Thanks to Taimur on Twitter, I found this portrait of Mevlana Rumi:

Today, a magical photographer and a brave journalist Iason Athanasiadis, wrote to me after reading some of my comments in NYT. This is such a small world after all. Iason has also lived in Pakistan and some of his beautiful pictures can be found here (I am posting an image from Pakistan below from his collection). What a treasure it is. I am so grateful that Iason got in touch..

Here is another one from Iran – absolutely stunning… (more…)

Pakistan Taliban commander Hakimullah Mehsud is seen with his arm around Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud during a news conference in South Waziristan (read more here courtesy this site)

Fatehpur Sikri – March 16, 2009, originally uploaded by Jahane Rumi.

I was in Fatehpur Sikri a week ago. I love going there again and again. The place is calm and represents architecture that can be easily described as frozen music.
This entrance is close to the shrine of the Sufi saint Salim Chishty – there are countless graves of Mughal era – mostly of the disciples of the great Saint whose best known follower was Emperor Akbar.
This was a spring afternoon and therefore an appropriate time to visit the place. But I am not happy with my visit. it was too short.
I will return.

Two pictures with captions tell many stories

I Breaking the Fast

A lone man eats in a soup kitchen set up for Ramadan outside a public housing project in Paris. Source

II Desecration
A damaged portrait of Jesus Christ hangs on the wall of a demolished home after an anti- Christian mob attacked it in Barakhama village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. (more…)

With legendary artist S.M. Sultan as his mentor, Anadi Kumar Boiragi from Jessore attended Khulna Art College in the late ’80s, before enrolling at the Oriental Department at Charukala in Dhaka to further his artistic education. (more…)

I took this photo at a Bihari camp in Dhaka. Thousands of ‘Pakistanis’ are stranded in Bangaldesh since 1971 and both the states refuse to acknowlegde their existence. Hence, a few generations have been born in the refugee ghettos who live in sub-human conditions.

I was extremely happy to read this report in the NEWS today that is a little ray of hope:

BD court gives stranded Pakistanis citizenship right

DHAKA: Bangladesh’s High Court ruled on Sunday that some 200,000 Urdu-speaking refugees have the right to be Bangladeshi citizens, a lawyer and a news report said.

Rafiqul Islam Mian, the counsel of a group of refugees, said the court made it clear that they also have the right to cast their votes in upcoming polls, expected to be held in December. “The refugees who were minors in 1971 or born after the independence of Bangladesh are citizens of Bangladesh,” the court said in its ruling. (more…)

KM and I have known each other for ages. There were days when we were at school and the height of excitement of pre-globalized Lahore was visiting friends. So we would plan our visits and then sit for hours and talk. Random, intelligent and human stuff.

And, then our lives expanded so to speak when we arrived in London as undergraduate students, lost and a little disoriented in a college with thousands of students. I remember that we watched “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” together and few other alternative films. KM was a little shocked at the Kundera’s hedonism. There was one that KM did not find too exciting. Perhaps it was Greenway’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover“. Of course we were growing up and finding our little paths and dealing with our demons and gods. (more…)

Bordering between abstract and socio-political, Shaheen Sultan Dhanji’s photography, painting and writings are at once striking to readership.  Her art transforms the humble into amazing objects of desire.

Sultan’s  large scale of black and white photographs are at once contemporary, mingled with socio-political messages. Themes of war, poverty, women and sanitation, globalisation and various pressing subjects are provocatively captured on film. She has had some of her works exhibited in Ottawa and Toronto Canada.

Luminous yet subtle abstract and figurative paintings reveal a fusion cultural influences, and experiences endured in  Sultan’s journey in assmililating between life in Africa and North America.

Her art punctuates and pierces a wave of questions of human dignity, colossal loss of wars, life of a courtesan and major other social themes.  Sultan is senstive to light and colour. Her work can be calssified with using strong oil base, and lots of blues, yellows, red and burnt orange.

Apart from visual art, Sultan is a writer for several newspaper. Her subjects include politics, literature, poetry and eastern philosophy. She does not shy away in dialoguing concerns facing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the genocides in Congo. A constant worker, Sultan is convinced that tenacity and perserverance are the deepest, firmest pillars to create the enigma out there.

JR is grateful that Dhanji has shared the images of her two recent paintings that are shown above. The write up has been adapted from a review of her works.

The piece on the left has been described as “one of the oldest, rarest and most beautiful works of art from the ancient world.”

Described by Sotheby’s as diminutive in size, but monumental in conception, The Guennol Lioness was created around 5,000 years ago — around the same time as the first known use of the wheel — in the region of ancient Mesopotamia.

“This storied figure, in its brilliant combination of an animal form and human pose, has captured the imagination of academics and the public since ..the late 1940s,” …

The figure depicts a standing lioness looking over her left shoulder, her paws clenched in front of her muscular chest.

Experts have speculated that the figure may have played a role in some ancient belief system or mythology in Mesopotamia, which today lies in parts of modern day Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Image and text from here

On a long tiring flight, I was not too amused by another predictable rant on “Intimidation in Tehran” in the Time magazine.However, while browsing through, I could not help notice a stunning photograph taken by Olivia Arthur. (more…)

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140 dead and 538 injured – this little byline cuts through hearts and our future!

Yesterday was the day of images – moving pictures of excitement, energy, applause and then the saddest of recent tragedies. (more…)

I was introduced to this photo taken by Khanpride by Jami Sirhandi.

His plea was to stand up to the ‘development mafia’ and stop this vandalism.

Across Pakistan, rampant and unplanned urbanisation is taking its toll on green spaces and the trees. As it is our forest cover has denuded to alarming proportions; and now we are creating urban wastelands of dubious impact in the name of development.

The image on the right, again shows how trees have vanished and there has been no re-plantation despite the usual lip-service that is paid on these occasions.

Saving trees is not just a romantic notion: it is vital to our future and involves the right of our next generations to survive on this planet.

Stand up and be counted, as they say…

During my recent visit to Lahore, I met the Lahore artist, Iqbal Hussain. We had a nice, engaging chat, saw his recent works some displayed and some eating dust in the splendid Cooco’s Cafe located next to the Badshahi Mosque.

Iqbal’s matter-of-fact portraits have introduced the multiple nuances and shades of Lahore’s red-light area to the world. The women subjects are mostly from the area and he paints them with stark candour and brings out the depths of expressions and emotions in his lines and brush-strokes.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Iqbal is the establishment of Cooco’s Cafe that has turned into a cultural landmark and has also catalysed urban renewal in the neighbourhood.

Among his recent paintings is the portrait of actor-writer Feryal Ali Gauhar with her dog. This is an uncommon subject but the result is fabulous. I was quick to take a photo (see the image below).

Iqbal is a down-to-earth artist with no pretensions. The directness and simplicity of his work is a reflection of his personality. He braved the mainstream opposition to his paintings with a stoic attitude and has invested his time and soul into the growth of cooco’s as a fine place that offers much more than the old city delicacies and cuisine. I can’t wait to meet him again and see his new work.