Owais Mughal

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Adil Najam

The latest issue of Nature (Volume 461 Number 7260, September 3, 2009) carries an article as well as an editorial on Pakistan’s Higher Education Reform experiment and on the Higher Education Commission (HEC). Since I am myself one of the co-authors I should not add too much more commentary to what we have already written in our Nature article. But some minimal contextual information may be worthwhile.

The topic of higher education reform, of course, has been a subject of intense debate in Pakistan and has been closely followed internationally because of the sweeping scale of the reform experiment in Pakistan. For this article the authors – Dr. Athar Osama (a scholar of science policy in developing countries and a Visiting Fellow at the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and someone who has written occasionally for ATP), Prof. Adil Najam (myself, the Director of the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future), Dr. Shamsh Kassim-Lakha (former President of the Aga Khan University and former Minister of Education, Science and Technology), Prof. Syed Zulfiqar Gilani (former Vice Chancellor, University of Peshawar) and Dr. Christopher King (editor of ScienceWatch) – reviewed the activities and impacts of the reform experiment to date.

Soumya Saxena

I recently visited a passport agent’s office in India. This agent also ran a travel agency from the same office and had tourism posters of various countries and other states in India pasted on its walls. I was browsing through these posters when one poster took me by surprise. It showed a highly decorated public bus in bright colors and below it was written:

The land of various colours: Pakistan

The photo above shows typical decorative art done on a Pakistani truck.

For a moment I quite really didn’t understand what I saw. This is because it was something I had never seen before. My utter surprise was not to end here as I saw another poster with an image of Gautam Buddha (in Gandhara art form) and again written below the image were the words:

The land of various colours: Pakistan

Gautam Buddha and Pakistan? For a moment I was in a fix again, and then I realized that Takshashila (Taxila) is part of Pakistan.