Pakistan through the eyes of a train traveller
31 May 2019
When the first train pulled into Quetta in March 1887, it did not roll the way they do today up the stony bends of the Bolan Pass. Instead, the line struck north from Sibi into the 160-kilometre-long meandering gorge of the Nari River through the sulphur-stained badlands of Gandakeen Aaf (sulphur water in Balochi) past such evocative names as Tanduri that is still famous for its furnace summer heat and into the cool highlands of Harnai and Shahrag. In those days when the Great Game had reached a frenzied pitch, the line that dreamed of reaching Kandahar was called the Kandahar State Railway.
Northwest of Harnai lay Khost and beyond it the dramatic yawning maw of the Chhappar Rift. But the rift is a tale of glorious achievement and woe so far as railway engineers of that time were concerned. Suffice it to say that it was put out of service by a summer rainstorm in July 1942. By then the line through the Bolan Pass was in place and passenger trains entering the Nari Gorge went only as far as Khost while coal trains trundled on another 15 kilometres to the mines of Zardalu.
Read more »Labels: Herald, Pakistan, Travel
posted by Salman Rashid @ 16:13,
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THE BARD’S PAKISTAN
03 June 2018
There are two aspects of a good travel book. One, that towards the end it makes me a bit sad that it is going to be over — I actually read slower and slower near the end. Second, that it makes me want to leave everything and go travelling where the author has been. The bonus is that it draws chuckles.
Isambard — ‘Bard’ to his friends — Wilkinson’s Travels in a Dervish Cloak succeeds on all counts.
It was in 1984 that Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote his beautifully witty To the Frontier, which was billed by Ayaz Amir as a “very sympathetic account” of Pakistan. Moorhouse’s journey through Pakistan took place in 1982 when the country was just beginning to break loose from its moorings under the cockeyed version of a dictator’s sham piety. Back then, society still maintained its original charm and beauty and it was easy for Moorhouse to show us an original Pakistan. There was more beauty, fewer warts.
Labels: Book Review, Books, Pakistan, Travel
posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:15,
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A Memoir of Partition
11 January 2018
On the twentieth day of March 2008, I headed home for the first time in my life. I was fifty-six years and a month old. Walking east across the border gates at Wagah I was on my way to the fulfilment of a family pietas of very long standing. I was going to a home I had never known; a home in a foreign land, a land that state propaganda wanted me to believe was enemy territory. But I knew it as a country where my ancestors had lived and died over countless generations. That was the home where the hearth kept the warmth of a fire first kindled by a matriarch many hundred years, nay, a few thousand years, ago and which all of a sudden had been extinguished in a cataclysm in 1947.
In that great upheaval, in a singular moment in time, that home ceased to be home. One part of the family made it across the border to become a tiny part of a huge data: they were among the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes. Another part of the family also became a statistic—a grim and ghastly one: they were part of the more than one million unfortunate souls who paid with their blood for the division of India and foundation of the new country of Pakistan for Muslims. They who died were not just Muslims who lived east of the new line drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. They were Sikhs, Hindus and even Jains who had homes thousands of years old, west of this line in the land that became Pakistan.
Read more »Labels: Books, India, Pakistan, Partition
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:56,
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Train tourism
07 April 2017
Railways is among the more enduring legacies of the British Raj in the subcontinent. There is virtually an inexhaustible body of extremely interesting lore and history of the building of this great system of transportation discussed in a few excellent books and in the esoteric journals in the Punjab Archives. It is another story that the ignorant and asinine bureaucrats do not permit access to that great treasure trove.
Even if one has not read about the intricacies and heroism of the laying of the line from, say, Ruk (near Shikarpur) to Sibi, one can still stand on the platform of Ruk and wonder what the letters KSR and IVSR that adorn the façade in blue on white ceramic tiles mean. The lettering signifies that this little-known station was the junction of the Indus Valley State Railway coming up from Kotri and the new line to Quetta and Chaman called the Kandahar State Railway.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway, Tourism
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The typical Pakistani conversation
27 June 2016
Pakistanis are strange people. They ask you a question with no intention of hearing a response. There is a very tiny, very, very tiny, lot of truly educated persons who when they ask mean to be told. The remainder only banter in the course of which when they have to pose a question, they really have no intention of knowing your view on it.
Shortly after I quit the army in 1978, I started out making fun of army officers. When I with my long hair and unkempt beard introduced myself to someone as an ex of their profession the question following my regimental identity usually was where I had served.
‘Five of my six and a half years of commissioned service, I served in Kharian....’ I would begin. That was cue for my interlocutor to cut in: ‘Once I was in Kharian....’ and there would ensue an endless narration of how great Kharian was in antediluvian times. Notice how every fauji will use ‘once’ instead of ‘when’ and notice too how glorious a place as dreary as Kharian seems after one has left it.
Read more »Labels: About, Life, Pakistan, Society
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Years of Publications
04 May 2016
Gujranwala: The Glory That Was published [1st ed 1992], [2nd ed] in 2000
Between Two Burrs on the Map: Travels in Northern Pakistan published in 1995
Salt Range and Potohar Plateau published [1st ed 2000], [2nd ed] in 2005
Prisoner on a Bus: Travel Through Pakistan published in 2003
Jhelum: City of the Vitasta published in 2005
Sea Monsters and the Sun God: Travels in Pakistan published in 2006
The Apricot Road to Yarkand published in 2011
All books are available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Labels: Books, Pakistan, Salman Rashid, Travel Literature, Travel Writing, Travels in Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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Ghazva e Hind
13 April 2016
My Twitter friend Harsh [@hashkeys] from, I think Bombay, is a smart young man with an open mind. And I like him very much. The idea for this piece came from one of his flippant tweets about them (the Indians) mounting Ghazva e Hind against us. And then he went, ‘Umm, that didn’t come off quite well.’
Now those of you who do not know what this phrase means are obviously not accustomed to listening to a lunatic in a red hat. The man goes on about how Muslims will one day liberate India from the wicked Hindus. Of course that will be shortly before the entire world converts to the one and only true religion, that is, Islam. And then before we can even get a hang of it, it will be Judgement Day.
I hope between getting rid of the Hindus and turning India pure and Judgement Day we have enough time for us Muslims to kill at least 200 million of our own kind. The same way as we are these days busily doing in Pakistan.
Read more »Labels: India, Pakistan, Twitter
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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How the State has fallen
12 April 2016
‘A group of lawyers on Tuesday locked a woman additional district & sessions judge in her courtroom allegedly for not rendering a favourable decision. AD&SJ Najaf Shahzadi and her staff remained locked in the courtroom for hours. District and Sessions Judge Nazir Gajiana took notice of the incident and got the courtroom unlocked. The D&SJ summoned the lawyers and the woman judge and reconciled the matter.’
The above is the transcript of a news item filed by Dawn’s staff reporter on Wednesday 6 April 2016. It illustrates the most abjectly shameful abdication of the authority by the State of Pakistan. It is all the more appalling because this is not the first time such a reprehensible act has been enacted.
Read more »Labels: Governance, Life, Pakistan, Society
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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What I told the Girls at LCWU
11 April 2016
Moneeza Hashmi is a very dear friend who values my work. It was in her tenure as General Manager PTV Lahore Centre that we did the 19-part, 30-minutes each, travel/history series titled Nagri Nagri Ghoom Musafir. It was also under her stewardship that I made the 13-part documentary Sindhia main Sikander on Alexander’s Indian Campaigns, once again each episode of 30 minutes.
The first series was executed in 1998-99 and the second in 2001. This was more than a quarter century after the now vaguely remembered masterpiece travel show titled Selani kay Saath had enthralled PTV viewers. That was the work of the one and only, the great doyen of documentary makers in Pakistan: Obaidullah Baig. OB, as we who had the great good fortune of being his friends, called him, was the master story-teller. The raconteur par excellence who leapt straight out of the pages of some thick medieval tome of fairy tales. When he spoke, his gravelly voice and the turn of phrase held so many of us rapt for he easily matched (if not outdid) Scherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.
Read more »Labels: Documentary, Geography, Guest Speaker, LCWU, Obaidullah Baig, Pakistan, Pakistan Railways, Sindhia mein Sikander
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Dharti Mata
10 March 2016
The most satisfactory and accomplished journey was a short trek to the summit of Takht e Suleman in November 1994. The trip took all of three days, but being on the summit opened a great window of light. My guide, two local militiamen showed me the 'grave' of Qais Abdur Rashid that all Pathans believe is a common ancestor to them. The grave was actually a stone pedestal measuring twenty-one feet square. It was an ancient pagan sacrificial pedestal.
Two years earlier, at the shrine of Channan Pir in Cholistan, I watched the rituals of salaam and giving thanks for the son and realised that this was a throwback to Dharti Mata of our pagan past. And shortly before the dawning at Channan Pir, I had been on the peak of Musa ka Musalla where some Gujjar herders were taking a couple of buffalos to say salaam too the shrine on the summit. They told me that this ritual made the animals more fertile. That is what Dharti Mata does: she bestows fertility upon her worshippers.
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Not even mediocre
13 November 2015
The other day I received a call from one of these private TV channels. The person said he wanted to speak to me regarding how we have failed to promote this sorry land as an attractive tourist destination and what we could do to turn things around.
And soon I had at my door two fresh-faced and very amiable young men with the accessories of their trade.
Now, being a travel writer is one thing and being able to wax meaninglessly, ad nauseum ineloquent on tourism promotion is another. I say this because anyone who is above forty in this country suddenly begins to look upon him/herself as an authority on everything that he/she knows nothing about.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Alexander on Aornos
23 October 2015
Burimar is a quiet and lovely little place of a few houses, mainly summer residences, small plots of tilled land where magpies squabble and argue, a tumbling brook and pine forest that rings with birdsong. It nestles just below the 2618-metre (8590 feet) peak of Una Sar. Una Sar, commonly famous as Pir Sar (after the slightly lower adjacent peak which has a supposed saint’s grave), sits in the crook formed on the west bank of the Sindhu River as it sweeps past Behsam to make a left (east) ward arc.
Now, the n in Una produces that sound which is known only in Sanskrit-based languages of the subcontinent: the sound that rolls the nasal n sound together with the palatal r. Sar, on the other hand, simply means peak. And so this was the Peak of Una. The Greeks, incapable of vocalising this sound, turned Una Sar into the Rock of Aornos.
In early April in the year 326 BCE, Burimar saw a minor battle between the Pukhtuns and the forces of Alexander the Macedonian. Having entered what is today called Pakistan by the Nawa Pass of Bajaur, and worked his way from victory after victory over the Pukhtuns he met on the way, he arrived in Swat. Meanwhile, many of the Pukhtuns who fought against him and made off with their lives, fled to Aornos. There on the lofty heights of this mountain whose circumference, as recorded by Alexander’s historian, was ‘about 25 miles’ and whose base was washed by the Sindhu River, the Pukhtuns took refuge.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, History, Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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All foreign invaders aren’t Pakhtun
07 September 2015
Tor Aman and his son Mehr Gul were White Huns. The Latinised versions of their accursed names are Toramana and Mihirakula. They came from Central Asia in the 5th century CE, fully a century-and-a-half before the advent of Islam. They laid waste the country that we now call Afghanistan, where they raped, plundered and killed wantonly.
Then they entered what is now Pakistan. The great and wonderful cities of Peshawar, Swat, Pushkalavati (Charsadda) and Taxila suffered their inhumanity as few of us can imagine. In the year 516, Tor Aman died and the sceptre passed on to his son. When the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Sung Yun, visited Punjab five years later, he found the country in the hands of a ‘cruel and vindictive’ king who visited upon the people the ‘most barbarous atrocities’.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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By the banks of the Bien
20 August 2015
Years ago, when he was still alive, my uncle Dr Habib ur Rahman once told me that he and his cousins used to cycle out from Uggi (our ancestral village in Jalandhar) to the Bien, a small stream. It was only a few kilometres away and they would spend their summer days swimming in its pellucid waters and picnicking on its sandy banks.
On my last visit to Uggi, I asked Bakhshish Singh to take us to the river. Now Bakhshish, in his early thirties, tall and very good-looking is a mona Sikh, while his father, the venerable Saudagar Singh, large-boned and bewhiskered, keeps the tradition of the great Guru Nanak alive. Back in March 2008, my first ever visit across the border, I was introduced to Bakhshish by the good Gurmeet Singh who looks after the Desh Bhagat Hall in Jalandhar (of this at another time). Bakhshish took me home to show me the village of my ancestors. It turned out that this family and I, they Kamboh and I Arain by caste, were kinsfolk from a distant past.
Read more »Labels: Heritage, India, Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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On the road with a message of peace
27 April 2015
On March 13, a group of nine Balti mountaineers and a doctor set out of Hushe (north of Khaplu) on a trek of 1000km, carrying with them a message of peace for the world.
Through Skardu, Gilgit and by way of the Karakoram Highway, they reached Islamabad exactly 31 days later.
Salman Kasi in Lahore
These good men were set off by the irresponsibility of the country’s print and electronic media. The semi-educated and irresponsible journalists manning the media cannot differentiate between the northwest of the country and what was until some years ago Northern Areas and routinely reported about terrorism emanating from the ‘Northern Areas’ (shumali ilaqajat in Urdu). The result was widespread vilification of the Gilgit-Baltistan region as a terrorist hotbed. And this was not just among ignorant Pakistanis but equally ignorant foreigners as well.
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Pakistan, People, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Standing on the threshold of a new age
16 April 2015
Once upon a time when ‘urbanisation’ had not yet caught on, this was another country. Outside the urban centres, this was a land of wide-open vistas of swaying fields of wheat, rice or sugar cane as weather permitted. This was a land of spreading banyan trees that, I was learn much later, figured on one-inch army topographical maps as ‘survey trees.’ And this was a country of fine stands of shisham and acacia trees, roadside ponds ablaze with red and blue lotus flowers and fresh water streams alive with tortoises and fish.
In those days of the late 1950s and through the following decade, when the family drove up the Grand Trunk Road to Rawalpindi or took the N-5 down to Multan, the ride was through a marvellous landscape. The Degh River just a few kilometres north of Lahore was a clear water stream whose banks were lined with anglers – especially if it was a Sunday. Gujranwala was a tiny little town where we swept past only a handful of stores and several lovely old town houses.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Another Sad Joke
10 April 2015
Today, 9 April 2014, there appears in newspapers this ad. It says that it is essential to have only that computerised registration plate on your vehicle that is issued by the Excise and Taxation Department. This is such a crock of shit!
I would like to know who is going to enforce this law. We have hundreds, nay thousands, of all kinds of laws that have never been enforced because our rulers are spineless. To match them is a bureaucracy that was castrated during our eleven year-long night of the great incubus Zia ul Haq. Years after the untimely death of the dictator the bureaucracy has become so accustomed to the sloth induced by him that it has no wish to change itself. And of the political class, the least said the better.
Aside: I say ‘untimely death’ of the accursed dictator. It was most untimely in that it was very, very long overdue. The curse should have been stillborn!
Read more »Labels: Governance, Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Not my Fault
12 March 2015
This piece appears in the March 2015 issue of Herald
There is an old Garfield cartoon where the orange cat tells readers that it has a very responsible position in the home. ‘Every time something goes wrong, I’m held responsible,’ says the balloon above the Saturnine glumness of his face.
Next to Garfield, our politicians are the cutest people on earth. Whereas poor loveable Garfield is always responsible, our politicians never are for anything that goes wrong. First off, the incumbent PM’s patent look beats the one-tooth-missing grin of Alfred E Neuman’s ‘What, me worry?’ expression. Secondly, he has the habit of saying the most inane things on earth with great gravity. In fact, his gravity while uttering absurdity is greater than that of a black hole.
By the way, if you didn’t know what a black hole is, it’s not a part of the human anatomy – as you so facetiously thought. You can now wipe that smirk off your silly face. It is a celestial body that permits nothing, not even light, to escape its surface. Though there are similarities between black holes and Pakistani politicians, we shall not go into that for the time being.
Read more »Labels: Herald, Humour, Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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‘Bakistan’ zindabad
16 January 2015
Folks do not like the new film Zero Dark Thirty. This film is about the 10-year long hunt for the most evil terrorist the world has known since Hasan bin Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountain — the two having much in common.
I am not a movie fan and know little about films, but the gripe of most reviewers is that this film features Arabic being spoken on the streets of Pakistan in the year 2011. One reviewer even ridiculed the scene of a camel train somewhere in Abbottabad. This poor reviewer may actually never have left his TV lounge where he writes his reviews because we have camels aplenty in this country.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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A Punjab odyssey
13 December 2014
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Shabnam and I crossed the border on a cold winter morning to a warm reception on the far side of the gates at Wagah. We were not part of any delegation; this was a purely private trip, a follow-up of my March 2008 yatra. The earlier visit, my first ever to India, was an attempt to discover the fate of one part of a family I had never known.
One day about the fourteenth of August, 1947 my grandfather Dr Badaruddin who lived on Railway Road, Jalandhar and his wife, two daughters and father in law together with their servant, his wife and five children were lost to the world. They became part of the one million mostly Punjabi people, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, who died for the division of India. From living beings, these people suddenly became statistics.
This time around, I hoped to find cases among Sikhs and Punjabi Hindus whose families had migrated from what became Pakistan and whose stories were similar to mine. We found people, we heard their stories, and together we became misty-eyed putting on brave Punjabi faces to show that we did not cry. As I wept privately at night, I am sure others did too. The grief of that event 62 years ago continues to haunt those like Darshan Singh in Jalandhar who was just a child when his family migrated from Klasswala near Pasrur. Others like Mohinder Pratab Sehgal, then just in his teens, who remembered my grandfather and the slaying of the family, still feels the guilt of that terrible time.
Read more »Labels: India, Pakistan, Partition
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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