SOMETIMES, to understand Pakistan, one needs to visit a foreign museum. Only by seeing objects that affirm the continuum of a country`s culture and heritage can one understand why the preservation of the past is so important, and why the Orange Line is such a dreadful warning of Lahore`s doomsday.

Lahore has become inured to the depredadons causedby generadons ofinvadersover millennia. It has outlived being ravaged, rebuilt, restored, remodelled, rehabilitated, rejuvenated. Can it survive this latest attack by a horde of modern Mongols? Or will it be condemned to spend its future life permanently scarred, like the victim of some vicious acid attack? Friends of Lahore foreigners and locals, academics and cognoscenti, experts and the afflicted-spenttwodaysinCambridgelast week deliberating on Lahore`s past, present and future. Cambridge was a perfect choice.

It is the personification in stone of a civilised city aged, sage and venerable. Not unlike Lahore.

The guiding spirits behind the symposium were Dr Majid Sheikh and that indef atigable friend of Pakistan, Sir Nicholas Barrington.

He served two stints in Pakistan, latterly as high commissioner/ambassador (depending on whether we were in or out of the Commonwealth). His intimate familiarity with Pakistan`s precious monuments (major and minor) was honed at a time when diplomats could roam freely around their host country, without a fussy security detail.

Sir Nicholas (an octogenarian) lives a retired life in Cambridge. His astral body resides in Lahore. His loving concern over the state of our monuments shames us supine Lahoris who have accepted that Lahore has no past worth preserving, no future worth fighting for, only an expedient present.

Hence the symposium.

Inevitably, many scholars cocooned in the rarefied atmosphere of British academia viewed Lahore through the amber prism of empire usually Mughal or Sikh or British.

They talked about the past arts and crafts which for centuries poured from the crucible of Lahore`s fecundity. One scholar had a novel approach: he suggested that the symbiotic relationship between cricket and Lahore explains the genesis of Imran Khan`s emergence as a political leader. This argument assumes that Imran`s grip on a bat`s handle is stronger than that of hidden hands.

Two specialists from the Victoria & Albert Museum Susan Stronge and Julius Bryant made presentations that served as reminders of the close, almost umbilical relationship between the V&A and Lahore`s Museum and its Mayo School of Arts (now the National College of Arts.) The V&A had been established in the 19th century not as a cemeteryof dead artifacts but as a repository of living (even if forgotten or neglected) artistic traditions. That elevated aim became the raison d`être of the Lahore Museum during the stewardship of its first curator J. Lockwood Kipling (the father of Rudyard Kipling).

Julius Bryant recently curated a masterly exhibition in which he resurrected the persona of Lockwood Kipling f rom beneath his son`s overarching reputation. In a sense Bryant has done for Lockwood Kipling what Lockwood in his time did for Lahore, which was to rescue its cultural persona from oblivion.

Passing though modern Lahore, only a handful of residents are aware of how pervasive Lockwood Kipling`s contribution was to the city. It went well beyond the brick walls of the museum and its conjoined school of arts.

It included designs for Aitchison College`s main building, even the furniture of the Punjab Club. The products of Lockwood`s fertile mind were almost limitless.

Between Kipling`s 19th century and today`s 21st century, three traumas have lef ttheir mark on Lahore. The first was in August 1947, when Lahore overnight ceased being the multi-religious, multicultural kaleidoscope it had become after centuries of coexistence.

Punjab`s partition in five short weeks by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited the subcontinent before, was an act ofimperial arrogance. History would be revenged were Theresa May to allow a Pakistani or Indian or Bangladeshi lawyer to decide Brexit in five weeks.

The second trauma occurred in December 1992, when in retaliation to the Babri Masjid destruction in distant Ayodhya, Lahore`s Hindu, Sikh and Jain temples and monuments paid the price for BJP`s communal hubris.

The third irreversible act of vandalism not spontaneous, like the other two, but deliberate and premeditated has been the construction of Orange Line as part of the Lahore Rapid Mass Transit System. The LRMTS`s of ficial map bears the imprimatur of a Chinese seal. Whichever CPEC official stamped it has the gif t of a short memory. He has forgotten the damage perpetrated in 1900 by European vandals who violated and destroyed Beijing`s Forbidden City.

Lahoris: take comfort. The Orange Line construction may be irreversible, but it will ultimately disintegrate in 100 years.• The writer is an author www.fsaijazuddin.pk