Begari Wah
30 May 2015
When the first Dombki and Jakhrani farmers turned to agriculture along the Begari, they would surely have been surprised by the fertility of this virgin land - from Begari Wah.
Labels: Book of Days 2015, Photo Stream, Sindh, Travel Photography, Waters of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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West Muztagh: bearer of the Balti footprint
29 May 2015
In the heart of the glacial web of the central Karakoram Mountains where the snow leopard stalks Himalayan ibex and the golden eagle quarters the skies for snow partridges, the terrain seems all but impassable for humans. Even in that ice-bound fastness of towering peaks, there lies a breach that for long served as a connection between the Baltistan capital of Skardu and Yarkand in Turkistan.
Accessible from the village of Askole by way of the Panmah Glacier, this is the New or the West Muztagh Pass, 5300 metres high and glaciated the year round. West Muztagh plays a junior role to its sister pass, however. Long before this pass was discovered, the people of Baltistan were travelling by one they simply called the Muztagh Pass. About the year 1790, snow and ice conditions made travel over that pass difficult and the route fell into disuse. On the orders of the Raja of Skardu, reconnaissance was carried out and the West Muztagh route was opened around 1800.
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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From Nania to Nani
25 May 2015
Back on the road beyond the mud volcano, the blacktop shortly gave way to a shingle road-bed. But even this had been prepared well and we carried on without reducing speed. Presently we were on the banks of the Hingol River. Rising in the hills near Nal, west of Khuzdar, and known as Nal in its upper reaches, the Hingol cuts a most dramatic gorge. Here, a few kilometres above its mouth, it is languid and green with silt. Together with the image of the mud volcano, etched from my earlier trip was one of the Hingol with its Tamarisk-shaded banks. But I was disappointed. The thick growth on its sides had given way to saplings. As the building of the Karakorum Highway had deprived the Indus gorge of its thickets of holly oaks, so too the Coastal Highway has eaten up the Tamarisk of the Hingol valley – all gone up in smoke.
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| The temple sacred to Nania or Ishtar, to Durga Ma and to Bibi Nani |
Labels: Balochistan, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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A gutsy crusader
20 May 2015
A lesser woman in remote Seejbun in Swat’s Matta sub-division would have given up. In fact, she would have been born resigned to the usual fate of domestic confinement and a long, inconsequential life. That, so she was always told, was Pakhtun culture. Part of this baggage was also to be wedded as soon as she attained puberty. That was the way for the young women in Seejbun.
But Gul Khandana was born different. After she finished primary school in the only girls’ school miles away from her village, the pressure from uncles and older cousins was for her to be restricted to the home. Fortunately, she had a brother younger than her and unable to exert pressure. She also enjoyed her father’s support and was thus able to join the local boys’ high school to complete her middle level education at age 17. Still a long way to being educated, Gul resolved to become a teacher.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, People, Swat, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Thalle La - the pass I couldn’t make
15 May 2015
Both Tilman and Shipton were however supermen. They carried on mountain climbing and adventuring until the very ends of their lives. I am a far lesser mortal and after having quietly celebrated my sixtieth in February, I was still looking forward to a few more years of hill walking. However, the sobering memory of my 2009 trek to Mintaka when blistered feet caused me to ride a donkey took the spunk out of me.
Read more »Labels: About, Explorers, Travelers
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Prisoner on a Bus: Travels through Pakistan
13 May 2015
Nyla Daud
It’s a right royal deceptive title: Prisoner on a Bus: Travels through Pakistan. For inside the covers of Salman Rashid’s latest book is a freedom to wander if not at will, then by picking up the trail of a man whose wanderlust has lead him to places about whose existence most Pakistanis are totally unaware. Or totally unexcited about, even if they happened to have heard the names somewhere along the road.
The compiled version of travel columns that he has been writing for a newspaper, Rashid’s book, a very finely bound publication, brings to life a land and its people that according to the author is “just waiting to be discovered” or, again in his words, “to be rediscovered”. From Dadem Chandio, the dacoit with a price on his head and hiding in the boondocks of the Kirthar range, to the story behind the bus with green wheels, from unearthing the philanthropy of Sir Ganga Ram to reconnoitering Musa ka Musalla in the north or trekking across Upper Sindh in high summer, Rashid literally leads his readers in a dance.
Labels: Books, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Puran Bhagat
09 May 2015
Gulbahar, fancifully renamed about twenty-five years ago, is almost a suburb of Sialkot for it lies just a few kilometres from the cantonment on the highroad to Chaprar village. It is unremarkable in every way save for the well of Puran Bhagat. Women come here to bathe in its blessed water as a cure for infertility. Religion is no bar and they come from across the spectrum of religions in Pakistan. Years ago, the elderly attendant had told me they came from ‘as far away as Karachi and Quetta’.
Puran was the first-born son of Raja Salvahan of Sialkot and his queen Ichhran. Upon his birth, astrologers advised the king to sequester the infant prince away from the parents for the first twelve years of life, failing which great calamity was to befall the kingdom. And so, the prince was sent to live in a part of the palace where neither parent was to see him. There he grew up at the breast of wet nurses. There he was provided tutors when he came of age to learn everything a future king was meant to learn.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Ziarat beyond residency
07 May 2015
For most of us of the ‘been there; done that’ breed of travellers, Ziarat in Balochistan is simply the Residency where Jinnah spent his final days, the few juniper trees in its grounds and Sandeman Tangi. The last a veritable cesspit with all its detritus of human visitations and the accompanying stench.
Fortunately there is more to Ziarat than meets the common eye. One only has to be a little venturesome. For starters, it is a paradise for bird and small mammal watchers. The one great thing about wandering anywhere outside Ziarat town is the locals’ easy going lack of curiosity for strangers. No crowds gather; no one comes up to gawp. But hospitality is offered readily and without thought for recompense.
Labels: Balochistan, Juniper, Ziarat
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Salt Range and the Potohar Plateau
05 May 2015
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Labels: Books, History, Punjab, Research, The Salt Range and the Potohar Plateau
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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When the meek inherit the earth
04 May 2015
The wali was as a father to the district, they say. He provided education to all regardless of gender and established two thousand schools in the district. He gave justice without bias and he gave it swiftly. In his age, the civil servant was just that: a servant of the citizen.
Misdemeanour on the part of an employee of the State of Swat could be reported and action brought down speedily against the miscreant. In his time, no one could so much as cut a twig, leave alone poach a whole tree. Best of all, there was peace and rule of law in the country under the wali’s rule.
Read more »Labels: Swat
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Upper Jhelum Canal, No Small Wonder
01 May 2015
“The River Jhelum emerges from the Himalaya mountains through an S curve. Just before emerging, it strikes against a cliff on its right bank, which deflects it to the left, where it strikes against the cliff which is surmounted by the old fort of Mangla; which once more deflects it to the right, where it debouches on more open country.” So reads a document written fully 110 years ago by a most ingenious mind.
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| The old abandoned headworks of the Upper Jhelum Canal sits right below Mangla Fort seen on the skyline. Tumbling down the mountains of Kashmir, Jhelum River washed the hill of the fort before turning sharply to the right, forcing its flow in the direction of the headworks. This was the first major canal that drew off without a barrage or weir spanning the river |
The issue at hand was the take off point for a new irrigation canal dubbed the Upper Jhelum Canal, the last of the three canals built under the remarkable project known as the Triple Canal System (TCS), Punjab. The year was 1908 and the TCS was already turning large bandit-infested tracts of primeval forest in the doabs of Bari and Rachna into farmland and new villages. Similarly, the Lower Jhelum Canal, not part of the system, taking off at Rasul was already irrigating country where new farming villages and towns were fast emerging in present-day Sargodha and Khushab districts.
Labels: Book of Days 2015, Punjab, Waters of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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