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In sync with the Lahorites’ skyward glances in the hope of brighter days, this time of the year also becomes a cause for celebration and serious introspection in memory of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the people’s poet, whose birthday falls around this time. So it was that a select group of admirers and persons of letters and learning got together at a meet hosted by the Pakistan Academy of Letters to celebrate the poet’s 97th birth anniversary. The presence of daughter Salima Hashmi brought in a personal touch as she looked back in time tracing the struggle her father had to go through in preserving his ideology. “My mother Alice used to say that she built her house straw by straw time and again and then it was destroyed each time,” she said. And well enough, given that the Faiz family had had to live through repeated trials when the father would be imprisoned for his ideals. Those would be times when he pined for his city even as he centred all his wishes on the liberation of Palestine and the restoration of the Palestinian people’s rights. Salima Hashmi also mentioned that she had in her possessions, a number of manuscripts and relics which she would readily give if a Faiz museum was established.
 
 
 
     
 
“This,” said artist Vidha Saumya, “ is all about a conscious effort to express this place from my point of view. The children have been my muse on a daily basis…” And spread around the Galerie of the Alliance Francaise were some 25 pen-and-ink drawing of the children of Lahore! Executed on hand-made paper, the sketches covered a world that had appeared so distinctive in its features, that this young artist from India was consumed by a desire to record them. In Pakistan on a South Asia Foundation scholarship as an undergraduate at the department of Fine Arts of the BNU, Vidha, who already holds a graduate degree from the Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay, has been drawn to the children she sketched by the sheer power of what she calls their body language. “From four year olds to 14, the children here have an aura about them. For one thing, it is their dress, wearing clothes that make them look like miniature versions of the adults around them.” Drawn from memory of children she has observed, most of the time fleetingly through the windows of buses, Vidha uses to commute around town, the sketches are memory based, instinctive reactions to a world which is not familiar to her. The result has been a collection of artwork that cannot be termed as portraits but rather an attempt to understand the mind-sets of the subjects who vary from a tie-clad schoolboy sporting a toy plane, to a street urchin dressed in an incongruous combination of jeans and t-shirt sporting an even more preposterous image, to the little girl scurrying away with a bag in hand. Much intrigue and interest was created by the invite which besides carrying three sketches from the collection, also sported a poem penned in free verse by Vidha.