Month: August 2007

Lahore: the most underappreciated city in the world

A beautiful evocative piece by Asad Raza.

Excerpt:

“Lahore is the conservatory of a lost world whose traces have been largely erased from more touristic destinations, like Delhi and Agra – I will come to the reasons for this below.  The world in general has few cities that interweave so seamlessly a great vitality today (the city is about the twenty-fifth largest on the globe) with an unbroken and luxurious history (spanning the last two millennia). … 

“In Lahore, by contrast, you can see what tourists can only imagine at the Red Fort or the Taj Mahal: the dense, complex, and still vital operations of an inner city bursting with markets, shrines, mosques, food, dancing girls, riotous children.  That’s what makes Lahore different: its history is sometimes worn on its sleeve and sometimes hidden within, but never is it advertised or reified.  It’s lived.”