This is not a eulogy or a tribute to Ahmed Faraz, for I never knew Faraz personally. Nor is it a comment on his poetry - I am not qualified to do that. It is just a memory of a few impersonal encounters with Faraz that came rushing to my mind when I heard of his death a week or ten days ago.

As students at Peshawar, we often saw Faraz on campus. He taught Urdu. (Poetry, I guess. What else?). He was a noted poet even then but, among the students on campus, he was equally known, if not more, for his bohemian lifestyle .

Peshawar University campus, built at the foot of the Khyber, was then 5 miles away from Peshawar city. It still is, but now you cannot tell where exactly the city ends and the university begins. Peshawar Sadar, in the cantonment area, was the happening part of the city. It was here that you found trendy cinemas and cafés, bookshops and upscale stores.

The Sadar was to Peshawar what the Mall Road was (or still is?) to Lahore. The Greens Hotel served Murree beer to its customers in a bar tucked away upstairs. (Prohibition came later, in 1972, when MMA’s version 1.0 came into power in the NWFP.) A few minutes down the road, the upscale Dean’s Hotel, even though it had cast off most of its colonial trappings, still retained its colonial architecture and continued to serve mulligatawny soup and caramel custard, and, of course, beer and other drinks, in a more formal setting.

In the evenings, the students would descend upon Sadar to watch movies, to gossip over a cup of tea in the cafés, and to just walk up and down the short stretches of the main Sadar Road and the Arbab Road, watching people. The Capital and Falak Sair were the two elite cinemas that showed English movies ; Silver Star and Café Alig were the two popular cafés; London Book Depot was the big bookshop; Bandbox were the drycleaners and Medicose were the chemists. Not far from these places, on the main Sadar Road, across the bus stop, was this little paan and cigarette shop, a khokha, which did brisk business.

I do not know if Faraz visited the Greens or the Dean’s but he often stopped by at the cigarette shop. He would come on his noisy motorbike (it was before he graduated to the white Volkswagen), stop in front of the shop, and, without switching off the engine or getting off the bike, buy his cigarettes and paan, and breeze away. The alacrity with which the vendor stepped out of his khokha to serve Faraz suggested that Faraz had a running account with the vendor or perhaps he was an ardent fan of the poet - or both.

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PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - Fifteen people including civilians were killed in northwestern Pakistan Wednesday in a raid involving helicopter gunships used by international troops in Afghanistan, security officials said.

“Four helicopter gunships from across the border carried out the raid,” a top security official told AFP.

“Reports from the area say 15 people including women and children were killed in the attack,” he said.A local official in South Waziristan tribal district claimed the helicopters dropped soldiers from the NATO-led force in Afghanistan (ISAF) in the border village of Jalal Khel and flew them back after the attack.

The official, Mowaz Khan, said the pre-dawn raid took place as residents were having their last meal before fasting as part of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.He said the foreign soldiers opened fire on the locals when they came out of their houses upon hearing the sound of helicopters.However, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said he was not aware of such an operation.He added that ISAF does not have a mandate to attack outside the borders of Afghanistan unless its troops come under fire from within Pakistan, in which case the force can respond with artillery.

Pakistan’s army confirmed there had been an attack.

“We confirm an attack was carried out in a border village and we are gathering details,” army spokesman Major Murad Khan told AFP.

Raids with helicopters or aircraft are extremely rare but US media recently reported that the United States was planning direct attacks on Pakistani soil, blaming Islamabad for failing to tackle militants based there.A recent series of missile strikes targeting rebels in Pakistan has been attributed to US-led coalition forces or CIA drones based in Afghanistan.Pakistan’s northwest has been wracked by violence since hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels fled there after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.US forces say the border area is being used as a launch pad for attacks on coalition troops.There are about 70,000 international forces deployed under NATO and a separate US-led coalition in Afghanistan in an effort to help local forces repel the Islamic rebels.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A surge of violence continued unabated in Pakistan’s tribal border region Thursday, with a car bomb blasting a bus filled with Pakistani police and government workers off a bridge and killing eight people aboard.More than 200 people have died in Taliban bombings and clashes since longtime U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf quit as president and triggered a power struggle that caused the country’s ruling coalition to collapse.

U.S. officials have been pressing for more action against insurgent strongholds in Pakistan’s wild border region.Pakistan’s military insists it is doing what it can to contain militants and prevent them from moving against NATO and Afghan troops on the other side of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Pakistan’s army chief secretly met the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top American commanders Tuesday on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean to talk about what else could be done.The meeting was the latest of several between Adm. Mike Mullen and General Ashfaq Kayani.

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04/08/08  PESHAWAR: At least 14 people have been killed in flooding and rains in different parts of Frontier whereas provincial government has called army after severe flooding and rains throughout the province.

Three more bodies have been recovered from the rainstorm drain in Tekhta Baig area of tehsil Jamrood of Khyber Agency.

There is low flooding in River Chinnab at Khanki and Qadirabad and River Ravi at Biluki in Punjab and River Indus at Guddu.

The situation in NWFP is gradually slipping away from the control of government in the face of mounting militant’s attacks in the province and FATA. Amid the fears that the Peshawar too could fall to the militants, authorities have launched an operation in the neighboring Khyber Agency against a militant organization Lashkar-e-Islam (LI), which had established its sway over the agency and was also using it as a launching pad to attack Peshawar.

The photo above shows tanks parked in a Government installation at Hayatabad, Peshawar. Photo  by Riaz Anjum at APP. The operation launched against the LI signifies a turning point in the coalition government policy towards FATA and NWFP, initially aimed at pacifying the troubled areas through dialogue despite intense US and NATO pressure.

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Khyber Safri steam train -  set up by British Raj  in 1925 unleashed a lasting fun,  immense joy, excitement and entertainment to the local as well as foreign tourists from different countries across the world during their recent sojourn from Peshawar to the foothills of Hindu Kush and the Afghan border. The whistle blows, the iron wheels creak and the Khyber Pass steam train lumbers slowly and gradually forward.

On the platform, those passengers who have not yet boarded, giggle nervously and with great excitement hurried towards the open doors.It was a great fun for everyone to have trip of the protracted thrill andunending excitement on the old train that whistles again - eager to be on its way·and with black smoke emitting fast, begins its 30 miles journey from Peshawar, towards the foothills of the Hindu Kush and the Afghan border. 

The Khyber railway opened in 1925 is a miracle of engineering art as was informed by a man Zahoor Durrani, Managing Director of Sehrai Travels, who spent almost 35 years to keep up the thrill with unabated will.Built to carry troops defending the British Raj, it took 40 years to build and cost Britain over two million pounds at that time. The rising and falling track passes through more than 30 tunnels, over 90 bridges and climbs over 2000 feet in 21 miles.

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The Islamia College, founded in 1913, with the object of imparting knowledge of modern sciences, along with a thorough grounding in the precepts and the principles of Islam to the youth of the North West Frontiers of this country, has grown from strength to strength during its existence of a little less then a century. The college prepares students in all science subjects and the humanities for the Intermediate Examinations of the Peshawar Board of Secondary Education and for the Degree examinations of the University of Peshawar.

In spite of the fact that now Degree colleges have been setup at all district headquarters and Intermediate College practically in all Tehsils of the former N.W.F.Province, there is a great scramble for admission to this College. But due to lack of facilities nearly as many application are turned down as number of parents from the tribal areas and the settled districts want their sons and wards to be educated here even if there is a College nearer home, as they look upon this institution with a sense of belonging. Its past traditions and present achievements make it easily the best educational institution in the country. Essentially the Islamia College is a residential college with 75% of its students and nearly the whole staff living on the campus like a coterie of scholars seeking and imparting knowledge.

Brief History Of Islamia College:-

When the new province of NWFP was formed in 1901 after its separation from Punjab, there were three types of schools in the province. Those maintained by endowments and gifts, those established and run privately, but aided by the Government, and those maintained by the Government through local boards.
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Reference: http://www.ummat.com.pk

Also known as Pakhto, Afghan, Pathani, Pushto, Pashtu, Pushtu, Paxto, and Pukhto) is the language of the Pashtun (Pathans, ethnic Afghans) who inhabit Afghanistan and Western parts of Pakistan, especially in N.W.F.P. Pashto is divided into plenty of dialects, of which southern, western and northern groups are the widest.

Written in a modified Perso-Arabic alphabet, Pashto shows strong Sanskrit influence, some Arabic and Persian loanwords, and numerous archaic Sanskrit features. It is written in the Arabic script, but the alphabet contains a number of original characters not to be found in either Persian or Arabic.

The term “Pashto” actually refers to the more important of the two dialects, the so-called soft, standardized, modern dialect of Afghanistan and developed parts of North-Western parts of Pakistan. The “Pakhto” dialect which is spoken in the far eastern parts of Afghanistan and far western parts of Pakistan has the “hard” kh and gh sounds. The language in Pakistan is some what influenced by Urdu script and has heavily borrowed Urdu words. While in Afghanistan the language is significantly influenced by Persian but the script remains in far purer form. Since majority of the Pashtuns are Muslims, the language has a strong presence of Arabic and Quranic vocabulary.

Read more about Pushto at http://www.pashto.org