s more, the local
transport is not available at majority of the bus stops along the Ferozpur
Road. Talha Adil from
Cantonment area said he wanted to experience “the Metro ride” but it
cost him a lot. He had to stand at one of the stops, watching several
buses pass by. “They wouldn’t stop, and I kept wondering why. “It took me at least
40 minutes before the first bus could stop. I had almost given up by then
and was going to walk it back home,” he said. Talking to TNS, Managing
Director MBS, Sabtain Fazal Haleem admitted that there had been “some
delay [of buses] which had caused inconvenience for the passengers. But
the issue should be resolved soon enough, as the pending tasks of the MBS
are completed.” Haleem also said that
before launching the MBS project the concerned authorities did not have an
idea about the “riders’ spirit.” The situation, according
to Haleem, is such that the buses are overloaded on the very first three
stations due to which the rest of the stations have to be skipped and the
passengers are left to wait for a long time. Besides, he said, the
pedestrians’ bridge at Chungi is still under construction. “The delay
in its completion is responsible for the buses getting stuck for several
minutes together.” To a query regarding the
inefficient escalators, Haleem said that a Chinese team had been working
on their calibration issue: “It shouldn’t take more than a week to
make these escalators fully functional. MD MBS also spoke of 18
parking areas that have been constructed by the LDA and the TEPA.
Additionally, four parking spaces are under construction at different
points next to the Ferozpur and Ravi roads for the facility of the
commuters. More recently, parking
stands are being set up for the MBS passengers so that they can park their
bikes and cars to take the Metro. “A state-of-the-art security system
will soon be installed at these parking areas,” he added. The MBS, he hoped, will
soon start functioning “at full swing, as soon as the pending tasks are
completed.” Cool facts about Metro n A total of 45 buses
have been launched on the 27-km long MBS track in the city n The buses stop at 27
stations covering the entire length of Lahore, from Gajumatta to Shahdara n The MBS route covers
dozens of residential and commercial areas along the city’s main artery
Ferozepur Road, linking Lytton Road, Jain Mandir, MAO College, Lower Mall,
Civil Secretariat, Aiwan-i-Adal, Chowk Katchehry (District Courts), Shrine
of Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh, Ravi Road and Shahdara town n Nine out of the 27
stations are built on the 8.6km long overhead bridge from Ferozepur
Road-Canal Intersection to Texali n The modern system of
electronic ticketing has been introduced at all the stations, in addition
to waterproof escalators for the elderly and/or the ailing n A special squad for
security and maintenance has been appointed caption — Photos by Rahat Dar
What has the
overpowering stench of smoke and queues as long as the best rides in
Disneyland? I found out the answer to this riddle in a very unfortunate
manner. The first sign that
things were going to get interesting was the presence of a beggar beside
the road outside. Normally, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary but
rather than praying for the academic success of children or eternal
happiness, she was illustrating her powers of improvisation: ‘Tere sone
sone passports banae.’ Yes, I was at the
passport office, the lanes near which were really crowded. Rather than
ordinary window cleaners or trinket sellers, the youngster who knocked at
the window of my car was offering ‘help’ (not out of the goodness of
his heart, I assure you). Soon, I was standing in
a long queue. There was a bigger problem than its length: it wasn’t
moving. Along with that, it was
unbearably claustrophobic. The few leaves fluttering above the wall were
sadly inefficient pumps of oxygen when compared to the barrage of smoke
emitting from the men’s queue. My space had also decreased exponentially
because the men sat perched on the banisters dividing the two queues and
the women near me failed to understand that if they had stood two inches
forward in the queue, it wouldn’t have made their turn come any sooner.
In fact, if I moved a few centimeters to the left (within the queue!) the
woman behind me would creep up in front of me. Thus, I had to fight for my
position in the queue, totally decimating the very purpose of one. The system being used
was a very convoluted one. First, I had to pray for some blessed person to
arrive and write a number on my slip as everyone extended their arms,
hoping he would spot the waving green or pink slips (a poor child cried
out as ladies crushed her in the ensuing chaos). Then I had to wait some
more till someone stamped the slip and then wait even more till someone
ushered me in. Basically, we were completely at the mercy of the person
who could take as long as he wanted to come out. From my fellow incensed
‘queuers,’ I discovered that the lucky ones bought the right to bypass
this ordeal for Rs700. Finally, after two hours
(some had been waiting for double that time), I finally entered the
building. As a woman closed the door to keep the cold air out, I realised
what awaited me there: more claustrophobia, more queues and more pushes. Well, after another
hour, I had turned towards my house. But it wasn’t because I was done
— oh, no! It was because I had no idea that they wanted my foreign
passport too (as a dual national). After all, why would anyone put a
notice outside listing required documents for different cases? Day 2: Inside, the
process had been divided into steps; the division did absolutely nothing
to improve efficiency. The individual steps themselves took seconds —
every person could be completely catered to within three minutes at the
same counter, but spent hours waiting to get a turn at every one. We resumed at Step 2
which involved data entry; it took off without a hitch, much to my
surprise. Hope reared its traitorous head and that made the next ordeal
hurt even more: Step 3 took... 4 hours! Why, you may ask? In Step 2, six
people had worked behind the counter but there was only one in Step 3,
creating a bottleneck (I had 224 people ahead of me). One biometric system
had been taken upstairs to serve the brother of a high-ranking army
official. As I sat in a half asleep state on one of the chairs, I heard
people suggesting that everyone should protest in the office upstairs and
rumours that the system would be brought down soon. It did happen but, of
course, not without a long wait. By Step 5, as the
desperation of the people had increased, so had the hopes of the young men
who roamed around; they overheard people complaining and pounced to make
their offers. Erratic numbers on the token screens marked their success,
but a few held out, notably a woman going for Hajj who announced that she
couldn’t begin the process with a ‘rishwat’ (bribe). When my turn for the
last step finally came, the man at the counter asked, “You want to keep
both nationalities?” “No, just the
Pakistani one,” I thought, with an internal eye roll, while nodding to
him. As I walked outside into
the darkness, not one fibre of my being cared whether I had got the green
passport or not.
*Critical Mass — Ravi
Siphon Edition will start off
with an assemblage at Zakir Tikka restaurant in Cantt at 10:30am, where
the bikes will be loaded onto a truck. The Mass will then head out to
Batapur, where the ride will begin. The Ravi Siphon is where the BRB canal
crosses the river Ravi. It is at the Pakistan-India border and there are
monuments along the canal in memory of the soldiers who lost their lives
in the 1965 war. *Cricket Premier League
2013, an Elites Hardball Cricket Tournament, starts March 8 till Mar 11,
at Gaddafi Stadium. As many as eight teams will compete in a knockout
format of 20/20, under proper rules and regulations which the organisers
claim will be strictly followed.
debut The 60 Second
Film Festival, the first of its kind in Lahore, opened this week, with the
promise of introducing the aspiring film makers to a (relatively) newer
format of the art. The brainchild of
Morango Films and Duck, two private organisations run mostly by young
graduates from LUMS and NCA, the festival attracted fairly large crowds of
people, mostly young aspirants, who seemed quite ‘in their element.’
Festival’s Creative Director Affan Alam claimed to have received scores
of entries — from places as far off as in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and
Balochistan — “which is something for us to cheer about. We weren’t
expecting such a response,” he said on the occasion. Alam, together with the
Festival Director Abrarul Hasan, started working on the event over two
years back, conducting workshops in cities such as Jam Shoro and Chaman
“in order to promote the concept [of making a 60-second long film] and
to encourage participation from all over the country.” The films that they were
looking at would “focus on specific issues related to the Millenium
Development Goals, such as poverty, health, gender discrimination and
HIV,” said Alam. “One of the main purposes of the competition was to
promote an understanding of these issues amongst the people making the
videos and to educate the audience at the same time.” Eventually, the
competition received an impressive 198 films, which were then shortlisted
to 50 by the host team, judging them on the different criteria of concept
and execution, the concept being more important. Later, a panel of judges
— comprising Mehreen Jabbar, Amena Khan, Sohail Javed and Amina Matalqa
— were asked to judge the best of the 50 shortlisted videos. It was interesting to
note that most of the films showcased at the festival presented a fair
level of technical understanding of the format, on the part of the film
makers. A lot of them were well-shot and edited to create a coherent
product while giving a simple message on a social/economic issue. If the
audience reaction at the venue was anything to go by, the standout film
remained ‘We Are Not Terrorists,’ made by Sanwal Chishti. The main
idea of the film was simple but it was presented in a very novel way. The
film showed the extreme closeup of a man’s face till it turns out that
he was heating food in the microwave. The film also won an award in the
category of “Peace”. Another film that
collected instant praise by virtue of its execution was titled
‘Personality Conflicts,’ directed by Shahzad Rashdi. It depicted a
woman putting on burqa, while the song “Sajna hai mujhe sajnaa ke liye”
played in the background. The film won an award in the “Conflict”
category. ‘The Loop,’ by Mahad
Ali Sajid, with its tagline “What if the person you’re meant to kill
is yourself,” was an interesting attempt to film a sequence in
‘Hollywood-style’. Overall, while the event
may have had little glamour quotient, it wasn’t low on substance. The
amateur works of the film makers, mostly first-timers, was conspicuous
primarily because it allowed them their creative expression. So,
eventually, it didn’t matter if they had filmed on a simple mobile
camera or a high-end digital device. To quote Abrarul Hasan,
the festival provided “a platform to Pakistani youth to express their
ideas and to show their concerns on the myriad deep-rooted issues which
the common public would otherwise overlook. I believe the festival is
going to give us an opportunity to take informed decisions for a better
future of the country.” Among the Jury Choice
Awards, Adnan Awaz’s ‘Education’ came off on the top, while the
Viewers Choice Awards included Usama Nasir’s ‘Broken’ clinching the
honours. According to Affan Alam, the latter category of awards had been
decided by an online voting on Facebook and through sms. The first day of the
festival ended a tad abruptly, with a performance by the underground band
Alefs. Morango Films and Duck
are now headed to Kathmandu for a screening of the films. caption It didn’t matter if
the films were made on a simple mobile camera or a high-end digital
device. What mattered was the concept. caption Affan Alam, the creative
director of the festival, speaking to the media on the occasion.
The
evocative and appealing faces of eve Self-taught
artist and a popular name among the social circles of Lahore, Ahmer Farooq
recently exhibited his first collection of paintings at The Drawing Room,
Sanam Taseer’s beautiful gallery space, in the city. Attractively titled
‘The Secrets of Eve,’ the collection was a big draw, what with its
creative use of calligraphy. Each of the 21 paintings
on display seemed to construct a prototype of a woman in her various
societal roles — a mother, a nurse, a niece and also an entertainer —
through little calligraphic pieces, a technique which is reminiscent of
the works of internationally renowned Rashid Rana. By Farooq’s own
admission, Rana was an inspiration but not a direct influence. Whereas
Rana mainly plays with digital, pixel-size photographic images to
construct the final picture, Farooq paints verses (for instance, in
‘Parveen Shakir’) or simply biographical details (as in ‘Resham’)
to build silhouettes of images, provoking thought. “My work draws from
the sad fact that very often we forget to acknowledge the myriad roles the
women have in our society and we view them simply as role-takers,”
Farooq said on the occasion. No wonder his collection
had both exuberance and a melancholy feel to it. The work, titled
‘Parveen Shakir’, was an evocative ode to the great (late) Urdu poet. “The painting should
be seen as a celebration of this Pakistani female icon,” said Farooq. The verses he picked for
calligraphic use are the ones (according to Farooq) that “highlight her
as a woman of substance.” About his own creative
evolution, Farooq said that his “childhood was spent around my sisters
and mother and, later, I got to know my bhabhis (sisters-in-law) each of
whom had come from a different background but was special in her own way. “All the murals that
you see here have a relationship with one another and I am particularly
grateful to them [the women depicted] for being a part of my life.” He was quick to add,
“There’s a lot more to our women than the fact that they are often
socially or intellectually isolated and suppressed. My work is a humble
attempt to project the lesser highlighted sides of their personalities.” Within the collection,
there was a trilogy — ‘In the rain,’ ‘In the sun,’ and ‘In the
field’ — that was particularly interesting because of its overt
“sensual appeal” (to use his own words), where “the silhouettes of
women are enclosed by colours and patterns representing different societal
and life contexts; those of beauty and independence.” These figures appear
intriguing at the same time, perhaps to show that there is more to them
than meets the eye. Replying to a query,
Farooq said that he had used “mixed medium… acrylic, glitter, oil
paints, pencils, various inks, textures and even food colour. “I want my work to
speak for itself and also to be displayed at people’s homes.” Quite business-savvy and
professionally oriented, Ahmer Farooq intends to take his collection
abroad. He hopes that “the blend of eastern and western influences will
generate a lot of interest on the international arena.” ccapion The artist. caption Some of the works on
display.
What elitist crowd! Did you see anyone
straight among male writers? Mohsin Hamid is to
literature what Rashid Rana is to art Lahori women are Soooo...
beautiful I counted exactly 30
people in Urdu fiction and poetry session But I heard about a
thousand say that Urdu was ignored in the LLF Pinch me please! I heard
Tariq Ali say he’s going to vote PTI Shehan is my second
crush since morning Oh please someone tell
Nadeem Aslam to stop this drama; Asi wi Gujranwaley de Honay Aan
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OMG
I want to propose Nadeem Aslam!
