Building Bridges. Opening Minds. Empowering Communities. |
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Dear Friends,
We really value having you as a part of the APF family. We appreciate your commitment to helping us achieve our goals. This is possible in large part due to your ongoing support and interest in our mission to build bridges, open minds, and empower communities.
Happy New Year and all the best to you!
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A festival designed for Thinkers in Lahore |
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ThinkFest (Afkar-e-Taza) is an intellectually stimulating annual festival in Pakistan. The festival’s goals are to create spaces for new ideas and thoughts relevant to Pakistan; bridge the gap between academia and society and provide an opportunity to engage with leading scholars from around the world so that Pakistan can develop as a forward-looking and progressive country.
The Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest is inspired by the thought of Pakistan’s poet laureate, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, where he exclaimed in his poem Takhliq (Creation) that ‘New worlds derive their pomp from thoughts quite fresh and new/From stones and bricks a world was neither built nor grew.’ In order to create these ‘newer worlds,’ the ThinkFest aims to achieve three objectives: First is the creation of newer spaces, realms, and opportunities for the flourishing of new thoughts and ideas, so that Pakistan can develop as a forward-looking and progressive country. Secondly, the Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest aims to bridge the gap between academia and society by becoming an interface between them. Worldwide newer and creative thoughts are incubated in universities and colleges, but in Pakistan, there is little interaction between academia and the general public. This event bridges the gap by providing academic discourse in an accessible yet robust manner, for greater understanding and engagement. And thirdly, since recently Pakistan and the world have been mired in the vortex of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ which blur and mask knowledge and judgments on critical issues, the Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest provides an opportunity to engage with leading scholars from around the world in a fact based and critical discussion which is grounded and vigorous.
Help Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest raise the remaining amount of funds for a successful event this year. Support them through their Facebook and Youtube pages.
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A pre-partition studio legacy that lives on |
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Pakistan lost a treasure when Shahid Zaidi, of the famous ‘Zaidis Photographers’ located in the heart of Lahore’s Mall Road, passed away in July 2022. Shahid Zaidi was working to preserve his father’s legacy, which happened to also be the legacy of Pakistan. We spoke to his daughter Amira Zaidi who is based in Virginia. She told us about her father’s life and life’s work.
Being born to a renowned photographer in the early 1940’s Shahid Zaidi was destined to become a photographer himself, though he toyed with the idea of becoming a pilot and dreamt of flying, his life and his father had different plans for him. Shahid Zaidi was a gifted photographer and was passionate about photographing black and white landscapes in the beautiful mountains in Pakistan and also loved photographing California's Sierra Nevada mountains.
With his wife and three children, Zaidi spent seven years in Reno, Nevada and thoroughly enjoyed his stint there. After studying at the London Film School in 1972, he came to the U.S. in 1979 with the idea of shooting cinema commercials and felt that working here was full of freedom and opportunity. He arrived in New York with his 35mm cinema films to show production houses his work, but he struggled to find work. Sending out his resume around and knocking on many doors, by a stroke of chance he finally landed a job as a photographer in Kinderfoto, based all the way in Reno, NV.
The U.S. offered Zaidi a platform to experiment with new methods in photography. It was here that he brought both his passions of flying and photography to come together. He took incredible photographs of planes, from planes. He made friends at his work place and loved flying gliders with his new close friend Stew Crane, over a small mountain north of Reno/Sparks.
Though his time in the U.S. was going well, Zaidi felt a calling to go back to a land and a studio that continued to tug at his heart from far away. A feeling many American Pakistanis are all too familiar with. The studio started by his father had a treasure trove tucked away somewhere in dusty shelves and there was a need to go back to preserve and digitize it for next generations. Link to Facebook page.
In its archives were photographs dating back to the 1930s, photos of leaders of Pakistan, the likes of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan to name a few, and photos of ordinary Pakistanis captured in a moment in history immortalized in stills. All of this sat in the Zaidi’s Studio in the heart of Lahore’s Mall Road. When Shahid Zaidi went back he began to finish the work his father had started, by continuing to photograph the distinguished people of Pakistan. And his efforts to digitize the legacy of Pakistan contained in his father’s studio also earned him an article in the NY Times.
Today, the studio is run by his son Usman Zaidi and a team of dedicated employees who were like family to the late Shahid Zaidi.
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The doctor who is changing the game in the US |
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Dr Humayun Chaudhary has made the Pakistani American community very proud after being recognized by Modern Healthcare magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare in 2022. On this prestigious list are names like President Joe Biden, Albert Bourla (CEO of Pfizer) and U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Dr. Chaudhary’s work in the field of medicine has been instrumental in the U.S. He is the President and CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards, and is responsible for governing the national federation that represents the country’s 70 medical and osteopathic licensing boards. He has been working to advance a secure pathway for physicians licensed in one state to practice across state lines. In his job, Dr. Chaudhry seeks to balance competing issues, such as the need to facilitate the greater use of telemedicine as a pandemic response with the need to prevent any abuse and fraud resulting from it.
A native of Karachi, Pakistan, Dr. Chaudhry emigrated with his family to the United States in 1971, when he was five years old. A graduate of New York University, New York Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, Dr. Chaudhry is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC.
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Together, we will empower communities and build bridges. |
Help APF expand its reach & impact. |
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