First edition of IPL twenty-20 tournament finished six days ago. Eleven Pakistani players also took part in the tournament. Following was their performance. While Sohail Tanvir was declared the best bowler of the tournament, we didn’t see many match winning performances from Pakistani batsmen.
Living outside Pakistan, any subtle or obvious reference to Pakistan, naturally catches our attention and make us feel proud.
In US at least I’ve noticed that if you go to any large retail place, you are guaranteed to see at least two items related to Pakistan. One is a made in Pakistan ‘soccer ball’ and other are the music CDs of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Occasionally one also comes across textile items from Pakistan.
Balochistan has been blessed by an awe inspiring landscape and scenery. A man made means to explore all this expanse of beauty had been the Railways in this province (see Bolan and Trans-Baluchistan). I have deliberately used past tense in the previous sentence because one such railways in Balochistan is getting uprooted right now; at this very moment; as I am writing these lines.
This section of railways, when laid during the British Raj, was called the Zhob Valley Railway (ZVR). It has been out of service since 1986 but these days all the left over track is being uprooted and sold as scrap. This has provided me the motivation to write this post and re-visit the history of this once longest Narrow-Gauge Railways of the subcontinent.
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
