What’s in a name?

LAHORE: This is with reference to the debate in your pages on whether Gaddafi Stadium’s name should be changed or not. I agree that in his present mood, state of mind and dispensation, Colonel Qaddafi is hardly fit for our adulation and the name of the cricket stadium in Lahore looks a little odd given his recent less-than-charitable comments on Pakistan. His comments were also patently unfair since he has made bigger and more pathetic compromises with the West over the last two to three decades, and only to keep himself in power, as compared to what Pakistani governments have done. He is no angel, he only looks and acts like a delusional fool.

Yet I will say that we need to pause, and reflect and understand that names of places, roads and towns have a significance bigger than the persons on whom they were once fashioned. The Hindu Muslim riots of 1947 and our anger against it can’t be a justification for renaming Lahore; our disgust with colonial rule can’t justify changing Abottabad’s name or for that matter names like The Mall, Lawrence Gardens, Kinniard College, Gordon College and so on. All of these have been integral parts of our history as well as our present and that must be accepted.

As for Gaddafi Stadium, it reminds us of important moments of our own history, of the passion of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pan-Islamism and whatever a generation of Pakistanis felt then. Today, many of those ideas have collapsed, times changed and people’s memories are short-lived — but precisely for that we must not change names, for these names connect us with the passions of the past and help us understand who we are, and where we are going.

Lahore is one of the finest of the living cities of South Asia, if not of the world. Let us celebrate Lahore with its originality and its diversity, and Gaddafi Stadium, with its historic name adds to Lahore’s sense of identity even if Col Qaddafi has become senile and pathetic.

Moeed Pirzada

Published in The Express Tribune, February 28^th, 2011.