Every time I decide that winter has ended, it rains and makes the weather chilly again. One keeps putting away warm clothes and then taking them out again. This underlines Islamabad's weather these days, sometimes very hot and at other times wet and chilly.
The first event was the presentation of a stage play Bulha by Ajoka theatre group under the direction of Madeeha Gauhar. Ajoka theatre group is known for espousing serious and political theatre in Pakistan. It was a three hour play written by Shahid Nadeem and performed at the Islamabad Club Auditorium. The story revolves around the life of Bulleh Shah (1680-1758) and is a tribute to the Punjabi mystic poet whose works are enjoying tremendous popularity these days.
Ms Jo Bakowski, director of the British Council, introducing the play observed that Bulleh Shah's message of love for humanity was very much needed in 'this troubled world.'
A consortium of British universities, led by the British Alumni Association, had sponsored the play to raise funds for girls' education in the earthquake affected areas.
It represented Bulleh Shah's profound struggle in search of divine wisdom which led him to prove the futility of conflicts caused by the vested clergy and rich classes.
What the playwright conveyed through Bulleh Shah's poetry in the present context was that the power of religion lay in the generous gifts of beauty, benevolence charity, forbearance, grace, mercy, service, tolerance, which God Almighty had bestowed on mankind.
The play provided an answer to the misuse of sacred fatwa's (edicts) by opportunistic clerics in a scene where the Mullahs of Kasur refuse religious burial to Bulleh Shah though he understood the essence of religion better than many religious preachers of his time.
The play was very well presented in terms of production, acting, stage décor, props, lighting and music. The idea of having a rising all purpose stand to accommodate the Qazi (Iqbal Naqvi) to deliver his sermon and the Mufti (Farhan Ali) for reading out prosecution statements was simply brilliant.
Ziafat Arafat, as royal drummer, added a rhythmic beat to their brilliance. Sarfaraz Ansari played Bulha with ease and grace and Aslam Bukhari gave powerful characteristics of a wise man offering solace to troubled mankind.
There was an evening arranged for Parto Rohil- Mukhtar Ali Khan in real life- at the Islamabad Cultural Forum. He took his listeners on an ecstatic roller-coaster of human feelings.
Professor Ashfaq Saleem Mirza, who was elected president of the PIPFPD the same evening, introduced Parto Rohila as an inspired poet who did pioneering work in Doha writing and also produced a monumental translation work of Asadullah Khan Ghalib's Persian letters into Urdu.
Kishwar Naheed, who was in the chair, observed that the translation work had "a sparkling quality" and enticed one to read it. She said the translation caught the essence of Ghalib's Persian prose.
Parto Rohila read two Dohas and then reached down to his long poems, of which he read several verses.
His long poem Karaz sought to show how the deepest sensibilities turn soppy in the daily cycle of events. It narrated the story of a wounded bird the poet had nursed back to health and set free but it reappeared some time later holding a struggling butter fly in its beak. Parto Rohila read extensively from his translations of Ghalilb's Persian Letters.
"Retrospective to 2006" by Mansoor Rahi opened at the Nomad Gallery. Mansoor Rahi is an artist of national and international repute for his creative canvases in cubical expressionism with the mixture of Rayonistic activity and psychedelic play of forms and colours, Rahi's paintings not only crate a mood of innovation new forms of illusion of values but also open a vision of free expression with spontaneous use of brush strokes.
Rahi's present work, which starts in the USA, makes a changed vision of entering into classical realism from the non-evocative abstraction. The image of reviving life from lifeless rock reflects magical evocation of colour, structure and void, plus activity in recent canvas depicts softness of love, rhythmic flexibility of the human figure integrated with the hard world of rock forms, leading minds to venture into a new world of classical synthesis of composition. The independent iconographical lines in the transformed human figure, tension of psychedelic values creates a world of "Neo-Classical Romanticism" with massiveness of cubical volume.
After resurrect rock series Rahi evolves into Precisionist which seems closed to the nature of realism in Black and White drawing on canvas. The exquisite transformation of leading structure integrated with the Rock Forms creates a sensation of cubical massiveness of monumental volume.
Mansoor Rahi was born in 1939 in West Bengal. He graduated in Fine Art from the Government College of Arts and Crafts Dhaka, securing a First Division in 1961. Further advanced research in Art from Japan, France and Germany.
His work has evolved through the following phases such as academic realism: cubical fractionise, analytic rayon's; organical period: cubical agonistic formalism, cubical expressionism, institutionistic expressionism, neo-socio-Realism, neo-cubical romanticism.
Images of his paintings are purely structural with formal bold forms of mainly Human Figures. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions from 1962 in many countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, Iran, Turkey, India, China, England, France, Germany and USA. He has organised art schools and art classes in Karachi, Peshawar, Abbottabad and Islamabad and given birth to a generation of Modern Vision artists.
He has established the concept of understanding of Modern Art in a wider range through regular TV programmes for six years on PTV.
He has introduced Pakistani painters abroad by taking group exhibitions and slide shows to London, Paris, Bonn, Godesberg, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Tokyo and New York.
Created prestigious impression of Pakistani painters abroad by reading papers at seminars, talking to art critics, press conferences and interviews on international TV channels. It was a busy week with acceleration in the number of cultural activities happening in the Capital.
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