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.

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):

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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

The Collective for Social Science Research’s Dr. Kaiser Bengali recently discussed Pakistan’s recent economic performance with The News on Sunday. It makes and interesting read and, thanks to the basic grounding I got in macroeconomics in my MBA, makes sense too.

There’s an article on Zeb and Haniya in this week’s Newsweek! And their long-awaited album is out next month :)

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:

• www.pkblogs.com
• www.siatec.net/proxyanonymizer

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.