DARRA ADAM KHEL

I am sure not many people have heard of this strange name. The township of Darra Adam Khel sits along Peshawar-Kohat Road in Pakistan, about 40 km South of Peshawar. It has poorly built double storey houses in the sand hills of Kohat Frontier region in Orakzai Agency. The name literally means Valley of Adam Khel and Adam Khel is a clan of Afridi Tribe. It is a state within a state; it is part of Pakistan but Pakistani Law does not apply here. The sole business of inhabitants of this place is manufacturing and selling guns! The town has only one street, lined on either side with shops and each one of these shops is a workshop cum showroom for guns of various descriptions, barring a handful of tea and meat shops interspersed.

On and off the main street there are hundreds of small workshops where men and children make working and amazingly original looking copies of almost all guns in the world. In the name of machines they have nothing more than a small drill press and a few hand tools. The tools are astonishingly primitive, yet the forges turn out accurate reproduction of every conceivable sort of weapon, from pen pistols and hand grenades to automatic rifles and anti aircraft guns. The copies are so painstakingly reproduced that even the serial No. of the original is carried over. A Darra gunsmith, given a rifle he hasn't seen before, can duplicate it in around 10 days. Once the first copy is made, each additional copy takes two or three days due to the templates created. Handguns, due to being more complex take a little longer.

In Darra, over 75% of the inhabitants are involved in the gun business and up to 800 pieces of armament are produced every day. And the No. is only increasing. The testing ranges are readiy at hand; a dealer has to simply step out in the open to fire 20-30 rounds in the air from the freshly made weapon and the gun is tested. Work pattern is fairly simple over here! Pak government does not permit foreigners into DAK for 'security reasons' and venturing into the area without permit is fraught with dangers. A weapon is considered an ornament for a Pashtun and the two cannot simply be separated. There are still many places on earth where we cannot tread without endangering our lives and DAK is perhaps on the top of that list.

PINGING

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SPRING IN THE AIR!

Whoever gave the name 'Spring' to the season interposed between winters and summers, did a good job of it. The season actually does take off, literally. After harsh winters and before the onset of hot summers in the temperate climatic zone, brief spring provides a much needed pleasant break with pleasing colours. It is an intermediate phase between two major seasons and signifies new life. It is generally defined in the Northern Hemisphere as extending from the vernal equinox (day and night equal in length), 20 or 21 March, to the summer solstice (year’s longest day), 21 or 22 June, and in the Southern Hemisphere from 22 or 23 September to 22 or 23 December. In the Polar regions, the Spring is very short in length. Spring is the most beautiful season which dresses up nature in the richest possible manner with many colours. It brings about good, meaningful growth and vibrancy in the atmosphere.

During spring season, the Earth gradually increases its tilt towards the Sun and the length of the day increases in the relevant hemisphere. The hemisphere begins to warm and thus causes new plant growth. Snows, if present, melt and water streams swell up with excess water. Many flowering plants bloom in this season, including numerous fruit trees which then bear fruit at the onset of summers. The weather is pleasant at this time of the year, neither hot, nor cold, nature wears new clothes, flowers bloom and birds chirp. There is happiness all around and a general sense of well being prevails. 

 

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote these lines in honour of Spring Season:

"For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins."

TIMBUKTU

I am dashing off to Timbuktu, wanna tag along? Did you know Timbuktu is a real town in a real country? I didn't know for a long time. But I used to hear this term often. When I enquired with one of my seniors in service as to where he is headed, pat came the reply, "Timbuktu. Want to come along?" Timbuktu generally gives an impression of a small, desolate, remote and outlandish place.

Timbuktu is an ancient town in Mali (a West African nation) which has been existing since 12 th century. Located on the edge of Sahara Desert, Timbuktu is hardly 15 km from River Niger. It played a major role in the trade of gold, ivory and above all, slaves. It has many tourist attractions which earn most of the revenue the town survives on. The architecture of Timbuktu is very unique.

 

In 12 th century itself Timbuktu became an acknowledged centre of Islamic learning and a commercial establishment. It had three universities and more than 175 Quranic schools. Even books were written, copied and imported/exported in/from Timbuktu. The first mention of Timbuktu in travels is that by the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta when he travelled to Timbuktu in 1353 while returning from his stay in the capital of the then Mali Empire.

Despite its illustrious history Timbuktu today is a poor town, impoverished even by Third World standards. Its current population is about 55,000 and the town regularly grapples with the curse of drought and floods (flooding occurs due to poor drainage system).

THE USSR

The years were early 70s and I had entered my teens. There was hardly a medium save for radio those days. There were no active media. We believed what radio and print fed us. In any case, a teenager's mind is like a piece of wet clay; raw and soft. It records imprints and those imprints, over the years when winds of time and sands of circumstances blow over them, harden. Those were the days when acronym NAM (Non Aligned Movement) was very popular. Our government claimed it had not aligned with any power but it actually did. The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was perceived a great friend. Photos of Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev were splashed commonly all over. 

 

When you picked up a piece of paper, you were bound to see something or the other related to the USSR. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982.

As children, we subscribed to magazines like Sputnik, published from the USSR Embassy in New Delhi. I loved its contents and photos anyway, it fascinated me. A world out of our reach and a fairy world at that. There were many subjects it covered but the two topics I remember most are space exploration and community farms. All said and done, the USSR was a formidable fort. It was big in every sense of the word, like Big Brezhnev!

I do not condemn a particular form of governance, nor do I appreciate another. But yes, theoretically, communism sounded so good: all equals with equal opportunities and shared resources. Whereas on ground, it was a different story. May be the very idea of communism is good but all over, in all communist regimes, the implementation in letter and spirit lacked. Or may be the evil side of human prevailed and corruption seeped in, polluting and thereby failing the system. May be. The only democracy I admire is that of the US. It works the most. Despite its occasional black holes it works pretty well.

There is no more USSR. It disintegrated on 25 Dec 1991, resulting in birth of 15 smaller countries. The demise of the USSR also sounded the death knell of the cold war.

The author acknowledges the photo shown here as copyright of RIA Novosti (Russian International News Agency).