Mast Qalandar

We recently had a post on Ghalib by Adnan Ahmad. I believe we can never have enough of Ghalib.
Adnan’s post was mostly about Ghalib, the poet. This one is about Ghalib, the person.
When we think of Ghalib as a person, invariably the picture that comes to mind is that of an old man, rather [...]

Mast Qalandar (MQ)

This post is about the “posters”, that is, the people who regularly post comments on ATP. In other words, my mental sketches of the persons I come across on the ATP discussion board.
One of the things I do early in the morning, after checking my e-mail and the news updates, is look up [...]

Mast Qalandar
This story was meant to be a part of the post on Panja Sahib that appeared on these very pages early this year. But I had left it out lest I make the post too lengthy. The post on Panja Sahib stayed on the Discussions Board for a day or two and then disappeared, [...]

Mast Qalandar
I must have passed by this place countless times on my way to Abbottabad and back and was always intrigued by its name. Khota Qabar! Donkey’s grave, that is. Why, I wondered, so much reverence for a donkey?

Khota Qabar lies on the Karakoram Highway about 60 miles north of Islamabad and 7 miles [...]

Guest Post by Mast Qalandar
In an earlier post on Sohni Mahiwal I had said that folklore is a mixture of beliefs, facts and fiction and that it was always a poet who immortalized a love story. But a poet chose to sing a particular story, and not the other, because of its inherent drama, beauty [...]

Guest Post by Mast Qalandar
In my last two posts on Islamabad (here and here) I talked about the woods and the forest trails that I love so much and take to them whenever I can.
In those woods, at the foot of the Margallas, until a few years ago, there was a very large and [...]