The Republic’s higher aesthetics

Islamabad diary
If culture is destiny then take a habitual sinner’s word for it that our future is bleak. There must have been a sense of beauty in this land once upon a time. But it’s hard to look for it now.
The House of Timur had it…which you can see in their gardens, fortresses and mausoleums. The founder of the dynasty, the great Babur – what does one call him first, a poet or a warrior? – would set eyes on a beautiful place and order a garden to be laid. If the prospect was pleasing it was reason enough for him to have a drinking party.
He was an accomplished poet and his prose style was supple and direct. Of the places he visited or conquered he would draw up a list of the animals and the hunting to be found in them and the plants and fruits for which they were famous. He could hold forth on the merits of writers and musicians. And he could undertake strenuous marches and lay siege to high walls.
If we had any sense, his memoirs would be part of the national curriculum. There is no better antidote to the nonsense of our seminaries, or indeed to the distorted history taught not just in our schools but our colleges and universities.
Yes, there was beauty then. Where did it vanish? There is certainly little Timurid about the aesthetics we see in our Islamic Republic. The Rawalpindi Metro I had a chance to look at closely a few days ago. Call it a revelation.
Islamabad is full of architectural horrors. The next time anyone says ‘Islamabad the Beautiful’ reach for your gun. What we’ve done to it, and are still doing, is a cautionary tale. Cities are made beautiful by stunning art, music and the setting for music like concert halls and opera houses. Cities are made remarkable by open public spaces and amenities such as libraries and the means to get to them like efficient public transport. What Bolshoi Ballet or Sydney Opera House do you find in Islamabad? There’s one library and you can’t get to it.
The Rawalpindi Metro, however, takes the prize. As a planning and architectural horror there is nothing to beat it. As you drive down Murree Road from Marrir Chowk it is over your head. Keep driving to Committee Chowk and beyond. Only then will the full horror of this piece of cake sink into your consciousness. In times to come this is sure to be immortalised as the Ittefaq or Raiwind School of Architecture…Pakistan’s singular contribution to the superior arts.
But the thing is done and there is no undoing it. And yet this invites a meditation on how the human mind can soar to the stars and how it can insist on wallowing in the gutters of the imagination. The Metro is a tribute to the mind’s lower depths.
There is a metro to follow in Multan. The City of Saints had better look to its salvation. Multan has been sacked and pillaged many times in its history. Alexander was seriously wounded as he scaled its walls and the Greeks in their fury, after they had taken the city, put its inhabitants to the sword. But I can bet that nothing in its history will prepare it for the coming assault. The city always recovered from previous sackings. It will not recover from what’s coming to it…just as no redoing of Rawalpindi can undo the permanent damage done to its skyline.
This brings me to another lament: the ravaging in the name of development of the Salt Range and one of its principal treasures, the Kahoon Valley… in the centre of which Katas Raj, abode of the Hindu deities, is located.
Three cement plants, huge and monstrous, are already causing utter devastation, digging up the limestone – once the beauty, now the curse of these mountains – using up the clay and sinking deep wells to extract water from aquifers which once used and exhausted will never be refilled. As if this wasn’t enough, a fourth behemoth will soon come up, our Chinese friends behind this one. The MOU was signed in Model Town. Why there? Is the Ittefaq School of Architecture in on this deal too?
In the popular imagination cement equals development. Talk to any bozo and he will say but oh, cement is indispensable. It indeed is but only up to what you need. What most people don’t realise is that we are producing cement far in excess of our needs and exporting it to Afghanistan definitely and, if I am not grossly mistaken, to India too. In other words, we are ripping up and ravaging our own soil and irredeemably damaging our water resources for the benefit of our neighbours.
Because there are big bucks in cement, a seller’s market if ever there was one, every captain of industry salivates at the mouth as he drives by on the Motorway, crosses the Salt Range and sees all the limestone in the overhanging rocks. And he says to himself: why not me?
The ones already in the game are big cats, all of them. Let me not name them because freedom of expression runs only thus far and no more. We can castigate politicians who in any case, most of them, deserve to be castigated but we dare not touch captains of industry because, no doubt, there lies our bread and butter.
When I wrote for another paper I once put together a column about the despoliation of the Kahoon Valley. That column went through but the second I wrote on the same subject was blocked. Why? Because the paper’s owner was married into an industrialist family and that family in turn was closely related to one of the cement tycoons. There is more to truth than what appeareth before our eyes.
The heavy trailers carrying cement from the three monstrosities destroyed the road connecting Choa Saidan Shah and Kallar Kahar. And the Khadim-e-Aala, servant of the people, set aside 55 crores for re-metalling the road. This was public money being used to subsidise the fat cats. They destroy the roads, give nothing to the people or the district and then get the government to rebuild the roads. They always land on their feet.
The banker-adventurer who became Musharraf’s finance minister and then prime minister was the patron saint of this cement endeavour. Musharraf himself thought this was development…so much investment coming in and therefore something to be proud of. They had no idea of the Kahoon Valley and none whatsoever of the price it would pay for their notions of development.
From Kallar Kahar if you go towards Malot on whose hillside Alberuni stood and measured the earth and look back you can see two of the cement plants and there is a clear view of hills made bald and lifeless by the extraction of the limestone. This is the fate lying in wait for large tracts of this heavenly landscape. And now a fourth plant is joining the fun…all in the name of development.
This could have been a touristic paradise. These were settlements inhabited by Hindus and Sikhs before Partition. As we know, or as Hindu myth would have us believe, the Lord Shiva grieving over the separation of his beloved Saraswati shed a tear which falling from the heavens carved out the pond of Katas Raj. Hasanabdal, sacred to Sikhs, is not far from here.
All this was holy land. The Lord of the Worlds entrusted it into our keeping and we are turning it into a wasteland.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com