Impressed With Shehzad Roy

I've never been a big fan of Shehzad Roy's music but I've always appreciated what he's done: the music he's made has generally been good, his collaboration with Sukhbir was fun, he was instrumental in getting Bryan Adams to perform in Pakistan, and his Zindagi Trust non-profit is making a real difference. [Official website]

I am, however, seriously impressed with his latest album, Qismat Apnay Haat Mein, which he launched in Karachi's Juvenile Jail last month. Roy is still fun, funny, and interesting but boy has he matured. And some of his new stuff is good, hard-hitting, and brilliantly political.

Take, for example, the first single from that album, 'Laga Reh'. Rarely do you get such a enjoyable, sarcastic, in-your-face, and yet immensely motivating song all in one. Here's the video:

And the album's title track -- which has also been uploaded to YouTube -- actually has the phrase "I'm allergic to bullshit" in it! :)

Of course, the entire album isn't political -- only four of the songs are -- but it's awesome that he's doing something like this and I highly recommend you go buy the album. (Though I have to admit I only like about half of the album myself!)

Umar Saif & Distributed Web Caching in Pakistan

One of my seniors from undergrad alma mater, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), is working on a project that implements a distributed web caching system in order to increase download speeds in developing countries.

Mason Inman explains in an article in the MIT Technology Review:
Internet access is growing steadily in developing nations, but limited infrastructure means that at times connections can still be painfully slow. A major bottleneck for these countries is the need to force a lot of traffic through international links, which typically have relatively low bandwidth.

Now computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. Software chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.

Sounds like a good system (the article goes into detail about how it works) and here's hoping it's a great success.

Feature on Asim Butt & His Art

Raza Rumi recently wrote a good feature on one my LUMS BSc classmates Asim Butt on the 'All Things Pakistan' blog:
What distinguishes Asim Butt from his generation and perhaps the preceding generations of artists is the sheer originality of his vision and an iconoclasm that is neither trumpeted nor made visible until the subtext of his lines is closely studied.

More on Asim:

Ramchand Pakistani

Speaking of stuff that's related to Pakistan (see my previous post), I'm really looking forward to watching Mehreen Jabbar's film 'Ramchand Pakistani' which I've heard good things about.

Ramchand Pakistani is derived from a true story concerning the accidental crossing of the Pakistan-Indian border during a period (June 2002) of extreme, war-like tension between the two countries by two members of a Pakistani Hindu family belonging to the 'untouchable' (Dalit) caste, and the extraordinary consequences of this unintended action upon the lives of a woman, a man, and their son.

I don't know when we'll get to see it in Melbourne but I hope it's sometime soon.

[Also see 'Ramchand Pakistani' on IMDb]

Jazbah.org

Laila Kazmi's Jazbah.org -- a site about "Pakistani women who have worked hard to achieve great goals and made significant, positive impacts in their societies" -- has been around for a number of years but I've never gotten around to mentioning it on this blog. That's mainly because, even though it's a great resource, it's not updated very often and most of the profiles on it are a few years old.

However I visited the site again recently thanks to the Muslimah Media Watch -- I was commenting there on how it's only blogs like MMW and PakPositive that ever seem to talk about all the good things going on in developing countries -- and figured I should give it a mention. It's a good site and the events and books sections seem to be active, which is cool. Make sure you take a look.

Film Club in Lahore

During my undergrad I became president of Alpha Hour -- LUMS' extracurricular club that showed movies, invited guest speakers to campus, and arranged discussion groups on interesting topics.

While I was president, though, it ended up being more of a film club than anything else. Every Friday evening, then, I'd borrow the video projector, book the school's largest auditorium, and screen a couple of films. We'd show all kinds of stuff and, by the time I handed the club over to my juniors, it had become pretty popular.

The movie screening formula that I used also worked nicely: I'd show a popular movie or cartoon first (usually a comedy, romantic comedy, or action movie), take a half hour break, and then show a more serious movie (usually a drama, artsy movie, or cult classic). The first session usually filled the 370-seat auditorium, especially when we showed films like Titanic or Star Wars: Episode I. The second session, meanwhile, was targeted mostly to film buffs and/or hostel residents (I was both). I remember in particular our second-show screening of Apocalypse Now because, by the end of the movie, there were only eight people in the room :)

Coming to the point of this blog post: Having run a film club in the past, it made me really happy, then, when a friend e-mailed to tell me about the Punjnad Film Club that has recently started in Lahore ("alpha hour - all jumped up on volunteer adrenaline", he wrote). We have a number of cinemas in Lahore but all of them focus on mainstream movies (mostly blockbusters) and PFC is a breath of fresh air for people who want to watch other kinds of movies as well. Here's hoping they're wildly successful.

Good Times: Trekking and Playing Music

UPDATE: The Karakorams.com site has been taken offline so the photos embedded and linked-to from this blog post are no longer available. I am trying to find other versions to put here instead...but don't hold your breath. [Ameel; 25 August 2009]

A couple of friends recently posted some photographs of treks that I've been on and gigs that I've participated in over the past decade and it got me feeling all nostalgic. Since those photos were posted on Facebook, I figured I'd post some of them here while linking to other, public ones as well.

Trekking in the Karakorams

First off are some trekking photos. I did a lot of trekking and travelling while I was in college -- there's nothing quite like travelling with lots of friends while on a tight budget -- and most of those treks are nicely documented on Karakorams.com (which I helped develop, by the way). Here are photos from my three favourite treks.

My first real trek was to Fairy Meadows, which is a camp on the north side of Nagna Parbat. You can find many photos from that trip on Karakorams.com but this one is my favourites (click for a larger version):

Saad, Amir, Ameel, and Yasir at Fairy Meadows

This was taken bright and early on the second day of our trek. Alefia, who'd been feeling really cold and had woken up a couple of hours earlier, got tired of our laziness and came to wake us up. You can't quite see me in there but I'm the hint of a face in the darkness of the tent. Yasir wrote an article about this trip and even he mentions this photo :)

Our second trip was to one of the Rakaposhi base camps and, for this one, both Yasir and I wrote articles -- though mine is more of diary-type recounting of events which, when I read now, I'm itching to edit! I like two photos from this trek. This one is of me, Saqib (one of the two friends whose posting in Facebook prompted me to write this), and Alefia with the Rakaposhi peaks in the background:

Ameel, Saqib, Alefia

And this one, which shows the ridge we had to climb across to get to our camp:

Crossing the Ridge

The path across this ridge was broken in four places and that photo is of one of the easiest crossings! You can find the rest of the Rakaposhi photos on Karakorams.com as well.

My third trip was to the Deosai Plains, which is one of the highest plateaus in the world. There are lots of really good photos from this trek but this one of Hasan as he positions his tripod to take a photo is my favourite:

Hasan Karrar on Deosai

Deosai really is a stunning place and I urge you to take a look at the rest of the photos as well.

Playing Music

Moving away from trekking: Back in 2005 a bunch of us in Islamabad got together and performed a couple of really fun gigs at Civil Junction.

What was possibly more fun than the gigs themselves were the jam sessions that we had at my house in the weeks leading up to the events. Sheharyar posted some of the photos from those sessions on Facebook and here are a couple.

This one is of me and Nadia -- we did most of the drumming and "percussing" for the band and, no, Nadia isn't normally surrounded by a motion blur:

Nadia and Ameel drumming for the F-10 1/2 Acoustic Band

The second one is a wider shot of the room -- the drawing room of our old house in Islamabad -- which had awesome acoustics. Sheharyar is the one with the guitar and mic:

F-10 1/2 Acoustic Band - Jam Session

Ah, good times. Here's to many, many more in the future...

Blogging Sites Banned in Pakistan...Again

The Emergency Times is reporting that popular free blogging sites like Blogspot/Blogger and WordPress have been banned in Pakistan. That means those URLs have been blocked at the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE), which is the only point of contact that almost all Pakistanis have with the 'net since all ISPs are required to route their traffic through it. For more on this, check out the Wikipedia article: Internet Censorship in Pakistan.

Of course, as anyone who is familiar with the Internet knows, blocking (or filtering) URLs in that way is pretty much useless. There are always workarounds. In fact, The Emergency Times lists two:

And there are many, many more. Just search for "anonymizer" on any search engine.

Two Good Articles on Pakistan: Fisk, Hamid

I came across two good articles on Pakistan today.

The first, 'They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf' by Robert Fisk (thanks, Ayesha) talks about the ISI (i.e. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency) and about how:
...Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a "murderer" were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

The second, 'It's Troubled, But It's Home' by Mohsin Hamid,is completely different. It's a much more personal article, written from the perspective of a Pakistani expatriate:
...As my wife and I board our flight from London to Lahore, evident all around us is a longing for home -- for the friends and family who are central to Pakistani culture in a way that many foreigners find so remarkable. (As an admiring American roommate of mine once said, "All you guys do is hang out.") This duality of Pakistan as a place both troubled and normal, a place capable of producing a large diaspora while also affectionately tugging at those who have left, is often lost on the world's media. International news outlets tend to cast Pakistan as the one-dimensional villain of a horror film, a kind of Jason or Freddie whose only role is to frighten. Scant attention is paid to the hospitality, the love for music and dance, or the simple ordinariness of 164 million people going about their daily lives.

Which then ends on a positive note:
In the United States, there will be newspaper columns and television talk shows dedicated to "loose nukes" and the "war on terror." Here in Pakistan, one can see signs of people coming together. Scare stories notwithstanding, it is possible (although by no means certain) that out of this tragedy the world's sixth-largest nation may succeed in finding its voice -- and with that the chance for a better future.

If you get the chance, do read both of them.

A Little Perspective: Defending Musharraf

Jonathan Power wrote a really good article in the Toronto Star yesterday in which he rightly defended President Musharraf:
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf gets a bad press; Benazir Bhutto a too kind one. Which of them is the real rogue?

When Musharraf, as Pakistan's top army commander, tried to engineer war with India over Kashmir in 1999, he demonstrated his roguish side. Yet even many of his opponents in Pakistan will concede that since he deposed Nawaz Sharif and assumed power he has been largely a benevolent dictator.

Read the whole article; Power makes a good point. Though, really, most of us Pakistanis didn't expect much "democracy" from Bhutto anyway. Her post-herself PPP succession plan being the ultimate case in point.

And we have no problems in conceding that Musharraf has been good for the country. I mean, can you imagine what life would have been like under anyone else? Present circumstances excepted, of course. Though, if you think about it, it's all those good years that make the present situation seem that much worse don't they? For example, had we not had a totally free press for the last five years, would we have missed not having one now? And had things not been so good in the last five years, would college students from across the nation have known enough or cared enough to actually protest the Emergency? Heck, had things not been better for the country, at least half of those students would have been in the US anyway!

My point is: all this is worth thinking about before we completely dismiss Musharraf and, in a catastrophic error of judgement, let the crooks back into the country and into a position of power. I hate to say it but, for now at least, the only way that I see us getting out of this mess is to keep Musharraf on as President. Without him -- and, really, without the military providing a constant threat and counterbalance -- our mostly corrupt and mostly useless politicians will, yet again, screw the country over and we'll be back to square one. Again.

And if not that, the only other way out is via a provisional government and the restoration of the judiciary. The real, honest, and just judiciary; not the sham one they've got in there right now. That's the key, though, isn't it? The Rule of Law. We've never really had it -- not in the last 4,000 years at least -- and until we get it and keep it for at least three generations, we'll never actually break away from our feudal, kingly, and dictatorial past.

Spiraling Downwards...

Speaking of the situation in Pakistan, things seem to be getting only worse. The Asian Human Rights Commission just published a statement on the how Asma Jehangir's daughters were assaulted and threatened that you should read [Via The Emergency Times].

The AHRC has also published a good overview on the fundamentals of what is happening on in Pakistan these days. And though it comes across as sounding a little sensationalist:
This is what Pakistan has become. It is a draconian military state and uses anti terrorism as a pretext to strengthen itself and to oust the rule of law. In essence it is a lawless place where any act of cruelty to any person at all, be it a leading politician or a chief justice, can be done with impunity. Those are the conditions under which the ordinary Pakistanis have to live and must adjusted themselves to.

Everything that the article says is, unfortunately, true.

Higher Education in Pakistan

A couple of months ago I wrote about how, as it turns out, things in Pakistan aren't going as well as we thought they were. Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of Pakistan's leading scientists recently wrote an article in Dawn that dispels the myth the the Government of Pakistan is actually fixing up our higher education system. It's an excellent two-part article of which this is the first part. I'll post a link to part two when it gets published.

(Note: You can find some of Hoodbhoy's other articles in Chowk.)

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated...

I can't think of anything to say. Besides, everyone else is already saying it -- and saying it much better than I ever could.

All political ramifications aside, though, my thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes go out to Bhutto's family. I know how hard it is to lose a loved one; especially a mother. And the more public that person is, the harder it must be for close family since any sendoff that you might want to give your loved one is inevitably hijacked by everyone else. I hope her family -- especially her children -- are hanging in there.

Farhat Haq Weighs in on the Emergency

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, an FIR [1] was recently lodged against Farhat Haq, a professor of political science at Monmouth College, Illinois. She has been charged with "writing inappropriate things about the government" with chalk on a wall in Lahore. Had the government actually checked before issuing the FIR, they might have noticed that Haq was actually in Illinois at the time of the alleged misdemeanour. Haq wrote an article about this in Dawn and it's been posted on The Emergency Times blog.

[1] FIR = First Investigation Report. Basically, the first step in a police investigation since this officially opens a police investigation.