Pakistan: Truck Art, Sufi Shrines and the Second Highest Mountain on Earth
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Pakistani truck art is one of the world's great vernacular art traditions. The trucks that move goods across Pakistan's highways are decorated with an intensity that transforms every vehicle into a mobile painting — flowers, birds, landscapes, calligraphy, portraits of saints and heroes, geometric patterns — applied in metalwork, chains, paint, and reflective tape. The decorations take months to complete and can cost more than the truck itself. Each regional tradition has its own distinctive style: Karachi trucks favour particular colour combinations, Peshawar trucks particular motifs. The art is competitive, regional, and completely serious.
The Karakoram Highway, running from Abbottabad in Pakistan to Kashgar in China, is one of the world's most dramatic roads — built by Pakistani and Chinese engineers over twenty years through some of the highest terrain on earth, past K2 (the second-highest mountain and by many accounts the most technically difficult), Nanga Parbat, and the Hunza Valley, where the meeting of the Karakoram, Himalayan, and Hindu Kush ranges produces a landscape of impossible vertical scale.
Qawwali — devotional Sufi music performed at shrines across Pakistan and performed internationally by musicians like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — is one of the most powerful live music experiences available anywhere. The performance builds slowly, the lead vocalist's improvisations intensifying over hours, the percussion accelerating, until the room reaches a state that the Sufi tradition describes as ecstasy. At shrines like Data Darbar in Lahore, qawwali performances continue through the night on certain religious occasions. The music is prayer made audible.
