Haider Ali and Ali Salman of Phool Patti dropped by in the morning. I went out to pick up some halwa poori, while Umar fixed up the place and made some tea. I must say, he is really good at uncluttering the place when he needs to. I can't say that about myself.Haider and Ali Salman are as usual up to great things with Phool Patti. As a truck artist, Haider has pushed his way past so many barriers to develop his skills and then rise on the merit of his hard work. Painting trucks has been in his family for several generations, but from his teen years, he made a point to seek out training in all areas related to his work. He went to cinema board painters to work on portraiture and landscapes, and studied with sign board painters to push his calligraphy skills. He wished to insure that he could cover all aspects of his art, and never be at the mercy of someone else. I feel very connected to that. In working on my own projects, I try to pick up as many skills as I can, and while I may not become an expert at everything, I want to at least be able to put things together. This helps a lot in directing and collaborating with other artists as well.In hearing Haider talk about his own journey thus far, I see a lot of the same obstacles that I hear from other artists or experience myself. Yet despite all of that, here he is, pushing and creating connections and opportunities for himself as well as the team he has created, traveling the world, breaking all of those barriers that others have tried to set, particularly on artists who don’t have recognized academic training or the benefits of other bars to admission in this very hierarchical and incestuous system. On the other hand, I have a lot of those benefits, but I recoil in disgust at a lot of that whole scene, while leveraging it in a way that better suits my temperament. He is an internationally recognized artist, yet if he had more of a snooty attitude about his art, and some inflated degrees; an acknowledgement to the academic gate keepers of art, then he would be Haider Ali sahib and not referred to as Haider bhai. What a bunch of crap. Despite all the nonsense, it brings me a lot of joy to see him and his team traveling the world on the merit of their work.After some food and sharing some music and artwork from “Risalo”, I head over to visit some relatives. I returned later towards evening, and took a series of buses and qing qis to get to the hotel Haider was staying at. We sat down for some green tea, then Umar and I saw them off at the railway station. That one sentence sounds so simple, but what it actually entails is so much more. We crossed several lanes of insane traffic from all directions, navigating potholes and open sewers (covers are often stolen), the public latrine (any wall or corner), misdirection on the train platform (running around with heavy luggage up and down stairs to every which platform we were directed to in a huge mass of people), then squeezing aboard the train and ignoring incorrect and official sounding pronouncements of being in the wrong berth, then walking all the way back through all of that to move on.Umar and I head to the bus stand and waited for a bus to Alhamra. Our friend Imran was there at the Faiz Festival, in honor of poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. We sat for a while, watching a beautiful solo dance performance to Faiz’s poetry, intermixed with other songs and pieces that pulled together readings of letters between Faiz and his wife during his imprisonment. There was a lot of humor in their exchanges through what must have been such a heart wrenching experience. I felt a bit sad, thinking about all the struggles, apathy and lack of a genuine desire to do your part to make things better that I see here and certainly back in the US as well. There are so many people who do care and are doing incredible things to make the world a little better, but overwhelmingly as was before and as is today, our goals and purpose in life are to accumulate wealth for tomorrow or brownie points for the afterlife.We took a walk through the beautiful Lawrence Gardens at night, before heading home to enjoy some delicious food courtesy of Umar’s sister.