ride
Camel tours

Launched on the Mall Road, Daachi Express currently offers a nightly tour of the historical buildings lined on either side of the road to the public at affordable rates
By Haroon Akram Gill
All of us are familiar with camel rides, but no one knew the humped desert animal could be made to parade the streets of the city while pulling a cart loaded with people. The inventors of ‘Daachi Express,’ as the ride is called, have done the uncommon.
Initiated by the City District Government Lahore as part of its Rs100 million Dilkash Lahore project, Daachi Express is sure to give the conventional camel ride a new meaning. TNS learns that the ride has been launched on the Mall Road and currently offers a nightly tour of the historical buildings lined on either side of the road to the public at affordable rates. 

MOOD STREET
Then they came for him...

By Sardar Hussain
It was about 10 O’clock in the night. I was about to go to sleep when I got a call from a very dear friend based in Multan. Happy to see his name flash on my mobile screen, I picked up the phone instantly. I sat up as I heard the very first word — “Hello!”
Unlike his usual, giggle-infested exchange of pleasantries, he sounded panicked. “They (the dominant right-wing students’ organisation) are planning to take out a protest rally against me tomorrow morning… They are distributing pamphlets against me at the [university] campus. The VC has asked me to immediately leave and go in hiding. He says ‘they’ have decided to charge me with blasphemy…” His voice trailed off. 

Town Talk
* ‘Naql-e-Makani,’ a satirical play, based on a short story by Rajindra Singh Bedi, one of the greatest 20th century progressive writers of Urdu fiction, opens at Ali Auditorium on Oct 4 through Oct 6. It’s a three-act performance, produced in collaboration with Rabtt, a youth social initiative that aims to promote independent and critical thinking through educational camps, bringing together students and mentors from different classes of society. Time: 5pm. 


theatre
Evocative yet funny

Shah Fahad’s allegorical Social Pagal comes in a comic package deal
By Usman Ghafoor & Irfan Aslam
Shah Fahad has a penchant for allegories. But, the interesting part is that his allegories come in a (weirdly) comic package deal. Having scripted — and directed — Innuendo-The Musical (2010’s award-winner at LUMS’s drama festival) where he also played the inimitable Fear (a la The Dark Knight’s Joker?) and, more recently, Akkar Bakkar, which bordered on black comedy, Shah is veritably an old hand at creating social satires where human characters become metaphors for abstract qualities. It is in this context that his latest theatrical production Social Pagal may be looked at. 

An international movement
The Boy Scouts’ Nasheman attracts thousands of youth every year
By Shahzada Irfan Ahmed
The smoke-emitting van takes a sharp turn along the bend and comes to an abrupt halt outside a small roadside restaurant. Passengers start disembarking without delay and head to their destination. Among them there are two young boys who are teeming with energy and seem extraordinarily excited to reach the place. They reach out to a fellow passenger and seek directions before heading to their ultimate destination.

Two wrongs don’t make a ride

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ride
Camel tours
Launched on the Mall Road, Daachi Express currently offers a nightly tour of the historical buildings lined on either side of the road to the public at affordable rates
By Haroon Akram Gill

All of us are familiar with camel rides, but no one knew the humped desert animal could be made to parade the streets of the city while pulling a cart loaded with people. The inventors of ‘Daachi Express,’ as the ride is called, have done the uncommon.

Initiated by the City District Government Lahore as part of its Rs100 million Dilkash Lahore project, Daachi Express is sure to give the conventional camel ride a new meaning. TNS learns that the ride has been launched on the Mall Road and currently offers a nightly tour of the historical buildings lined on either side of the road to the public at affordable rates.

So far, the project has met with an overwhelming public response. Because it is more of a family/group affair, people turn up in throngs, most of them with children, from different parts of the city, around 10 in the night, expecting to catch an amusing camel ride.

“I really enjoyed the camel cart ride,” says nine-year-old Waleed who is from Ichhra.

The project has proved to be a cost-effective entertainment for the low-income class. A middle aged labourer Muhammad Bilal Bhatti, who is seen accompanying his three kids to the ride, says the children have become “addicted” to Daachi Express. “It’s for the third time that I have brought them [here] and my kids never seem to grow tired of it. Their faces glow as just as they spot the camel. And, I am also happy because it doesn’t cost much to me; only Rs5.”

Mrs Rukhsana Amjad, wife of a rickshaw driver, joins her two little kids for a ride, the children cheering on.

Misha Fatima, a Grade IV student at a local school, says she was going back home with her parents after eating out when she spotted the camel cart; she was hooked.

For most onlookers, it presents a strange sight and people stop to take a good look. Some of the motorists like to drive along, while others with children stop their cars and buy tickets for the ride.

As of now, the Daachi Express starts off at the Istanbul Square which is surrounded on the one side by the historical Town Hall and the Punjab University on the other.

Anarkali Bazar is the first station of the Express. Tollington Market, which has now become the Lahore Heritage Museum, is another milestone on the way.

Daachi Express also passes by Neela Gumbud, GPO, Lahore High Court, State Bank of Pakistan and the mighty Cathedral church. The ride ends at Charing Cross, in front of the Provincial Assembly building, the Baba Dinga Singh building, Ahmad Mansion and NICL which have been restored to their original structure, design and plan under the Annual Development Project.

As with every international tour ride, narrators have been deputed on the carts who give details on history and heritage on view. “The Daachi Express has met with success beyond our expectations,” says District Coordination Officer, Lahore, Nasim Sadiq, talking to TNS.

“As many as 1,600 children took the ride in one day alone. We are now working to expand the route towards downtown.”

The DCO also says that an important element of Lahori culture, tonga, is also being included in the larger plan. But a single ride of tonga is likely to cost Rs400. Besides, a tonga can only carry up to eight persons whereas the camel cart can accommodate 30 people.

The children are also given small gifts for every ride they take. “We have jokers to amuse [the children] with their gestures during the ride,” says Nasim Sadiq. “The activity shall not only help the children learn about the city’s history but also promote art and culture of the provincial capital, its folk songs and music.”

Rao Javed Iqbal, a researcher at Dilkash Lahore, says that so far two camel carts have been fielded. Their timings are: 10pm to 1am. “800-1,000 people, including children and adults, are taking a ride daily,” he reveals. “Each cart costs the CDGL Rs2,500 a day to operate.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

  MOOD STREET
Then they came for him...
By Sardar Hussain

It was about 10 O’clock in the night. I was about to go to sleep when I got a call from a very dear friend based in Multan. Happy to see his name flash on my mobile screen, I picked up the phone instantly. I sat up as I heard the very first word — “Hello!”

Unlike his usual, giggle-infested exchange of pleasantries, he sounded panicked. “They (the dominant right-wing students’ organisation) are planning to take out a protest rally against me tomorrow morning… They are distributing pamphlets against me at the [university] campus. The VC has asked me to immediately leave and go in hiding. He says ‘they’ have decided to charge me with blasphemy…” His voice trailed off.

Sensing the sensitivity of the situation, I asked him to immediately come over to Lahore. Knowing that he liked to defy the dangerous situation, I made him realise the impending danger.

When he finally gave in to my persuasion to just leave the city immediately and not try to prove his innocence, I lay down on my bed, imagining ways in which I could help him out once he was here in Lahore.

Early next morning, I called him again, to make sure he was on his way. I was furious to know that he was still hanging in there.

He told me he was trying to contact different people to clarify how he was being ‘fixed’ and how the right-wing teachers (in majority) in the English department (where he had recently joined as a faculty member after availing the Fulbright Scholarship) had been tightening the noose around his neck.

Forcing him again to promise that he would leave for Lahore on the double, I sat perched on my room chair, hearing the clock ticking at the break of the dawn.

I don’t know when I fell asleep again, but when I got up, it was a full bright day already. I reached for my phone to call up my friend. His mobile was switched off.

I have never heard from him again.

******************

I met him at the King Edward Medical College’s hostel canteen. A topper in FSc from the DG Khan Board, he always wanted to be a medical scientist. Latter, realising that it was not his true calling, he turned to Liberal Arts.

He was an avid reader of books from across disciplines. He commanded great respect among senior academics. His ingenious heart, life-enriching laughter and a general compassion for all endeared him to everybody wherever he went.

After he was taken into police custody that day — I found that out from another friend — the people who knew him in different capacities tried to do something for him. But soon there was a general ‘agreement’ that it was good for him not to speak for him and to let the matter cool down.

It has been over a year since he disappeared from the public gaze. I keep hearing friends ‘alluding’ to him as a precedent ‘they’ set for those who defy ‘their views on life.’

He was also very popular on Facebook discussion forums. Even his FB profile has become silent for now.

We, his friends, sometimes ask each other, as to how and where would he be, in one or two lines, and that’s it! The irony is that I can’t even name him in public, lest it should ensure silencing of his voice.

It is merely a reluctant whisper from a friend for another friend gone missing.

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

—Martin Niemöller

 

 

 

 

Town Talk

* ‘Naql-e-Makani,’ a satirical play, based on a short story by Rajindra Singh Bedi, one of the greatest 20th century progressive writers of Urdu fiction, opens at Ali Auditorium on Oct 4 through Oct 6. It’s a three-act performance, produced in collaboration with Rabtt, a youth social initiative that aims to promote independent and critical thinking through educational camps, bringing together students and mentors from different classes of society. Time: 5pm.

 

* ‘The Musical Outro,’ a Redingote Entertainment event, brings up-and-coming musicians on stage at Ali Auditorium on Sunday (today). Time: 6:30pm. The young, talented musicians on the list of performers include Abdullah Qureshi, Jhol, LUMS Music Society and Minahil Cheema (of LSE).

* ‘Hues of Fall,’ a fashion exhibition of prominent as well as new brands, to be held on Oct 4 and 5. Venue: Tehxeeb, 164-P, Gulberg II. The visitors can expect “a diverse range of trendy clothing collections to suit your mood for this fall.”

* ‘Lal Ki Sada,’ an exhibition of paintings by Ali Abbas, ends Sep 29 (today) at Ejaz Art Gallery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

theatre
Evocative yet funny
Shah Fahad’s allegorical Social Pagal comes in a comic package deal
By Usman Ghafoor & Irfan Aslam

Shah Fahad has a penchant for allegories. But, the interesting part is that his allegories come in a (weirdly) comic package deal. Having scripted — and directed — Innuendo-The Musical (2010’s award-winner at LUMS’s drama festival) where he also played the inimitable Fear (a la The Dark Knight’s Joker?) and, more recently, Akkar Bakkar, which bordered on black comedy, Shah is veritably an old hand at creating social satires where human characters become metaphors for abstract qualities. It is in this context that his latest theatrical production Social Pagal may be looked at.

Produced under the banner of Dramaducation, an amateur theatre group headed by Shah, Social Pagal was recently performed at Alhamra The Mall, for five consecutive nights, to an audience comprising mostly the young and the school-going. It had been advertised as a charity event, the proceeds from the tickets going to Shaukat Khanum Memorial Trust Hospital.

Again, in Social Pagal, Shah stretches the genre of allegory to incorporate funny one-liners in a variety of lingos — from ‘desi’ to ‘Minglish’ to ‘filmi’ and, at places, gibberish — coupled with acts of buffoonery and complete inanity to achieve the comic effect. The purpose in all this, however, is to make a comment on the ills of the society.

The young actor-writer-director from FAST also introduces elements of immersion theatre before the start of the play, when the proverbial ‘fourth wall’ is removed and a number of characters creep up to the audience from behind the curtains. This adds an amusing prelude to Social Pagal which was originally performed over a year and half ago, without the segment.

The setting of Social Pagal is a lunatic asylum where six main characters — namely Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Holiday and Pakistan Day — along with a few minor ones, are kept under the care of a Madam DP. The asylum has three guards Rajab, Sha’baan and Ramzan (obviously named after the months in Islamic calendar).

When the play opens, Madam DP is offering the lunatics — or “social pagals,” as the narrator reminds us intermittently — a chance to prove their sanity within the next 30 minutes under a surveillance camera. From this point onwards, the audience is witness to a kind of a play-within-a-play as Holiday (Shah Fahad) suggests to his fellow inmates that they should develop a plot for a drama which shall speak for their sanity.

As with most allegories, Social Pagal allows each of its main characters at least one dark soliloquy that is more of an internal monologue and meant to provide a context to the characters’ present state of mind. For instance, when Friday, the young girl with burns on her face, breaks into a spiel on how her obsessive lover threw acid on her because she had refused to become “his possession,” the pun in her name (“Friday is a day of purity,” she says at one point in the play) becomes all too obvious.

It turns out that all the inmates have a traumatic past. Thursday, we are told, lost his mind after his mother was murdered right before his eyes by his father; Wednesday had a nervous breakdown after her son was killed in a road accident; and Pakistan Day, the civil servant, lost his family to mass violence in Karachi.

The soliloquies are full of pathos and the effect is never lost on the audience when you have a brilliant set of performers. Kudos is due to Shah Fahad and his entire team of actors, especially Sana Jafri (as Friday), Sarmed Aftab (Thursday) and Abuzar (Pakistan Day). Even Alee Hassan Shah displays perfect comic timing as a TV journalist who is out to hunt the ‘breaking news.’

PAC student Hassan Rasheed (his last work was Avanti-The Musical) makes his no-nonsense, back-to-work Monday simply come to life with a very believable performance. Sarmed’s drunk Thursday is curiously reminiscent of Bollywood’s olden Keshtu Mukherjee and gets the maximum laughs from the audience.

Besides the main characters, the minor ones also have similarly harrowing experiences to share. The bearded maulvi, interestingly named Ras Gulla, relates how he was accused of blasphemy by the landlord just so that the latter could grab his land, while Amrati (the old woman) is said to have lost her senses when her children left her in an old people’s home.

The play’s superior comment is clearly that in this part of the world, we are producing neurotics. At one stage, Holiday also declares, “Sanity is highly overrated.”

The play also deals in paradoxes as Monday, the stiff-necked and stout army officer who is always talking about sifting “mard” (men) from the boys, betrays his actually predominant feminine side. “I have been acting all my life,” he murmurs. The audience cannot but put their hands together.

Last but not the least, there is Politician who is on all fours and always found barking. Funnily, he considers himself a dog that can only be ‘tamed’ by an army officer.

At the end of the play, Holiday succeeds in freeing all the lunatics from the asylum by the force of a ‘toy gun’. On a personal level, he has managed to fulfill his long cherished dream of producing and acting in a play.

Though it may be coincidental but Social Pagal has resonances of 20th century American novelist Ken Kesey’s classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and also our very own Aashiqo Ghum Na Karna, adapted into Punjabi by Sohail Ahmad in the 1990s.

For their part, Shah Fahad and his co-producer Daniyal Naeem Dar do well to keep the freshness of the script intact. The set, designed by Sana Jafri, complements the evocative mood of the play and so does the makeup by Depilex.

   

 

 

 

 

 

An international movement
The Boy Scouts’ Nasheman attracts thousands of youth every year
By Shahzada Irfan Ahmed

The smoke-emitting van takes a sharp turn along the bend and comes to an abrupt halt outside a small roadside restaurant. Passengers start disembarking without delay and head to their destination. Among them there are two young boys who are teeming with energy and seem extraordinarily excited to reach the place. They reach out to a fellow passenger and seek directions before heading to their ultimate destination.

The point where they have disembarked from the van is called Brewery Chowk. Named after the colonial-era building of Murree Brewery, which is hardly half a kilometre away, this place is frequented by a large number of students every year. Many of them who take up this journey change vehicles here and take the road that goes uphill towards Lawrence College, Ghora Gali.

But their destination is not the elite public school. They get off the vehicles half way to reach the place which they have aspired for long. It’s none other than the Boy Scouts Summer Training Centre of Punjab, also known as the Boy Scouts Nasheman, which attracts thousands of youth every year.

The two boys mentioned above are also going to the Centre to join their schoolmates who are already there. They will spend an entire week at the place, live in tents, take part in different exercises, learn life skills and benefit from trainings which will enable them to face the challenges of life effectively. The boys are so excited that instead of taking a van they decide to walk all the way.

On the way, the boys take an occasional breather to view the majestic hills, valleys and pine trees and they inhale fresh air which they can hardly find back in the cities where they come from.

They ultimately reach the amazingly beautiful scouts training centre, situated about 6,500 feet above the sea level and spread over an area of 150 kanals.

It is hardly eight kilometres away from Murree and, hence, a dream place for a large number of boy scouts coming from relatively poor families as well as those from the affluent ones. While the former get a chance to visit a cherished hill-station almost for free, the latter enjoy the independent life they live here and the adventure that awaits them.

This is the minimum that scouting has to offer to the school-going youth of the country, says Syed Zameerul Islam Bukhari, Commandant of Boy Scouts Summer Training Centre of Punjab.

Bukhari tells TNS that scouting is an international movement and it trains and disciplines youth in an excellent manner. The activities organised for them are endless and can be modified according to the needs of time.

The activities arranged for the scouts at the Centre range from hiking, sports, study of nature, compass reading, giving first aid, map reading, traffic control, hospital service, building of small bridges and firefighting to carrying out vaccinations, shooting at target, kitchen gardening, swimming, riding and so on.

“It has been observed that the students become totally changed individuals once they pass through the rigorous training they get at the Centre,” he adds.

This leads to the question about the purpose of investing so much time and money. Besides, one seeks explanation as to why scouting is now limited to a few government schools and the private sector is fast opting out.

The answer comes from Adnan Khan, a former boy scout who is now teaching at a local college. He says, “There is a saying that ‘once a scout, always a scout.’ This means a true scout will remain committed to the cause which he vowed to serve throughout his life.”

Citing an example, Adnan says there are endless scouts organisations formed by ex-boy scouts who stay connected to each other and immediately come into action in times of need.

In such occasions, they are unmatched for being volunteers, committed, trained and locals of the place they serve. Unlike the paid workforce employed by the government, their priority is to serve the masses and manage difficult situations with missionary zeal. To quote Adnan, “there are thousands of scouts who take care of people affected by disasters of various kinds, the injured and hospitalised, manage crowds at fairs, religious festivals and professions and extend helping hand to government department.

One can recall how more than 10 scouts sacrificed their lives at the Ashura procession to save the mourners, says Adnan, adding that these fearless scouts were the ones leading the procession. “Their services are required in the event of a plantation drive, a distribution of food to the needy, in awareness campaigns on health and hygiene, urs celebrations and so on.”

On the schools’ decreasing interest in the activity, he says it’s a pity that the youth of today have become lazy and are addicted to television, films, internet and video games.

“There are many better opportunities available to them such as sports, recreational clubs, excursions arranged by schools. But all these are not comparable to what they can learn at scouting,” he asserts. “Scouting teaches self discipline, situation management, service of mankind, planning skills, humility and humanity and what not.”

However, an official in the school education department, which oversees the scouting activities, cites another reason why the level of interest in the activity is on the wane. He says that the scouting camp is located at a prime location and there are forces trying to sell out this land some business group.

He tries to substantiate his claim by saying that acres of land belonging to the boy scouts association were occupied in Walton, Lahore, to construct Bab-e-Pakistan.

When asked about the same, Bukhari claims there were issues with locals over land but they are being sorted out. The Centre administration has carried out some land transactions including the acquisition of the property once owned by Murree Brewery. A few of these had issues with them but on the whole situation is under control, he says.

 

 

 

 

 

Two wrongs don’t make a ride

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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