Owais Mughal and Adil Najam

Not all world records are created equal.

Being in the Guinness Book of World Records is as often a sign of being just weird as of having done something truly of import. Having the world’s longest nails or being the world’s fattest person is intriguing but not really consequential.

Sometimes, however, the record created is truly consequential. On July 15, 2009, one just truly consequential record was created when a team of 300 volunteers in Pakistan planted 5,41,176 mangrove tree saplings in the back waters of Arabian Sea near Keti Bandar.

This is consequential not because it is a ‘world record’ but because it is truly important for the world. In the midst of environmental degradation and rising sea levels the coastal Mangroves in Pakistan are natures defense against all sorts of environmental calamities, and this defense has been progressively disappearing. Bolstering the Mangroves can make a real difference not only to Pakistan’s environment, but to the world’s.

Owais Mughal

A day and night long monsoon rains have left 28 people (later updated to 33+) dead in Karachi and other areas of Southern Pakistan and washed away infrastructure, including at least two bridges.

170mm rain has been recorded in the past 24 hours. Atleast one newspaper is claiming it to be the record rainfall in 30 years (I am unable to verify the claim). Anyways, as always what was supposed to be blessing of nature has once again became bad news. Electricity supply across the city lies in shatters as circuit breakers started tripping with first drops of rain. Atleast two bridges in Karachi have washed away and several homes lost their roofs and walls besides the loss of 28 precious lives.

Agha Waseem Ahmed and Zubair Shafi Ghauri

For a long while I kept listening to terminologies like Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Pre Indus, Mature Harrapan civilizations and so on. Though the subject was very interesting for a layman like me but I never thought of listening to such eccentric jargon when we planned to visit Lakhan Jo Daro and met Pof. Dr. Ghulam Mustafa Shar of Archaeology Department, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur.

Lakhan-jo-Daro is a Sindhi word and it means The Hill of Lakhan in English and ‘Lakhan ka Teela’ in Urdu. Going by the same nomenclauture you can also guess what the famous site Mohen-jo-Daro means.

Few months back news surfaced in international media about an ancient archeological find near Sukkur. Just in days “Lakhan Jo Daro” was a common word. Everybody was chanting “LJD” and its importance in the Archeological arena.