Tell them a story: Salman Rashid charts his journey with travel filmmaking
07 December 2020
By Shayan Naveed
Salman Rashid is a historian and the only Pakistani to have seen the North Face of K-2. He also has the unique privilege of calling himself the late VS Naipaul’s friend. Today, he sits adjacent to me in a cacophonic coffee shop in Lahore, sipping overpriced coffee. He strains his ear to make sense of what I ask him but gives up, shaking his head as we drag our chairs outside, away from the clutter.
“Restaurants here are set up in a way where you can’t even converse,” he says.
Our coffees start to look like muddied water.
Read more »Labels: Culture, Salman Rashid, Telling a Story, Tourism, Travel
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:15,
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Goddess of fertility
09 December 2016
The goddess wears fancy, sometimes even bizarre, head-dresses, but it is her extra wide hips and an equally large bust — the primary emblem of feminity and therefore of fertility — that are noteworthy. This distorted, even grotesque, imagery symbolises the goddess’ fecundity.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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No season for fairs
16 February 2015
The traditional melas — fairs — in the subcontinent were the place for ordinary folks to let their hair down. Long before they took on a quasi-religious colour in Muslim Pakistan, fairs were secular whose timing was guided by the seasons.
Harvests meant food in the larder and cash in the pocket and so we had festivals in April and May, coinciding with the wheat harvest alternating with those to mark the cutting of rice and sugarcane.
Things changed and while some many festivals became aligned with the lunar calendar, some despite their attachment to shrines and death anniversaries of the saints interred therein continued to stick to the earlier solar calendar.
Read more »Labels: Culture, Festivals, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 13:28,
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Channan Pir
18 October 2014
Legend has it that a Muslim saint came to the court of Raja Sandhila, who ruled over this part of Cholistan at some indeterminate time in the past, and asked if there were any Muslims in the country. There were none, he was told. In which case, said this man of god, the king’s pregnant wife was to deliver a son who would be a Muslim and who would eventually convert the whole country to the true faith.
Read more »Labels: Cholistan, Culture, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mother Goddess
04 October 2014
In the year 416 BCE, a young man of Greek descent left his native Cnidus on the mainland of what is now Turkey to take up employment with the Achaemenian king, Artaxerxes (Ardeshir). Ctesias, as the young man was named, was from the family of Hippocrates, known to us as the Father of Medicine, and himself a trained medical practitioner. For the next few decades, he served the Persian King of Kings as an archiater.
Now Ctesias was evidently a rather inquisitive individual. He appears to have been acquainted with The Histories, the magnum opus of Herodotus, published about forty years earlier, and was a trifle miffed by its disregard of Indian history. Ctesias therefore took it upon himself to learn as much of India as was possible. But his duties looking after royal health perhaps did not give him time enough to go wandering off to the Land of the Sindhu River, so he did the next best thing: He quizzed every Indian visitor to the court about their country.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Manufactured stories
07 August 2014
After reading Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy’s “How to spot the crackpot”, I simply could not resist telling this story. He writes of some nutter publishing a paper to the effect that experiments carried out by someone (presumably the CIA-Mossad-Raw nexus) in northern Alaska have triggered earthquakes and floods in Pakistan! The burden of Dr Hoodbhoy’s article lies on our ‘understanding’ of science.
In late October 2005, I met a person who was clearly a reader only of Urdu newspapers. He was retiring the following year, since he was then 59, a supposedly mature age. After the preliminaries, he cast a suspicious look around his sitting room, leaned over and very conspiratorially with a sly smile on his face asked, “So, what do you think of the earthquake?” I promise you, for a second I thought this was a sadistic madman who took sick pleasure in the misery of others.
Read more »Labels: Culture, Life, Society
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:00,
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Upstarts
10 December 2013
Most of what we Pakistanis do screams to the world that we are upstarts. Consider: several years ago a friend while picking his son from school was introduced to the father of the boy’s classmate. On discovering that the two families lived very near each other, my friend suggested to the father that they form a car pool for the boys’ trip to school and back. The man said, ‘Why do you imagine that I cannot afford for my son to be sent to school in his own car?’
The Punjabi words: ‘Meray puttar nu gadiyan da ghata a?’ This showed not just the upstart mentality but an utterly uncultured ignorance of the need to conserve fuel not just for one’s own economy but for the environment. No surprise then that in any given school, every child, other than siblings, arrives in his/her own car clogging streets for upward of an hour morning and afternoon. Fuel burns, horns honk and tempers fray. But not one parent will consider suggesting the establishment of a car pool or school bus for fear of being taken to be unprosperous.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Channan Pir
17 August 2013
The shiny new pick up truck went bowling down the black top road bordered on one side by rolling, grey sand dunes and by vibrant green citrus orchards and wheat fields on the other. I was riding from Yazman (Bahawalpur District) to the annual festival of Channan Pir in the Cholistan Desert and my co-travellers, all twenty or so of them, were devotees come from as far away as Faisalabad, Rahimyar Khan and Kashmore. Being the first Friday in February, these people were the vanguard for the festival was to continue over the next six Fridays culminating in middle March. As far back as anyone could remember the death anniversary celebration of Channan Pir had always extended a full six weeks.
I had come to investigate what I believed to be the most primordial festival in Punjab, the others were heading for the shrine of Channan Pir either to offer thanks for the dead saint’s benediction in providing long sought for sons or to seek fulfillment of their quest for sons. The boys born out of supplication at the shrine came freshly scrubbed, wearing their best finery with oily hair and shiny plastic shoes. The thick smear of kohl lining their eyes made them winning candidates for parts in some B-grade horror film. Some of the boys even wore cheap rouge on their cheeks.
Labels: Cholistan, Culture, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Festivals of Pakistan
01 June 2013
I was never a great mela-goer. Growing up in Durand Road, we were ten minutes from the shrine of Bibi Pak Daman and the annual festival. But we were not permitted to go by our parents. The first real festival I actually saw was after I left the army and went to live in Karachi. This was Abdullah Shah Ghazi's death anniversary and I quickly realised that there was nothing religious about the festival; that it was almost totally secular with a very thin veneer of quasi-religious belief. It was nothing about pleasing a deity or a departed spirit; it was everything about letting one's hair down. This was no mourning of a hundred of years-old death, but a celebration of life.
I just loved it. Thereafter, I attended other festivals and found them to be the same. Shah Bilawal Noorani in the interior of Lasbela district in Balochistan was another great festival, a regular picnic in a lovely forested spot. The devotees dopes themselves blind with hashish and bhung. Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan with its entrancing dhammal is yet another beautiful festival that goes a long way back to the roots of Sindhi culture.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:19,
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