Berry Picker

Finally took a trip to the historic city of Lahore this week. I visited only two of the usual tourist spots - the
Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort, which are next to each other - but the drive to and from that part of town
allowed me to see other notable sites and, of course, the chaotic whirl of people, cars, donkey-pulled carts, man-
pulled carts, three-wheelers, motorcycles, bicycles, buses, etc. that one expects in South Asian cities but is not
readily seen and felt in the wide avenues of Islamabad.

Also adjoining the mosque and the fort is Lahore's red light district, called Heera Mandi. One of our Pakistani hosts deftly maneuvered his car through the traffic, through the narrow streets of this district then led us into a gallery of paintings of women plying the world's oldest profession and up a flight of narrow stairs into a rooftop restaurant called Cooco's Den & Cafe, Time Asia's Best Experience in a Red Light District in 2006. 

And so over a sumptuous meal delivered through a pan pulled up and down from cooking stalls below on the street, I learned about Iqbal Hussain, painting and prostitution in Lahore, and Louise Brown's The Dancing Girls of Lahore. Just across the street, night lights dance divinely on the domes and minarets of the Badshahi mosque. In the cafe, an eclectic mix of sculpture, a headless Buddha and a meek Virgin Mary, just to mention a few, mutely but insistently meld into one's thoughts and senses. My mind started making something out of all these improbable juxtapositions but it was best to just absorb it all.

The next day, I saw the mosque and the red light district in daylight. My bare feet felt the red sandstone of the courtyard and the marble floors of the prayer halls of the mosque, cool and slowly warming in the late autumn sun. From views framed by arches, I saw Cooco's Cafe, peering just above the southern walls of the mosque, appearing almost next to the minaret on the southeast corner of the mosque.

From the Badshahi Masjid, I walked across to the Lahore Fort through the Alamgiri Gate. Foreigners pay an entrance fee of PKR 200 and there's an option to buy a booklet about the fort for PKR 150. Past the gate was a man offering his guide services which took some effort to appreciate and also explain that I prefer to explore the fort by myself.

The most decorated part of the fort is in the northwest corner where the Shish Mahal (Palace of Mirrors) is
located. This is supposed to be the harem portion of the fort. It is easy to miss this corner however since one has to turn left to it before entering a contemporary gate into the main grounds from which it can get confusing which paths to follow to get to the nortwest corner.

I crossed the main grounds anyway all the way to the southeast corner of the fort's wall from which I peered down into a bustling portion of Fort Road and looked across a stack of square brick houses characteristic of the historic parts of Lahore. It was like looking at the present from a vantage point on a concrete corner of history. I wondered if the apparent diversity and freedom I see in these many juxtapositions of the past and the present spell what a brighter future for Pakistan would be.

Today is a holiday in Pakistan. It's the 132nd Birthday Anniversary of this country's national poet, Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal is widely admired in the Muslim world as a poet-philosopher but particularly so in Pakistan because of his role in articulating the idea of a separate state for Indian Muslims which he best expressed in his address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League on December 29, 1930, at Allahabad, India and in his lecture series titled The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

As a foreigner trying to understand the current problems of this country in terms of its history, I thought that its chosen national poet might embody some of the complexities that we encounter when we try to look at the past in order to see the future. We tread carefully, of course, as there are dangers in trying to read current political issues into poetry and lectures written at another time and era. As stated in How to Read Iqbal, "Take care of the poetry, ...and the philosophy [or the politics] will take care of itself."

Still, we bring our own noisy interpretations into the silence of allowing the poet's voice to ring in one's ears and heart. I try to flow with the evolution of Iqbal's thought and I appreciate the integrity of his own contradictions but I struggle to understand how deeply religion (in this case Islam) has so formed (or was used to form) the idea and the identity of this state called Pakistan. I react to it rather irritatedly as I react to my housekeeper's sense of alliance with me based on her being a Christian (to which I emphatically respond, "I didn't hire you because you are a Christian. I don't care if you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu or whatever.")

But perhaps, I contradict myself. Maybe religion is a stubborn subtext running beneath my agnosticism, ready to spring to verse or prose when I need a sense of unity with others against a common oppressor or enemy. But what do we know even after we struggle with the passions, aches and longings in finding who we are? Here's a poem by Iqbal titled Epilogue

When, to leave earth, I gathered what was mine,
To have known me through and through was each man's claim;
But of this traveller none knew truly what he
Spoke, or to whom he spoke, or whence he came.

"...I wear shalwar kameezes," Hillary Clinton is reported to have said on an interview on Dawn TV. So I searched for images of Hillary in shalwar kameez. I must not be searching right because I see nada. It's always Hillary in her trademark pantsuits. The closest I could find was of her, supposedly, in a traditional Kashmiri cloak pheran. But, uhm, that looks like a spoof.

My search did turn up an old Newsweek article on Hillary's first visit to South Asia, as First Lady, in 1995, with Chelsea - see Dances With Camels, Hillary Clinton: In South Asia, A Search For Statements-Fashion And Otherwise. The article mentions Hillary, Chelsea and Benazir Bhutto (God bless her soul) all wearing the shalwar kameez but the only photo I could dig up of all three of them during this visit shows the three in some kind of westernized shalwar kameez?

Never mind. There are better things to look up than fashion and politics. Just poking around for the visual.

I'm getting tired of the news feeds coming in. They all seem to converge on the war on terror. Yep, that's got to be covered but a constant diet of such news can sap one's positive mental energy. So I note this article from The Guardian - about an upcoming film titled Slackistan.

When you live in this part of the world, you could mistake a shaking of your bed and the house at 1:53 am as the jolt of a bomb blast that traveled from somewhere. But it was an earthquake alright.

As if things weren't already bad. I just hope the 6.4 magnitude we felt didn't add more injury to this already suffering country or region. The earth is angry at all these killings on its grounds?

Anyhow, I have a flask of coffee, the electricity and water are still on, and yes, I'm still on the Internet at 3 am checking out the USGS site for the latest earthquakes in the Asia Region.

I'm going to wait out the aftershock on the terrace...

I've been pushing it aside. This need to learn the local language or at least some of it. How many times do I wish I could have said assalāmu' alaikum but default to 'hello' just because I feel my tongue tied? How many more times will I come across Rah-e-Nijat or Rah-e-Raast and just say, oh, some code name for the military operation and not try to see what it means?

In the crudest language-learning method that I could think of, I looked up a transliterated Urdu-English dictionary and located the meaning of each word in a phrase, at least by the Roman form of the Urdu words. Rah - way, path, road; Nijat (Nijaat?) - absolution, freedom, liberation, release; Rast (Raast?) - even, honest, level, true. Rah-e-Nijat=Way of freedom? Rah-e-Rast=Way of truth?

Nah. Of course, that ain't no way to learn a language. So, I looked up more helpful online Urdu language lessons beyond a word-by-word translation and here's a few of them:

• The BBC's A Guide to Urdu - includes why you should learn Urdu, key phrases that you can listen to and download as an mp3 file, alphabet, Urdu history and links. A good beginning to learning the language.
• Urdu Podcast - the first podcast was posted on July 17, 2009 so this resource is quite new. The podcasts are made by young Pakistani-Americans living in the US and are slanted towards keeping the language alive while living in the US. The lessons are presented in dialogue form, first just in Urdu, then in Urdu-English, then a detailed explanation of the sentences. The podcasts and their transcripts can be downloaded. I find it helpful to both listen and see the Roman form of the Urdu words.
• BYKI Language Series - go to this site and select Urdu among a list of languages to download your free language software. Install the software on your computer and use it as a desktop application. The lessons walk you through several steps in increasing difficulty using visual cards of both the English and Urdu (script form) word or phrase accompanied with how it is said.
• Ukindia Learn to Read Urdu - this is an older site and it emphasizes learning how to read the Urdu script. Good complement to the podcasts.

Hope to greet you in Urdu next time - in podcast form!

Some really nice Pakistani friends took me out to dinner last night at The Heritage Cafe or Virsa Cafe up on the Shakarparian hills, south of downtown Islamabad. The cafe is next to the Heritage Museum and also tries to showcase the diversity of arts and crafts in Pakistan. Good Pakistani cuisine. I wish I can learn to cook it but having lived in Sri Lanka for 5 years and still wasn't able to master one Sri Lankan curry recipe, I'm not inclined to put my energies into learning how to cook. I think I'll do better mapping some good places to eat so here's a start of a Google Map of places to eat in Islamabad. The placemarks have links to the restaurant's website or review or photo of it. My own reviews will come later.

What can one say about the senseless loss of lives one hears and reads about in this part of the world? No amount of tears is enough for the death of any one child, woman or man. But I can drag a marker onto a Google Map and see where these fucking shit are going on. [See a start of a Google Map I created for this kind of stuff.] And I can distance myself further and say, it's a good way to learn about Pakistan's geography. Aha, there's where Shangla or Kohat is...

As a geography reference for friends and family back home, the markers are not placed on specific addresses on a map, just pinned to the city, because you only need to have a general sense of Pakistan geographically. [Wikipedia has several good pages about the administrative divisions of Pakistan. ] I also included a link to a news article of the event in the markers. These are mostly to NYT articles on the event since, again, my audience are mostly non-Pakistanis. I do use links to news updates from the Jang Group-owned The News, which gets its latest updates on these kinds of happenings from Geo News Pakistan.

Let's see if I have the heart or the stomach to continue mapping these...

A few songs into the concert, the lights on the stage went out. It was only for a fleeting second but perhaps the anxiety level in the auditorium shot up. The five musicians on the stage looked at each other and smiled knowingly. This wouldn't be the first time that they have to stop a live concert because of a bombing.

They didn't have to stop Thursday night. For at least one hour, Arieb Azhar and his band of four asserted the power of music's universality, diversity and tolerance in a city that only four days before had once again felt the power of terror to subdue the human will to fight for what is true and beautiful in life.

In the middle was Arieb doing the vocals and guitar. To his left were the flutist and the tabla player. To his right were the electric and rubab/bass guitarists. Together, they brought to life folklore and poetry from Pakistan's own mystic and humanist traditions as well as from the Balkans where Arieb spent about thirteen years of his life learning that region's folk music. He even inserted a rendition of John Lennon's Imagine.

The music was at once meditational and upbeat. I'm no expert on music genres so I don't know how to describe and categorize Arieb's music. You can sample his music on YouTube, see for example Husn-e-Haqiqi. From there you also can access other Pakistani musicians brought together by Coke Studio , a collaborative musical platform sponsored by the Coca Cola company to showcase Pakistan's diverse music and performing artists.

At the start of most of the songs he sang, Arieb shared the poem or folk story they were based on. He introduced one song with the story of a man meeting a woman on the road one day. The woman was carrying two buckets. One was filled with water and the other with fire. Asked what those are for, the woman replied that the bucket of water is for putting out the fires of hell and the bucket of fire is for firing up the wells of heaven. Or close to that anyway.

The Area Study Center for Africa, North and South America of the Quaid-i-Azam University here in Islamabad just had its 12th International American Studies Conference Oct. 2-4. The theme of the conference is The Media in America; America in the Media. America here means not only the US but all North and South America and Mexico. I was lucky to have been able to attend some sessions. Got some insights into the theoretical frameworks and research methodologies used by master’s and doctoral students, faculty and media practitioners to analyze the media in countries other than their own. [See a list of Pakistani universities represented at the conference. Universities from Bahrain, Sri Lanka and Spain were also represented. Presenters from India and Bangladesh were not able to make it to the conference.]

Session titles included: The Media Covers War, Literary Media(tions), Mixed Media, Latin American, Spanish & US Media, The Media and International Politics, Other Culture Wars. Post-modern theoretical frameworks predominated – the role of language in the USA’s war against terror, dilemmas surrounding cultural & biological hybridity in novels written by immigrants in America, threshold positions of outsiders entering insider spaces, etc. As in any conference, there were some presentations backed by solid research methodologies, data and analysis and some which were nothing more than essays strung together from a cursory examination of whatever literature was available on the topic.

The session format involved what they call a ‘discussant’, who discussed and summarized the main points and/or common threads after the presentations. A Q&A which is facilitated by another person followed the discussant’s turn. I found that this format worked well in giving feedback to the presenters, particularly to the master’s and doctoral students who could use such feedback to improve their papers. It also facilitated some thoughtful discussions and comments from participants holding different points of view and thus brought the learning process to a search for kinship more than difference, towards creative and innovative thinking out of ‘threshold’ positions instead of leaving the topic sitting on false dichotomies or binaries.

It was very encouraging to see such intellectual climate here in Pakistan. There is much capacity and potential in higher education here to create an environment for intellectual freedom and freedom of expression that have marked the glorious eras of Islamic cultures.

[See also a coverage of the conference at Interface, an online clearinghouse of Pakistan education-related news and resources.]