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Dear Readers,
While All Things Pakistan has remained alive and online, it has been dormant since June 11, 2011 - when, on the blog's 5th anniversary, we decided that it was time to move on. We have been heartened by your messages and the fact that a steady traffic has continued to enjoy the archived content on ATP. While the blog itself will remain dormant, we are now beginning to add occasional (but infrequent) new material by the original authors of the blog, mostly to archive what they may now publish elsewhere. We will also be updating older posts to make sure that new readers who stumble onto this site still find it useful.
We hope you will continue to find ATP a useful venue to reflect upon and express your Pakistaniat. - Editors
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I had gone to miandam in 1970s and people had told us there were jinns in the hotel. Our driver heard sound of chai wala in the middle of night and didnt see anyone when he went out to investigate. Another person of our family heard footsteps just like your brother.
@auk
When Aurangzeb Alamgir was told about the fire in historical mosque of Kashmir, he asked first about the fate of the centuries old chinar trees beside the mosque. When he was told that they are fine, he calmed down and said “If the mosque is burnt alamgir will reconstruct it a thousand times, but if one tree is burnt down, a thousand alamgirs can not bring it back.:
yaar khuda janay hum itnay jangli kab say ho gaye..bhoot bhi hum say dartay hoon gay.
For me the hardest thing to bear is the landscape in the UTube video. You hardly see any mature pines in those pictures, and the hills are mostly bare with just a few stumps here and there. Also half the pictures are of tree stumps, or someone chopping a tree or wood.
This is the reality of all northern areas of Pakistan today. A few years ago, the Supreme court stopped the then Punjab govt of Pervez Elahi from building new Murree project on pristine land of Pine forests with 200 year old trees. Also that area is in the catchment of water reservoirs for Islamabad and Pindi (Simli and Rawal dams). Unless we wake up to the reality that these trees are what makes these areas heavenly, and are an absolute necessity to preserve our ecosystem, we are going to turn these areas into real wasteland. I also see this as one reason for the current floods. Hills in the north have no capacity to hold water because of what we have done to them, and they wash done with very little rain. Trees are our friends, please help plant them and nurture them.