I would like to commend Ms Fauzia Minallah for her piece on the desecration of the heritage of Saidpur village.
LAHORE: This is with reference to two items published in your newspaper regarding cultural heritage. I would like to state the following in response to each one: To Mr John Mock’s concerns (banner on January 9, page 4 Lahore edition) regarding the documentation of the rock carvings along the silk routes in Gilgit Baltistan, I would like to submit that the Heidelberg Academy for Humanities and Sciences has spent over 26 years doing research and conducting meticulous documentation of over 50,000 petroglyphs consisting of images, iconography and scripts in 14 different languages. This documentation is published in 10 volumes by the Institute of Rock Carvings and Inscriptions along the Karakoram Highway under the supervision of Dr Harald Hauptmann.
I would like to commend Ms Fauzia Minallah for her piece (January 10) on the desecration of the heritage of Saidpur village, Islamabad, through the uninformed activities of the CDA. In 2007, at the inception of this ill-thought out and myopic ‘conservation’ of the ancient habitat, Ms Minallah and I had met with one of the CDA directors implementing the ‘restoration’ plan. We had pointed out that serious issues such as solid waste management, clean water supply and covered drainage were not being considered a priority by the CDA in its efforts to bring Saidpur into the fold of a so-called civilisation. Unfortunately, our concerns were left unheeded and today Saidpur has become ‘Sad-pur’, a Disneyland of some bureaucrat’s technicoloured vision. As a conservation and heritage management professional, I ask the question: Why fix it when it wasn’t broken?
Feryal Ali Gauhar
Published in The Express Tribune, January 13th, 2012.
