WRITTEN BY CH. FAISAL MEHMOOD
The past week has been a period of celebrations, warming the hearts of stakeholders like us in our tourism industry.The coming weeks also look like the season is going to continue, heralding the more heart warming celebrations of Christmas, leading to the opening of the New Year of hopes and expectations.
What is significant is that while it has become normal for Lahore to hold meet events like its recent Cultural Roots Festival, Pakistan National Council of Arts Islamabad launched the Ninth National Exhibition (PNCA). The two-month long exhibition is taking place after a series of regional exhibitions representing all provinces which were given relevant context according to the cultural heritage of the land. The first National Exhibition was held in 1973 under the leadership of PNCA’s founding DG and the legendary Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It was supposed to be a yearly event, but unfortunately, only seven exhibitions were held in 45 years. Full of action and thrill Swabi jeep rally was jointly organized by the Tourism Corporation, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (TCKP) and Frontier 4×4 Club was full of entertainment to the local people.
Karachi had the Sindh Culture Day celebrated, not only in halls and centres, but also on the streets; this means that the fear element bearing upon Karachi is defeated – as is one of the functions of Tourism. The city hosted a landmark 10thedition of International Urdu Conference at the Karachi Arts Council.The event can be called the biggest gathering of scholars, writers, poets, critics, students and literati of the country.
Among other such events, we had China presenting its performing arts, Japan celebrating its Emperor’s Birthday and Thailand celebrating its rightly venerated King’s birthday.
These are positive developments for a city suffering the image and fact of terrorism – more the image than the fact – and we are thankful to the countries which hold their events here. We also appreciate and support our government departments and private sector institutions which initiate such events.
We take pride in the high professional competence of Event Managers that we now have in our country. It is they who can lead Karachi into becoming the Convention City that world geography and commerce need and want it to be.
As we speak of celebrations and event management, our attention moves to the one celebration that Pakistan needs to hold throughout the country and at the world.§
