Holi (from Variable PRO)
The world is fascinating. People and cultures inspire us. Sadly, the fast paced lifestyles of our generation result in many not taking the necessary step back to soak in the existing world around us. Our goal with this film is to help viewers further appreciate and take notice of the beauty in life & culture that lies within our world…
…so the next time you notice something that strikes you as interesting, stop for a second, start powering on your camera, think about why it’s unique, and snap the shot before you miss it. Life is extraordinary. Embrace it.
Sir Ganga Ram. Father of Modern Lahore.
Sir Ganga Ram (1851-1927) was a civil engineer and leading philanthropist of his times, who established the Renala Hydral Power Station in Renala Khurd in 1925.
In 1873, after a brief Service in Punjab P.W.D devoted himself to practical farming. He obtained on lease from Government 50,000 acres (200 km²) of barren, unirrigated land in Montgomery district, and within three years converted that vast desert into smiling fields, irrigated by water lifted by a hydroelectric plant and running through a thousand miles of irrigation channels, all constructed at his own cost. This was the biggest private enterprise of the kind, unknown and unthought-of in the country before. Sir Ganga Ram earned millions most of which he gave to charity.
In the words of Sir Malcolm Hailey, the Governor of Punjab, “he won like a hero and gave like a Saint”. He was a great engineer and a great philanthropist.
He designed and built General Post Office, Lahore Museum, Aitchison College, Mayo School of Arts (now the NCA), Ganga Ram Hospital, Lady Mclagan Girls High School, the chemistry department of the Government College University, the Albert Victor wing of Mayo Hospital, the Hailey College of Commerce, Ravi Road House for the Disabled, the Ganga Ram Trust Building on The Mall and Lady Maynard Industrial School. He also constructed Model Town, once the best locality of Lahore, the powerhouse at Renala Khurd as well as the railway track between Pathankot and Amritsar
He built Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Lady Mclagan School and Renala Khurd Power House with his own money.
He was a promising agriculturist, too. He purchased thousands acres of barren land in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) on lease and by using engineering skills and modern irrigation methods, turned the arid lands into fertile fields. He retired in 1903. He died in London on July 10, 1927. His body was cremated and his ashes were brought back to India. A portion of the ashes were consigned to Ganga River and the rest buried in Lahore on the bank of the Ravi.
A statue of Sir Ganga Ram once stood on Mall Road in Lahore. Saadat Hasan Manto, the famous Urdu writer, in one of his stories on the frenzy of religious riots of 1947 writes that an inflamed mob in Lahore, after attacking a Hindu residential area, ‘turned to attacking the statue of Sir Ganga Ram, the Hindu philanthropist. They first pelted the statue with stones; then smothered its face with coal tar. Then a man made a garland of old shoes climbed up to put it round the neck of the statue. The police arrived and opened fire. Among the injured were the fellow with the garland of old shoes. As he fell, the mob shouted: “Let us rush him to Sir Ganga Ram Hospital”.
(source)
Collateral damage: Sports, arts pay price of India-Pakistan tensions
The guns may have fallen silent, but the collateral damage from a deadly flare-up between India and Pakistan is still mounting with major sporting and arts events among those hit by the fallout.
Less than a month ago, Pakistan’s cricket team embarked on its first tour to India in nearly five years.
But hopes the trip would herald a wider cultural thaw were soon dashed by tit-for-tat military exchanges in disputed Kashmir that killed five soldiers in nine days.
Although the two armies agreed a ceasefire on January 16, the impact of the violence is being felt far away from the front line. (Complete article)
It is quite unfortunate that this upcoming election in India seems to be hell bent on Pakistan. Political Parties in India are literally racing to score points, push in more war-hysteria and do further warmongering to distract the common masses from real issues. Worst is that it does seem to be working quite effectively on ordinary citizens. Lately I have read more and more commentary by common masses, giving up their sanity once again for all this lunacy.
Pakistan has been relatively less inflicted by such rhetoric. Perhaps we have got bigger problems to worry about. Rising inflation and decaying economy slightly overshadowed by the terrorist activities on the Western frontiers, and of course the International bad-rep. A country which once held a significant political and PR clout is being reduced to ashes…
As the character in one of the recent stage plays I saw in Lahore said, “Kings fight, masses cry. But who cares?”.
This happened last night. A friend posted on my wall his anger at what is happening in Pakistan, especially with reference to Indian unprovoked firing on the LoC. He got responded by another friend who reminded him that he is not posting on the Rehman Malik’s (Pakistani Interior Minister) wall.
Just for the sake of clarity, I am not the same Malik - so please don’t hate me :)
Just got banned from Zaid Hamid’s page which posted his Ski-mask clad picture holding a gun and warning “Hindu Zionists” for the war they’ve started. In my defense all I recommended was checking him into a mental asylum in Lahore since he is giving a bad name to Pakistanis and Muslims.
I wish we could teleport his sort of ultranationalist idiots to another planet, just one without any oxygen. India lost their own lunatic Mr Bal Thackeray recently, otherwise Zaid Hamid could have had very fun last few seconds on that oxygen-deprived-planet I want him teleported to so bad.
Dear Mr Altaf Hussain (aka Altaf bhai),
I hope this post finds you in best of your health. I thought unlike millions of ordinary Pakistani who hate you, your singing skills and of course mafia like control of Karachi city from core of their hearts - I should actually try doing something constructive.
Please here find a small Pakistan 101 lesson for yourself. For your convenience I have decided to go in a numbered list format, since that is proven to be much more effective and even easier to remember in future:
- Pakistan and India gained independence in 1947 from United Kingdom.
- Both the countries were granted this freedom under the status of Dominion.
- Dominion means that whoever held the crown in London was to be taken as Sovereign of the new formed political territories.
- All the citizens of the Pakistan and India were Indian Citizens before that, who technically paid their allegiance to the British Crown.
- India by formulating a Constitution left the Dominion status in 1950, whereas Pakistan in 1956.
- Therefore again “technically” before 1950 every Indian was paying allegiance to the British Crown and every Pakistani till 1956.
Now as per your point about Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s allegiance to the British Crown, my dear Bhai that was really nothing as you are trying to imply. If seriously this was your “Political Drone” you were talking about and this is what you thought is some highly intellectual discourse you wanted to stir - I really cannot understand the people who follow you at all!
Given that we allow people like you to control a megapolis thousands of miles away and other pedigree politicians run the country as if it is their fiefdom says a lot about what is wrong with Pakistan.
Please have mercy on the people Bhai, and just enjoy those Kebabs from the Sulamaneh Restaurant on the Edgware Road (can’t recommend it high enough).
Best,
Usman Malik
that was some f*cked up game Pakistan! Damn it, almost had the Greenwash! Time to do my grocery now.
arrr
How India treats its women (by Soutik Biswas)
With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30. Most disturbingly, according to police records, the offenders were known to their victims in more than 94% of the cases. Neighbours accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other relatives were also involved. Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country.
And it is not rape alone. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings and abductions of women were up 19.4%, women being killed in disputes over dowry payments by 2.7%, torture by 5.4%, molestation by 5.8% and trafficking by an alarming 122% over the previous year. (Complete article)
Green!
Well done Pakistan. (texture credit: NoraAlgalad)
To the most stylish man and founder of Pakistan, happy birthday!
He was a visionary and at that one who had the best taste in suits and shoes. I hope we Pakistanis can remain true to his words:
“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State…We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State…I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in due course Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.” (August 11, 1947 address of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to the members of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly)
Actually, so important was a woman’s silence, so cherished, that it became a key criterion of her beauty and desirability – the prerequisite of the ideal woman. The expression Sangin o Samet [solemn and silent], still in abundant use to this day, defines an ideal woman who is self-effacing rather than self-promoting, enclosed rather than exposed, mute rather than vocal. As the protagonist in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Zanan Bedun-e Mardan [Women Without Men] describes his ideal mate, he echoes an age-old aesthetic model: “She is a girl, eighteen years of age, excessively beautiful, gracefully silent, bashful, timid, kind, industrious, diligent, modest, chaste, solemn, and neat. She wears her veil when in public and always casts her eyes down. She blushes all the time.”
Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words (via touba)
The idealization of women’s silence is by no means unique to one writer or another. Major and minor, traditional and modernist writers have paid their tribute, over and over again, to this ideal of feminine virtue and charm. Evidence that her silence continues to attract men may also be found in many contemporary works. Even a modernist novel such as Buf-e Kur [The Blind Owl] by Sadeq Hedayat equates women’s beauty with silence. The ethereal girl, the only woman who excites the narrator’s aesthetic admiration and desire and is his source of comfort and delight, is a perpetually silent woman. This nonthreatening, nonaggressive, irresponsive sleeping beauty is marked above all by her silence. Never throughout the whole novel does she talk. Her silence is complete and uninterrupted. It is her most distinctive and desirable attribute. Her demonical double, on the other hand, expresses herself profusely and earns herself the epithet Lakateh, the Bitch.
One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day: Fly by a clipper to Pakistan & India (1951)
- Would be the last one for a while
Vintage Collections / One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day / Pinterest
One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day: Indian State Railways poster for Kashmir (1940s)
Disputed area between Pakistan and India, and just for the record I am all for Kashmir’s independence from both.
Vintage Collections / One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day / Pinterest
One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day: Travel Kashmir poster 1949
Disputed area between Pakistan and India, and just for the record I am all for Kashmir’s independence from both.
Vintage Collections / One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day / Pinterest
One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day: 1930 North Western Railway poster for Nankana Sahib pilgrimage for Sikhs.
Vintage Collections / One Vintage Pakistani Travel Item A Day / Pinterest
