When Pakistani TV presenter Maya Khan was recently caught hounding innocent couples at a park in Karachi, social medial sites in the country reached melting point as the public took to Twitter, Facebook and other forums to denounce the ‘Vigil Aunty’s’ blatant intrusion on people’s privacy.  That rallying call by the Pakistani public led to Khan being quite publicly sacked.  

The episode not only showed the power of social media but the ever increasing influence of increasingly disillusioned, liberal segments of Pakistani society.    

And now, perhaps the most influential of all liberal social campaigns in the country – Azme Alishan – is bringing its message of hope to Great Britain.

‘Pakistan: Ready to Rise’ is a music concert which will see Pakistani and British Pakistan artists join together to promote the message of tolerance through music, in particular the edgy, angry yet hopeful voices of youth which make up punk, rock and hip hop.

Among the artists performing will be rapper Adil Omar, punk-rock group Bumbu Sauce and British Pakistani urban acts Pure Music Generals and Shizzio.  

The audience will also be treated to a special performance by Aziz Ibrahim, a British Pakistani singer and musician who has collaborated with the likes of Simply Red, The Stone Roses and Paul Weller among others.

The campaign behind the concert – Azme Alishan – has been instrumental in providing a voice to Pakistan’s disenchanted youth who make up more than 65% of the population and who have been weighed down by extremist violence, political upheaval and economic uncertainty.  

The social networking site is described as a “Meeting place for positive Pakistani voices that believe in and represent the true spirit of Pakistan; a country of diversity, creativity, tolerance, opportunity and potential.”

Pakistan: Ready to Rise takes place at the Rhythm Factory at Whitechapel, London, on March 1, 2012.

For more information on the event and Azme Alishan – The Spirit of Pakistan, visit www.facebook.com/azmealishanuk

The Noble Stage Art Gallery – the first in London specializing in South Asian Contemporary Art – has announced details of its latest exhibit, an installation by acclaimed Indian artist Sandhya Pai.  
‘Grass Roots’ is Pai’s first installation in London and showcases her interests with ritual, worship, memory and history.  

In Grass Roots, Pai uses crushed newspaper pulp as the base for her installation, signifying the words and letters that together make up an individual’s living recent history, paradoxically made into a unrecognizable – not to mention unreadable – soil-like surface.  From this ‘soil’, or as Pai describes it this ‘source’, emerge figures from Pai’s history, in black and white, like idols of worship.

It’s a method Pai has utilized in her creations before, most notably in 2008’s ‘Landscapes and Memories’ which saw her use paddy grass to form outlines of the map of Mattancherry, Fort Kochi live inside a gallery.  These outlines related to her walks where she viewed many different cultures of people living close together in the town.  Amongst and above these grass paths she placed drawings relating to the people and scenery she had witnessed along the way.  

Born in 1982 in Karnataka, India, Pai is a graduate of Mumbai’s Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, the oldest art institution in the city.  Her work has been noted for exploring themes such as home rituals and the energy and visual aesthetic of the collective and the snapshot memories of our pasts as photographed by us as well as by our elders.  

Nine days after the tragic events of 9/11, Pai created the sublime performance installation, ‘20/9 Worship’ in her ancestral village in Karnataka. On the occasion of her father’s sixtieth birthday, and with the reaffirmation of her parents’ marital vows at that same event, Pai daringly placed large drawn images of his past throughout the space, high up, so that they were included in (if not interrupting) all audience visual participation in the rituals and celebrations. These images often showed moments in her father’s history that interwove with the pasts of many present at the ceremony, alluding to how our view of the present is invariably colored by our past.

The exhibition takes place 17th – 26th February 2012.

For more information, visit www.thenoblesage.com

-    Vijitha Alles/Reports

The Raghu Dixit Project’s raucous, inspiring performance at the Alchemy Festival, Southbank Centre last year whet the appetite of existing and a large army of new fans who were given a first taste of the kaleidoscopic music produced by the band.

After subsequently vowing the crowds at Glastonbury, the Project is set to make a triumphant return to light up the dour Southbank Centre on the 18th and 19th April 2012.

As they did last year, Raghu and his band of eclectic, sarong-clad musicians will team up with English folk music band Bellowhead and the Southbank Centre’s resident choreographer Gauri Sharma Tripathi to provide a heady mixture of East and West for the fans.

Ms Tripathi’s participation will see the performance take the form of a musical with the musicians joined by dancers to recreate a story based on Girish Karnad’s play Hayavadana about a man’s search for identity.  

The second half of the performance will see the Project join hands with Andy Mellon (trumpet), Brendan Kelly (saxophone) and Pete Flood (drums) from Bellowhead playing tracks from Raghu’s Antaragni days as well as more recent and new material.  

For tickets and timings, visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk

- The UKAsian