Adil Najam

The enemy struck again. Killing Muslims in Lahore and then in Karachi.

Tamashbeen

I usually do not hold politicians in much esteem. But I have found new found respect for a number of them in this video. Specially because the journalist who was trying to be ever so clever comes out looking quite the monkey. He wanted a Bandar ka Tamasha, and he comes out looking like the biggest Bandar himself.

Adil Najam

This installment of excerpts from K.K. Aziz’s The Coffee House of Lahore (read book review by Raza Rumi, here) presents a portion of his profile of the Arab Hotel, Lahore. An institution of old Lahore, now long gone. A fascinating glimpse into the Lahore that was. Another fascinating description of Lahore’s hostelleries is provided by A. Hamid in this fascinating account. For ease of reading, as before, we will not indent the selected excerpt as quoted text; everything beyond these lines is in K.K. Aziz’s words (as are the two paragraphs above).

From K.K. Aziz’s The Coffee House of Lahore (pages 15-16):

No description of the cultural life of Lahore can be complete without mentioning the Arab Hotel. Once the old-fashioned baithaks (sitting rooms of the orient) had gone out f use, the literati wanted a pace where they could meet, eat and talk. For those ‘orientalists’ of the 1920s the Mall was too Westernized, distant and costly. By chance they started patronizing a small, unclean restaurant on Railway Road, opposite the gate of the Islamia College. A clean-shaven but dirty Arab from Kuwait, known as Bhai Aboud, ran the shop and was happy to serve kebabs and tea to his intelligentsia even on doubtful credit.