well said mariam :) osman gives himself too little credit. what he doesn't tell you is the enormous praise he gets from his editors and how people (i.e big bad companies, writers, other editors) are lining up to get him to work with them!




can't belive it's been a year! hope the whole gang is well. dont get to hear from anyone much except a few of them.

How's about another book by the bol group? haha.

been long

heyy everyone....
how's it going....its been real long since we'v heard form each other....really hope all of you are doing good and i hope things are not too bad at everyone's end with whts been going on in the country since yesterday....and hope to hear from you guys soon...

tc
ciao

Voices and Visions : Oxford University Press

Daily Times : "OUP launches 100-rupee book full of young talent" By Fahad Faruqui

Voices and Visions

Congratulations to Sidra and Osman :) It was wonderful to see both of you on the front page ! :)

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/images/images2.htm

We missed you guys, every single one of you at the ceremony. Will be emailing pictures soon. KESC has not been too kind today. :)

Launch Ceremony

Heyyyy everyone.....how's it going??

i guess all of you have received invitations for the ceremony on the 8th, i just wanted to know who's reading their story that day....because apparently OUP is under the impression that i gqave my consent to reading mine that day :S:s kinda daunting but anywayy.....just wanted to know who else will be doing it and if the lahoris and iram will be coming .....

correction

sorry people......hira said its the 'launch ceremony 'and Batul Ali sent an email regarding that..... :pp haven't received an email either :S

Lunch Ceremony

heyy everyone, how's it going???

i dunno if any of u know about this but hira zahid sent me a message this morning asking if i was going to the lunch ceremony......i haven't heard anything regarding a lunch thing......have any of you???

Yes, yes, Osman, you woke us up. :)

The reason why I'm here is : We need to select four people who would read their texts aloud. :) How about :

Sadaf, Umbreen,Hira , Gibran, Sana, Tooba, Misha, Sehba,Rayika Osman ,Sarah Iram, Sidra (hope they're all coming to Karachi) to do the reading aloud part? :)

Hope everyone is well!

BOL !?

For those of you who did not get this email...

I just received a note from Batul, (from the OUP) and I could see that some of the addresses were missing, so I am posting her email over here and forwarding it to your emails as well. I could not see Sidra, Sarah, Rayika and Osman's email, or maybe you guys have some other email IDs. I'll be forwarding this note to at least you guys.

From : Batul.Ali@oup.com

Dear All

It would be appreciated if you could send me the title of your short story/poem, along with the first three lines of the text, written for ‘Women in Pakistan ’ project under the auspices of the Heinrich Boll Foundation (Bol group) in 2007. I need the information to compile a list of entries along with the writers’ names.

An early response is solicited.

Thank you,
Batul Ali
Senior Editor
Education Division
Oxford University Press Plot No. 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi-74900, Pakistan . Tel No: (92-21) 111 OXFORD or (111 693 673) Fax No: (92-21) 5055071, 5055072
General Email: ouppak@theoffice.net Website: http://www.oup.com.pk

For those who have not checked their emails: Eersa's Message

Oxford university press has received only 18 entries listed below (prose and poetry out of 20).

Please send me the following as soon as possible:

Names of writer against the title

1. A complete list of writers alongside the titles of their entries. There seems to be some confusion about who wrote which entry. For example, two entries are by the name of Sadaf Halai which is not possible. The names of the writers’ of 5 entries are missing. I have highlighted these in red.
2. Background information on the writers if immediately available. It would be nice to add this but only if readily available.



List of entries received:

1. Admiral Superstar and Captain Fabulous by Rayika Choudri.
2. Bol and Bra: Writer's name missing.
3. My Mother, Me and My Daughter by Sana Kazi
4. Through the years...by Iram Qureshi
5. Laughter of the Living by Sadaf Halai
6. On my Seventieth Birthday by Sadaf Halai
7. Fantasies by Sehba Mohammad
8. Meditations of a Hari by Jibran Khan
9. Karachi Rain by S. Mariam Humayun
10. My First Love by Mira Sethi
11. Future. Writer's name missing.
12. Love Heals. Writer's name missing.
13. The Blue Eyed, Yellow Beaked, Pink Parrot. Writer's name missing.
14. Green Thumbs and an Ache in the Heart by Sidrah Haque
15. Shikari by Sahar Rizvi
16. My Aspirations: The Dream of the Crisp White Shirt by Saadia Zahra Gardezi
17. Where to Begin by Umbreen Butt
18. Speak. Writer’s name missing.



Kind regards
Eersa

NCA Thesis Show 2008

I had been very busy in helping out our senior batch and college administration with the fine arts thesis show. This time there has been a lot of work done on preparing and managing the thesis show, and i have played a very active part in that. The juries ended today and the initial results were quite good , plenty of distinctions and honours for everyone , well almost, but no one failed.
I would proudly invite the Lahore BOL people to visit the show , which is opening on the 12th and will go on till the 18th of January. Anyone who is interested to see the show can inform me and i will be glad to welcome you all and show you this relatively massive art exhibition.(or you could visit it yourselves , whichever way suites you). Its being held at the Zahoor ul Ikhlaq gallery of the NCA as well as various studios within the NCA which have been converted into gallery spaces (you know where the NCA is, right?). This is one of the most extensively organized thesis shows in the history of the institution, and I am honoured to have been a part of it. Come and experiene it yourself.

Three Things:

1. Have the edited texts already been forwarded to the OUP or do we need to do that ourselves?
2. Has anyone told the OUP that they are handling the cover? I don't have concerned person's email, so anyone who does, (the OUP people) please do forward the message.
3. Will the people who did not attend the workshop have any say in this? Are they aware of the deadlines to submit their work? (Mira Sethi, or Sahar Rizvi and others?)

Let me set the record straight

Shared this email with friends abroad after watching a few FOX News features online. Thought the record should be set straight by someone on the inside....

Let me set the record straight.

Pakistan has become a social circus...or maybe, a socialist circus. People's Party leader Benazir Bhutto was shot dead two nights ago, officially becoming a shahid like her corrupt father: a martyr dying in the name of freedom. President Bush offered condolences even before our Permanent President Musharraf officially declared three days of mourning. The news must have the Cowboy quite hard: who could America choose as Pakistan's next puppet Prime Minister?

For an entire night, news of Benazir's death was the most repeated feature on CNN, BBC, Sky and Fox News. The western media had blown her up in death to be larger than life: the future of democracy, the first woman prime minister in a Muslim country, savior of Pakistan...nonsense. Her greatest feat when she was in office was emptying national coffers while maintaining the appearance of (Western educated) legitimacy.

But then again, these people did not live in Pakistan in the 90's. They never saw men set themselves on fire in the marketplace out of frustration. They did not know that 11-year-old Salamat Masih was thrown in jail for blasphemy. They forgot that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Faisalabad shot himself in the head out of protest. The blood has dried on our memories, not theirs. We did not enjoy the real good, feel good 90's. Our politics ping-ponged between two corrupt regimes (Nawaz Sharif's outright Wahabist administration, and Benazir's supposedly liberal one) while our economy plummeted, unemployment peaked and the gap between the rich and poor was set in stone.

The disparity still exists today, hence the frustration that compelled crowds of oung men to burn banks, buses, cars and even hospitals alongside the party processions that took over the streets of Karachi the night of Bhutto's death. Cars were stolen at gun point and set alight, wallets and mobiles were stolen, shops were looted. Two men burned to death in a KFC employing deaf workers: their extra crispy
bodies were buried the next day. Two more locked themselves in the cold storage, and froze to death. The violence spilled out of the city and into small villages: Thatta and Dadu, names we never heard before boasted of burnt police stations. Meanwhile, the police were no where to be seen. This was the real face of modern Pakistan.

Even under Benazir's "modern" government of the 90's, the women newscasters on the state run PTV (the only channel available locally then) were still required to cover their heads. There was no such thing as live reporting, and the news was strictly censored before it aired at six every evening. The cops still demanded to see marriage certificates if men and women were pulled over late at night: failure
to produce one, or sufficient bribe money, could land both indefinitely in jail, where Akhter Javed had chili peppers and kerosene oil put up his ass in 1996 and set on fire. He was buried the same year as Mir Murtaza Bhutto: Parliamentarian and critic of his sister's government, who was "accidentally" shot pointblank in a
"random" shootout when over seventy policemen gathered outside his Karachi residence.

At least Benazir allowed long-haired men to sing rock songs on national television, as long they did not criticize the government, like the rock group Junoon did with "Ehtesaab" (Accountability), eventually leading to them being banned. And with over a billion dollars stolen from the national treasury, who was keeping count
anyways? Where was the money being invested, when even the main cities could not boast of free schooling, 24 hours electricity and decent roads? And I thought modernization meant developing Education and Infrastructure to encourage the exchange of ideas and thereby create an informed public.

Asif Ali Zardari, known as Mr. 10% for his blatant acceptance of bribes, became Mr. 15% by the time BB was dismissed from office for the second time…and no, these figures did not indicate his annual income tax. In 2003, both husband and wife were convicted of laundering $11 million by a Swiss Court, and given jail sentences
along with a heavy-duty fine. With a little help from friends in the right places, the conviction was overturned four months later by a higher court.

And now, Benazir was back to spread "democracy" in Pakistan, by brokering a power sharing deal with a military dictator and the American government, who would effectively hand pick our next "democratically elected" Prime minister in the upcoming January elections. Benazir was the perfect neo-con pinup: modern, liberal,
western educated and eager to access her frozen bank accounts in Pakistan…never mind the fact that hers was one of three governments in the world to officially recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government (Saudi Arabia and UAE were the other two).

It may be these very Islamic hardliner forces that are responsible for her death. But who is to know for sure, when the night of the blast, Liaquat Bagh was hosed down clean by firefighters, forensic evidence and all? And why did the Interior Minister Brigadier Javed Cheema insist that Benazir was killed by a skull fracture by her head hitting the lever on the sunroof of her car, when even BB's right hand woman (and PPP spokesperson) Sherry Rehman publicly announced that Benazir
was shot in the neck and the head?

Even before Permanent President Musharraf declared Emergency, Pakistan was hit hard by a strong wave of suicide bombings. On November 24th, over a month after the first attempt on Benazir's procession, both a bus carrying ISI employees close to GHQ (General Head quarters) and a military checkpoint in Rawalpindi were hit by suicide bombers, making us all question who was taking care of our security, when even the
nation's Secret Services and Defense were not immune.

Were the suicide bombings politically motivated to bring on The Emergency, and further delay elections? Or were they executed by extremists, in retribution for the army carpet-bombing entire districts in Wana and Waziristan (men, women, children and all) on American orders? Or was it an inside job? After all, the army does
have a history of being linked with Islamist movements, and even years after the war in Afghanistan ended, the ISI foiled plans by defecting military officers to overthrow the government and establish an Islamic caliphate (1995). The same questions will remain unanswered for Benazir Bhutto's death.

The next afternoon she was laid to rest next to her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, one of the largest feudal landowners in Sindh, who rose to power on the Socialist slogan, "Roti, kapraa, makkan" (food, clothing and shelter). The promises were never delivered, nor did his land ever become public property.

My friends' parents who grew up in Karachi loved Daddy Bhutto for his charismatic speeches and Western ways: he loved booze, jazz and women. My Ahmedi family from the NWFP hates him: they went into hiding for an entire year when he declared their Islamic sect illegal, thereby sanctioning the Wahabist uprising that cost hundreds of Ahmedi's their lives. Bhutto's legacy remains today: when signing the National
Identity Card form, citizens are required to declare that Ahmedi's and Qadianee's are non-Muslims and to follow either sect is illegal.

At Ghari Khuda Buksh, Benazir's was not the minimal Islamic funeral, where the dead are wrapped in white cotton and placed in the earth. Her body was placed in an ornate mausoleum: as opulent in death as in life. Her will be read out publicly later today: her son Belawal, 19, will be named the heir to People's Party, just as she inherited her father's party by default. Who inherits the money stolen from the
people of Pakistan, well, that remains strictly a family matter.