Rangeen Rangoon

Steaming jungles, prison camps, leeches, people with straw hats who ate frogs

Wajahat Malik

I wonder how Shamshad Begum must have felt when they changed the name of Rangoon to Yangon and Burma to Myanmar. Imagine Shamshad begum crooning away "meray piya gaye Yangon, kia hai wahan say telephone," -- it just doesn’t sound right. I don’t think she would have been amused with the name change of Rangoon.

My fascination with Rangoon started when I was a little kid and my grandmother used to tell us adventure stories of a maverick Uncle who had run away to Rangoon from the hills of Mansehra when he was a teenager. He had fought in Second World War on a Burma front, had been held captive by the Japanese and later escaped to Rangoon where he fell in love with a Burmese woman, got married and settled there.

At that time, after hearing all these stories of steaming jungles, prison camps, leeches, people with straw hats who ate frogs etc, I wanted to grow old and run away to Rangoon as well.

And I think I am now old enough to run away to the city of my childhood dreams, a city that still has a magical resonance to its name. Rangoon for me is not only an exotic city but I feel it is still the weary vanguard of the bygone colonial times.

I feel that the weathered spirit of the olden world is still languishing in the crevices, ceilings and wooden teak latticed windows of its old colonial buildings, where the slow whirling fans in the high arched ceilings of hotel lobbies and verandas still disturb the thick humid and musty air of a tropical Rangoon.

I want to marvel at the architecture of these old buildings built during the British Times, I want to walk through its bazaars teeming with its rangeen Rangoon life. I want to breathe in its exotic soul ride in its rickshaws, drench myself in its down pours, romance a Burmese woman and perhaps look for my long lost relatives.

And I would also like to explore and stumble upon the grave of Bahadur Shah Zafar who died in exile in Rangoon and was buried in a spot that is still unknown to this day.

I want to visit Rangoon.

A pilgrimage to Benares

One of the oldest inhabited city of the world

Haroon Khalid

It is believed to be the oldest inhabited city of the world. Tradition has it that this place known as Varanasi today was first occupied sometime around the 12th century BCE. Varanasi is for Indians what Jerusalem is for the Semitic religions. It is the holiest city in India, revered by not only Hindus, but also Jain, Buddhists, Sikhs and several smaller sects.

It is not far from here that Gautama Buddha received enlightenment and started preaching. Every year thousands of his devotees converge to this place to search for traces of Lord Buddha himself. According to the Jain tradition three Jain Tirthankar, Suparshvanath, Shreyansnath and Parshva were born in this city. Tirthankar are the enlightened souls in Jainism and there are a total of 24 known Tirthankar. The fact that the 7th, 11th and 23rd Jain Tirthankar were born in this city makes it one of the holiest cities for the Jain.

Hindu mythology is full of stories about this city. It is one of the seven holiest cities in Hinduism, all of them known as the SaptaPuri. In the Rigveda, one of the earliest and holiest Hindu books Varanasi is known as Kashi, the city of enlightenment. This epithet is still used.

It is believed that Lord Shiva, the Hindu deity of destruction, founded this city.

Varanasi, also the Benares, of old is the city where the mystic poet Bhagat Kabir was born and lived. Kabir who lived in the 15th century is one of the most important poets of the Jogi movement. His poetic genius lies in the use of vernacular to express profound religious thoughts. Like Nanak and Bulleh Shah he talks about blurring the religious distinctions between Muslims and Hindus. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikh religion, also visited this holy city and collected the poetry of Bhagat Kabir from his devotees. This visit of Nanak to Benares makes it a holy city for the Sikhs as well.

With almost every living religion of India having a holy association with Benares, this city is a treasure for anthropologists who are interested in the history of religion and rituals, for even today all of these traditions thrive in this holiest Indian city.

The Tsar city of St Petersburg

Some time soon before capitalism completely takes over the remnants of revolution

Alefia T. Hussain

Like you, my yearning to go around the world, to escape, is insatiable. The more I see the more I want to explore. The world is boundless but not my journeys…

I often dream of a boundless journey -- to the Tsar city of St Petersburg… follow the trails of emperors and empresses, among them of Peter the Great, the city’s namesake, who founded the city in the 1700s. A visionary, he learned about city planning in Manchester and paid for European architects, artists and artisans to come and create his vision of a city. So, then, does St Petersburg feel like any western European city, like Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna… it can’t, it’s Russia. It mustn’t.

Will the opulence of the green and gold Winter Palace match that of any other in the world? Will it take years to see the art collection at the Hermitage Museum, really? Are the stately boulevards now relics of the communist era? Do the spirits of Lenin and Dostoevsky roam the prison cells of Peter and Paul’s fortress?

Winter snow, frozen River Neva, circus, opera, ballet and, of course, fur hats…

And, behind this classical façade, I imagine life, energy and chaos -- the grimness of suburbs and its artsy youngsters finding creativity and, on the other end, the tall, beautiful women in killer heels and all that bling and the tycoons flashing their petrodollars in glitzy restaurants and bars, tipsy after their rounds of vodka shots.

I yearn to go see, smell and sense St Petersburg next spring, next summer, some time soon, before the forces of capitalism completely take over the remnants of revolution and communism. But I fear I will lose my heart to this Russian city the moment I’ll step on its soil!

Rio de Janeiro -- so like us

Where reason follows emotion

Sarwat Ali

I would love to be in Rio de Janeiro, not because the Football World Cup was being held there (I have no taste for the game) but because opportunities may be thrown open for similarities and contrasts with my own country.

The passion that is vulgarly flashed during matches, the golds and greens  of the country kick the ball in fair or foul play strikes a chord with the emotional high wire acts of people in Pakistan.

Reason follows emotions -- this is what I love about the Brazilians and it is demonstrated in many ways other than the football pitches. See how it is flaunted on the beaches, the display of skin and the no hold barred glorification of it in the festival or the carnivals held frequently.

The prudery and the shame of being human turned into unabashed joy as we cherish and worship the most the human body either in raw or sublimated form.  It is not a peep through the murky shadows of nightclubs and bars but daylight gratification. The rules of do’s and don’ts are reversed.

So like us and so much unlike us.

The wide yawning gap between the have and the have-nots, the plush villas and the sprawling favelas, the police high handedness and the resilience of the people to survive are the icing on a society struggling to come to terms with democracy. The freedoms that are cherished but cannot be availed properly due to the foundation of democracy being leaky and creaky. Since the givens of democracy are missing like in our own country.

The fabulous wealth remains either untapped or exploited, the benefits not tricking down to those boys and girls wildly dancing on the beaches engrossed in the satisfaction of the moment with Christ looking down, blessing but not interfering like the patron saints of our cities.

Jerusalem and Peace

Alice and her dreams of Wonderland

Sarah Sikandar

I couldn’t care less about Jerusalem, or Israel, or Jews - thanks to an education ingrained with the concepts of evil Jews and non-existent Israel (it doesn’t exist for us because we can’t go there).

It would have never made to the top on/of my must-visit places list unless a friend hadn’t asked me to work on an application version of BBC’s famous Lonely Planet. I researched for days on Jerusalem and its surroundings. The city has been haunting me since then.

I blame my curiosity for all the money spent on books on Israel. Books, of course, are hardly any help for Alice and her dreams of Wonderland.

With time, this curiosity has only multiplied for two reasons.

Firstly, because of the impossibility of entering its territories legally with a green passport, although I have heard tales about Pakistanis entering without getting their passports stamped for brief trips. If possible, I would willingly take up the challenge. The stringent security for Muslims to enter the region makes it more tempting like a child for whom the only fascinating place in the house is where he isn’t allowed.

Secondly, the interesting reactions I always get from some friends and family over my ‘odd’ wish.

Why, they ask, would somebody want to go to Jerusalem? Going there or even wishing to do so, I am corrected, undermines the stance of Muslims all over, because by doing so you accept that Israel belongs to Jews. No Muslim with principles should desire to visit such a place. Say what?

Those who have visited Israel without any such baggage, especially its smaller, scarcely populated town cannot rave enough of its distinct beauty and non-commercialised tourism.  It is supposed to be the most clean and well-preserved part of the Middle East, or so I have heard.

So until I get a passport that is not green in colour, I continue to imagine myself in the streets of Jerusalem, sipping green tea after a detoxifying dip in the Dead Sea. Peace.

Tale of Budapest

A city of incredibly beautiful architecture and culture

Salman Rashid

In December 1984, I climbed, for the first time ever, the spiral stairs of Minar e Masumi in the old town of Sukkur to look out across a fascinating vista of crowded multi-storeyed houses and the Sindhu River rolling magnificently through them. On one bank sat Sukkur the newer city and on the other Rohri, steeped in early medieval history, oozing that hoariness.

Of a sudden, I thought of Budapest, the Hungarian capital. Now the towns of Buda and Pest are two distinct towns separated by the Danube River and yet connected with a number of bridges. Similarly our Sukkur and Rohri are discrete but still joined by the spans across the Sindhu. I thought this was an analogy and as much as I scoured my mind I could not think of any other twin cities like this that were divided by a river.

Three years later, in the summer of 1987, I met a Hungarian tourist in Gilgit. He said he had a document at home that told him that his family came from one of the several Magyar tribes. I knew from my childhood stamp collecting that Hungary was Magyar in its own language.

The man was on his way to Xinjiang whence the Hunnic Magyars emerged during the early Middle Ages to migrate west. He wished to seek distant kinsmen he had never known. I told the man that my ancestors also came from the same land and before I could say it, he said, he knew we were distant cousins.

The man was from Budapest and I could not resist telling him that we had a Budapest on the Sindhu. Before we departed, his stories had built an image of a river-bisected city. Back home, I read up on Budapest and discovered a city of incredibly beautiful architecture and culture and I knew I had to see it once in my life. What drew me ever more to Budapest was the fact that as the Sindhu forms an island between Sukkur and Rohri so does the Danube.

One day, I wish to be in Buda, climb a tall building to look out across the Danube to Pest and see what those two share with Sukkur and Rohri. So far, with several trips to Europe behind me, I have not made it to Budapest.

Paris in my bucket list

Rich in history and culture, Paris is more than the glamorous tourist destination it is thought to be

Momin Masood

The primary reason I would give for wanting to visit Paris is a vague, floating idea about the city’s status as one of the most sought-for tourist spots: basically, jumping on the bandwagon. Yes, I’m on that bandwagon too but I have more than the usual reasons for including Paris in my bucket list.

One of the pioneers of the progressive age, the capital of France is also  one of Europe’s central historic locations. You might have heard a few frequently thrown-around nouns: Eiffel Tower, Mona Lisa and maybe, just maybe, Arc de Triomphe. But nobody knows anything about Paris beyond these few staples, let alone the specifics of these things.

First the specifics.

Eiffel Tower is more than a monument for a romantic spotting. It was designed and erected to represent the industrial development in the European region at the time, as well as a celebration for the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

Mona Lisa, displayed at Louvre, is not the only piece of art that needs to be seen; the museum displays a diverse body of works that depict cultures including that of Egypt, Greece, Persia, Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Spain, Germany and Iraq (which would require an entirely separate article to be discussed).

The Arc de Triomphe, yes, is a magnificent structure with admirable architecture but it was essentially built to honour those who took part in the French Revolution along with the long-lasting Napoleonic Wars.(I happen to know substantial details).

And this is just the tip of the ice-berg.

While Paris is a city of glamour, luxury and splendour, its historical, cultural and political richness is what pulls me (and also glowing accounts of my maternal relatives’ time that they lived there). Ranging from its significance for being the centre of the French Revolution to its renowned excellence at fashion to generating one of the world’s largest GDP’s, Paris’ inclusion on my list is justified.

New York for dreamers

Who wouldn’t want a bite of the Big Apple

Anum Husain

The mere sound of the name ‘New York’ carries an instant spark, conjuring mixed emotions and images. With all the glamorous movies, shows, art and music set within this city, it seems like the birthplace of artistic and cultural brilliance.

Never stagnant, New York is always moving forward -- two steps ahead of the rest of the world, but always aligning with one’s racing dreams.

New York seems to be a melting pot of all cultures. It’s a hub of unusual people from all walks of life, and hence carries a unique element of not only diversity, but acceptance. It’s being able to walk from a Museum of Modern Art to a cinema a block away to catch the latest Tom Cruise movie, from a classic Broadway play to a Maroon 5 concert. It’s the aesthetic appreciation of art as a whole, without pretentious restrictions.

A bustling metropolis where my shooting stars would be the flickering lights from sky scrapers, New York makes you feel like there is really nothing that you can’t do. Each street so filled with desire; opportunity glistens in the air. Each avenue reflects one of the many stories of heroes who could make it here and hence, anywhere.

New York is the city for dreamers, and hence it’s where I fantasise myself to be. Despite the now clichéd icons of yellow cabs and lights that open up the night dazzling bright, it carries a charm that’ll truly never get old.

Not only would I like to visit it, but I’d like to someday call it my home. There is really no place in the world that can compare to the Big Apple.