Gorgeous views, buddy. Need to really explore more in this part of the world. Btw, i'll be in Lahore in February. Its for work, and also doing some personal tours on the culture attractions there. A friend of mine recommended Lahore as a place to get my "foot wet" in explore Pakistan. So i'll be meeting up with his clan; perhaps you know them? Surname is Zaidi.
Am excited to finally visit Pakistan tho. Hopefully the first in many !
lol.. Zaidis isnt a clan... and knowing zaidis or even members of a particular clan/ethnicity/family/tribe is hard as fuk.. impossibru..
People with the surname Zaidi trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula particularly the city of Mecca located in present-day Saudi Arabia. The Zaidi family are a part of the Arab Tribe of Banu Hashim.The Zaidi surname is derived from Zaid ibn Ali, the son of Ali ibn al-Husayn Zayn al-'Abidin, who was the great grandson of the Islamic prophet,Muhammad. People with the surname Zaidi trace their lineage to Zaid ibn Ali. Descendants of Zaid ibn Ali who chose to move away from the Arabian Peninsula and have the surname Zaidi are commonly located in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Anyways.. welcome to Pak brother!
Hope you visit other cities too... lahore isnt just the only city in Pak or even Panjab province!
Maybe if i dont leave il show you around ... or could ask a friend to do that..
Gorgeous views, buddy. Need to really explore more in this part of the world. Btw, i'll be in Lahore in February. Its for work, and also doing some personal tours on the culture attractions there. A friend of mine recommended Lahore as a place to get my "foot wet" in explore Pakistan. So i'll be meeting up with his clan; perhaps you know them? Surname is Zaidi.
Am excited to finally visit Pakistan tho. Hopefully the first in many !
Never knew that!!!! WOW! An all this time i thought the British did.
istory
Polo is arguably the oldest recorded team sport in known history, with the first matches being played in Persia over 2500 years ago. Initially thought to have been created by competing tribes of Central Asia, it was quickly taken up as a training method for the King's elite cavalry. These matches could resemble a battle with up to 100 men to a side.
As mounted armies swept back and forth across this part of the world, conquering and re-conquering, polo was adopted as the most noble of pastimes by the Kings and Emperors, Shahs and Sultans, Khans and Caliphs of the ancient Persians, Arabs, Mughals, Mongols and Chinese. It was for this reason it became known across the lands as "the game of kings".
British officers themselves re-invented the game in 1862 after seeing a horsemanship exhibition in Manipur, India. The sport was introduced into England in 1869, and seven years later sportsman James Gordon Bennett imported it to the United States. After 1886, English and American teams occasionally met for the International Polo Challenge Cup. Polo was on several Olympic games schedules, but was last an Olympic sport in 1936.
Polo continues, as it has done for so long, to represent the pinnacle of sport, and reaffirms the special bond between horse and rider. The feeling of many of its players are epitomized by a famous verse inscribed on a stone tablet next to a polo ground in Gilgit, Pakistan: "Let others play at other things. The king of games is still the game of kings."
Polo on the worlds roof.. Highest polo ground in the world... Shandur cup
Extreme Polo
There are no holds barred at the annual grudge match in northwest Pakistan's "land of mirth and murder"
image:
At an altitude of 12,300 feet, the Shandur Pass is usually populated by grazing yaks. But once a year it turns into the world's highest polo ground. When teams from Chitral and Gilgit face off—as they have since 1933—tribesmen gather for the mayhem. (Paul Nevin)
By
Paul Raffaele
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE |
SUBSCRIBE JANUARY 2007
image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/polo_stampede.jpg__220x130_q85_crop_upscale.jpg
PHOTO GALLERY
Musharraf, who has survived several assassination attempts, seems to be taking no chances in a province roamed by Muslim extremists. But still, he has come: after all, it's the annual mountain polo match between Chitral and Gilgit, rival towns on either side of the Shandur Pass.
Persians brought the game here a thousand years ago, and it has been favored by prince and peasant ever since. But as played at Shandur, the world's highest polo ground, the game has few rules and no referee. Players and horses go at one another with the abandon that once led a British political agent to label Chitral "the land of mirth and murder."
This valley guards an important chain of passes on the ancient Silk Road linking Western Asia with China. In the 19th century, the area loomed large in the Great Game, the spy-versus-spy shadow play between the Russian and British empires. The exercise of local rule, however, remained with the Ulmulk royal family, whose reign extended from 1571 to 1969, when Chitral was incorporated into Pakistan. It was in reference to the Ulmulks that the British political agent, Surgeon Major George Robertson, wrote in 1895: "Their excesses and revengeful murders went hand in hand with pleasant manners and a pleasing lightheartedness."
Now, as Musharraf takes his place in the stands, the two teams begin parading around the Shandur ground, their stocky mounts tossing their manes and flaring their nostrils. The team from Gilgit, a garrison town, comprises tough-eyed Pakistani soldiers and police officers, and its star player is an army sergeant named Arastu but called Shaheen, or "the Hawk." The Chitral team is led by Prince Sikander, a scion of the Ulmulks—and the losing captain for the past two years. This is his day: to be shamed forever as a three-time loser or redeemed as champion of the mountains.
Chitral is isolated for several months each year by heavy snows, but in warmer weather a propjet can spear through a gap in the high, barren mountains of the Hindu Kush. I first visited the town in the summer of 1998, when I met another Ulmulk son, Sikander's brother Prince Siraj. He owns a local boutique hotel, whose celebrity guests he is not known to fawn over. (He once asked Robert De Niro what he did for a living.) It was Siraj who first told me about the grudge polo match held each July, and it was at his invitation that I returned for last summer's tilt.
As it happened, it was during my first visit that President Clinton ordered the bombing of Osama bin Laden's suspected headquarters in a cave just across the border in Afghanistan. In response, the mullahs in Chitral called for the killing of all foreigners in town after Friday prayers. And so a mob of extremists screamed for our blood as they marched through the bazaar—but the paramilitary police herded me and the few other foreigners around into a hotel until we could be flown out to safety a few days later.
This time, as Siraj and I drive through the bazaar, a warren of hole-in-the-wall shops selling everything from ancient flintlocks to assassin's daggers to juicy melons to pirated running shoes, little seems to have changed. As before, there are no women in sight, and most men are bearded and robed. But then I notice that not a single man wears the black robes, black turban and long beard of the Taliban. "Following 9/11, the government forced them back into Afghanistan," Siraj says. "We were glad to see them go."
The region's tribal warfare and religious strife reach back millennia. At the same time, the towering mountains and labyrinthine passes have isolated some peoples in time warps all their own. If you roam around, you can find tribes who claim descent from Alexander the Great's army, or meet a wizard who summons snow fairies from the mountains in a ritual that predates even the Macedonian conqueror's time.
The polo match is still a week away, but Siraj says the Chitral team is already in the mountains making for Shandur, usually six hours on bumpy roads by jeep. "Even though the men and their horses are used to high altitudes, the pass is so lofty that they need to acclimatize to its thin air," he says. Sikander and the team spend each night at a different village, playing practice games.
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