Anas’s Blog

Here’s a really good article on the Pakistani authorities’ neglect of Lahore – a neglect that borders on contempt for that truly venerable city and its innumerable treasures — by Simon Jenkins of the Guardian. Jenkins manages to touch on the many layers of Pakistan’s history (pre-Islamic, Mogul, British Raj) that have bequeathed countless impressive, often dazzling, monuments and relics, to the modern day city of Lahore. Only, that is, for Pakistan’s current totalitarian regime to allow them to fall derelict or to demolish them for short term profit in a society where corruption is the norm. Of course this has to be understood in the context of a country where the treatment of most human beings and the low cost placed on their lives and wellbeing is the greatest outrage. That understood, I have to confess that being of Pakistani origin myself I am angry at the thought that so much of my heritage (and not just in Lahore, where it is most tragically apparent) is being wiped out as a result of greed and carelessness. I was in Lahore in 2005 and was absolutely amazed at how beautiful it was, and that a city with such an illustrious past, a past still visible in the streets and boulevards, within the Walled City, was practically unknown here in the West where we continually exalt places like Paris, Rome, and Venice — who knew dirty little Pakistan held such a jewel? 

I guess a part of it is selfishishness: being Pakistani (well of Pakistani-origin anyway) I’d much rather for my own sense of self-esteem that Pakistan were known for the exquisite mogul architecture of Lahore and the stupendous beauty of the Karkorams, things like that, than as a hotbed of terrorism and fundamentalism, whose people are eminently expendable and whose only real worth is strategic in the war against (some) terror. And this is because no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise, to rid myself of this habit of thought, I do identify myself with that Godforsaken country — it’s in the blood.