ARCHITECTURE (AN ARTIST's BAD DREAM)
AN ARTIST'S BAD DREAM
By: NASSER YOUSAF
After brooding for years, some four years ago I finally decided to bid adieu to Peshawar for good. It wasn't an easy decision, but a score of fateful events helped me take the long due step, with an unthought of alacrity. The city of my birth was under a relentless stranglehold of repressive check posts with no sign of any reprieve. To make it all that difficult for someone with my share of sensitivities, the people of Peshawar then, as now, appeared to have submitted to their fate without as much as a whimper, or a word of protest.
The ongoing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project wasn't one of the reasons compelling my exodus lock, stock and barrel. It was then in a nebulous stage with little hope of it seeing the light of the day due to scores of technical complications and a looming financial crunch.
In due course, however, all those bottlenecks were swept aside as with a magic wand and the project was launched with a lot of fanfare. The nearly 27 kilometres long stretch of bus route, consisting of tunnels and flyover, was projected to be completed in a record time of 180 days, or by the 18th day of April, 2018. Appallingly ambitious as the target was considered to be by some of the right-thinking people, the job has not been completed to date and in fact may take many more months.
Undoubtedly, the project will one day be completed as work on it is proceeding apace. I found this out during my frequent visits to Peshawar that my existential constraints force me keep undertaking. Unforseen delays in a work of such gargantuan magnitude in a developing country cannot be ruled out. The ever rising cost, earlier not taken into account, is not, or ought not to be, a matter of too big a concern either. What, however, is a matter of utmost concern is the eternal loss to the topography of Peshawar which has been torn apart and mutilated with an unexplained violence. All this, let's have no doubt, with absolute impunity!
With very few landmarks and little of the flora of olden times left, Peshawar wasn't our Garden of Eden, immediately before work on BRT began. But the old city, its now largely barricaded cantonment and the sprawling University Road still retained some of the scent and flavours of the years gone by. After it becomes operational, the few sensitive and caring people left in Peshawar, will find out to what extent had BRT disfigured the landscape and skyline of their city.
On a cloudy day, the lilac minarets of the Sunehri Mosque will present a stupendous panoramic view, and the green belt and treeline in front of the old marvel of architecture called Islamia College would refresh one's weary state of mind. Such rare sights offered by the smog-laden city of Peshawar have been eaten up by BRT. The old Peshawar Club Road and part of Khyber Road together with the fabled Khyber Bazaar are some of the other casualties. In fact, the real damage, rather destruction, starts right from the starting point of Bala Hissar Fort and then it keeps ploughing right through the entire insides of Peshawar pausing only briefly at where the contours of the runway come into sight at Tehkal. This said stretch is one greater mass of a flyover, in the shape of a roller coaster ride, that will keep hanging, in a state of suspension, on Peshawar for until the end of Time.
In fact, the miles-long flyover is like a chain that has been inextricably put around the neck, hands and feet of Peshawar, permanently crippling its movement, after the announcement of a sentence of life imprisonment. 'Is this a punishment for an unmitigated Biblical sin inflicted on the people of Peshawar,' one keeps wondering while assessing the scope of destruction.
Why couldn't we foresee all this, whither all those hundreds of engineers, architects and landscapers passed out from the many engineering universities in KP? Why didn't even one of them raise a finger at this architectural catastrophe of our times? If nothing else, BRT provides us some food for thought as to why our universities could not produce men, and women, with a better sense of imagination?
One has to admit that there is an acute poverty of artistic and aesthetic minds in KP. Had this not been so, BRT would not have passed through its first phase. BRT, with its faulty design and its resultant ramifications, is an artist's bad dream, but then our land does not seem to have given birth to that kind of an artist.
focusonfrontier.blogspot.com
)
By: NASSER YOUSAF
After brooding for years, some four years ago I finally decided to bid adieu to Peshawar for good. It wasn't an easy decision, but a score of fateful events helped me take the long due step, with an unthought of alacrity. The city of my birth was under a relentless stranglehold of repressive check posts with no sign of any reprieve. To make it all that difficult for someone with my share of sensitivities, the people of Peshawar then, as now, appeared to have submitted to their fate without as much as a whimper, or a word of protest.
The ongoing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project wasn't one of the reasons compelling my exodus lock, stock and barrel. It was then in a nebulous stage with little hope of it seeing the light of the day due to scores of technical complications and a looming financial crunch.
In due course, however, all those bottlenecks were swept aside as with a magic wand and the project was launched with a lot of fanfare. The nearly 27 kilometres long stretch of bus route, consisting of tunnels and flyover, was projected to be completed in a record time of 180 days, or by the 18th day of April, 2018. Appallingly ambitious as the target was considered to be by some of the right-thinking people, the job has not been completed to date and in fact may take many more months.
Undoubtedly, the project will one day be completed as work on it is proceeding apace. I found this out during my frequent visits to Peshawar that my existential constraints force me keep undertaking. Unforseen delays in a work of such gargantuan magnitude in a developing country cannot be ruled out. The ever rising cost, earlier not taken into account, is not, or ought not to be, a matter of too big a concern either. What, however, is a matter of utmost concern is the eternal loss to the topography of Peshawar which has been torn apart and mutilated with an unexplained violence. All this, let's have no doubt, with absolute impunity!
With very few landmarks and little of the flora of olden times left, Peshawar wasn't our Garden of Eden, immediately before work on BRT began. But the old city, its now largely barricaded cantonment and the sprawling University Road still retained some of the scent and flavours of the years gone by. After it becomes operational, the few sensitive and caring people left in Peshawar, will find out to what extent had BRT disfigured the landscape and skyline of their city.
On a cloudy day, the lilac minarets of the Sunehri Mosque will present a stupendous panoramic view, and the green belt and treeline in front of the old marvel of architecture called Islamia College would refresh one's weary state of mind. Such rare sights offered by the smog-laden city of Peshawar have been eaten up by BRT. The old Peshawar Club Road and part of Khyber Road together with the fabled Khyber Bazaar are some of the other casualties. In fact, the real damage, rather destruction, starts right from the starting point of Bala Hissar Fort and then it keeps ploughing right through the entire insides of Peshawar pausing only briefly at where the contours of the runway come into sight at Tehkal. This said stretch is one greater mass of a flyover, in the shape of a roller coaster ride, that will keep hanging, in a state of suspension, on Peshawar for until the end of Time.
In fact, the miles-long flyover is like a chain that has been inextricably put around the neck, hands and feet of Peshawar, permanently crippling its movement, after the announcement of a sentence of life imprisonment. 'Is this a punishment for an unmitigated Biblical sin inflicted on the people of Peshawar,' one keeps wondering while assessing the scope of destruction.
Why couldn't we foresee all this, whither all those hundreds of engineers, architects and landscapers passed out from the many engineering universities in KP? Why didn't even one of them raise a finger at this architectural catastrophe of our times? If nothing else, BRT provides us some food for thought as to why our universities could not produce men, and women, with a better sense of imagination?
One has to admit that there is an acute poverty of artistic and aesthetic minds in KP. Had this not been so, BRT would not have passed through its first phase. BRT, with its faulty design and its resultant ramifications, is an artist's bad dream, but then our land does not seem to have given birth to that kind of an artist.
focusonfrontier.blogspot.com
)
posted by Nasser Yousaf @ 22:11
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