Friday, April 19, 2024 | 6:30 PM | Central Courtyard, Academic Block, LUMS
Jashn-i Nowruz: Celebrating the Persian New Year Festival (GCLL in collaboration with the LUMS Culture Society)
The Gurmani Centre, for the third year in a row, organized an evening filled with poetry, music and other festivities to celebrate Nowruz, generally understood to be the Persian new year. This mega event was planned in collaboration with the Khana-e-Farhang, the Iranian Cultural Centre in Lahore and the LUMS Culture Society. The Centre had the good fortune of receiving both the outgoing and incoming DGs of the Khana-e-Farhang as Chief Guests, and a chance to bid farewell to Mr. Jafar Ronas and a warm welcome to Dr. Masoodi.
The central courtyard of the academic block was decorated with buntings and fairy lights with a variety of stalls set up to offer food items, handicrafts and costume jewellery. One centre of attention was the egg painting activity that attracted everyone, especially young children and the second a table displaying clay pots and vases decorated with calligraphic inscriptions bidding Nowruz Mubarak to everyone by the Centre’s inhouse calligrapher Ustad Sher Zaman. The program started with Dr. Nadhra Khan’s welcoming remarks addressing the Chief Guests, the HSS Dean Dr Ali Khan, faculty members from different Schools, students and guests from outside LUMS. This was followed by a beautifully-designed presentation on the SMD screen by Dr Spenta Kakalia (a renowned paediatrician), Dr Farah Hassan (Assistant Professor of English Literature, LUMS), and Dr Reza Abdolmaleki (Assistant Professor of Mathematics, LUMS). Dr Kakalia apprised the audience of the festival’s ancient roots in the Persian culture and its beauty of being embraced by multiple religious communities rising above religious domains. She introduced Haft-Sīn, the table laid with seven items starting with the letter ‘sīn’ as symbols of wellbeing and prosperity for the coming year. Dr Hassan, and Iraqi national, surprised everyone with the fact that Nowruz was an equally important festival in Iraq and neighbouring Arab countries where it is marked as a public holiday. Dr Reza, who hails from Iran, recounted his experiences of celebrating the festival and its observation by a vast number of communities in the wider region and across the world. Students from KPK and GB were then invited to briefly recount the festival in their mother languages which they happily did in Pashto, Dari, Khwar and Shina, thus establishing Nowruz as a festival equally significant in Pakistan as it is in the rest of the world. The event entertained the audience with engaging performances that included Persian singing, songs in different languages spoken in the Gilgit-Baltistan area and traditional dance performances. Mr Jafar Ronas and Dr Masoodi praised the efforts of the Gurmani Centre for holding a memorable event. They warmed everyone’s heart by mentioning the deep ties between Iran and Pakistan and the role of LUMS in strengthening them by offering Persian language and literature courses and holding cultural events meaningful for reinforcing these associations.