Kasur, the town that has lay by the now dry bank of the Sutlej river for longer than anyone can remember; for those who know of it, remember it for its renowned falooda served in earthenware pots, and for the mystic superstars that have long mingled into its clayey soil- for it serves as home to the shrines of some of the most revered South Asian holy men.

So it seems slightly strange, that looking back to that sweltering summer day when I journeyed to Kasur, an enduring, almost nagging memory is neither of gastronomic nor hagiographic satisfaction, but rather, of my own cell phone.

For as I neared the town having driven over roads groaning under the weight of produce from the fertile lands of the Punjab, my phone suddenly bleeped with happiness. The verdant farms that hemmed the road all the way from Lahore had not yet been conquered by the powers of cell towers and thus were bereft of mobile reception, but in this ancient town – my mobile was suddenly at home again. The significance of this little omen was lost on me then; but with the benefit of hind sight, cell phones snuggling into the quite evidently antediluvian town of Kasur was as significant a metaphor for the fortunes of Kasur as it is easy to overlook.

I on the other hand was struck by disquiet, a fidgety slightly anti-climatic dread. For today’s Kasur, notwithstanding its illustrious past is blighted by the insidious brand of our modernism; an incoherent mix of monstrous mobile phone hoardings, charged parking, ensconced in the timeless sights and sounds of the Punjab, forming the granular present.

But none of this creeping brand of modernism is perhaps more incongruous than the imposing white mosque that stands in the middle of town. Replete with blindingly reflective golden glass and strikingly inorganic white, it seems an apparition, a mirage transported from the hollow plastic dollhouse cities of the Gulf.

It’s not just that the sky scraping, post-petroleum inspired style is so alien to the town; but in an irony so acute perhaps only a people so wholly deprived of their own past could pull off consummately, the site is also the shrine of the great Sufi poet and philosopher, Bulleh Shah. For a man who believed in asceticism so completely and wholly, the only thing that belittles the monumental proportions of the mosque is the bewildering sense of overriding mockery.

They say he ran amok on these very streets-tales gnarled no doubt by the sweet ravages of centuries of story telling-dressed as a woman, bejewelled as a newly wed bride, dancing ecstatically. To his spiritual master, Shah Inayat Qadiri he dedicated a piece of poetry that is perhaps the very definition of the essence of the sufi cadence, the famous Kafi, Tere ishq nachayya. As an excerpt from Muzaffar Ghaffar’s superlative translation puts it:

Summon Bulleh Shah for Shah Inayat
has brought us to the door,
Whose love do I whirl bedecked
in varied shades of green and red.
Whilst dancing rapturously
Beloved I found thee;
Love for you makes me whirl in ecstasy.

Meanwhile, in the present, vertiginous fury strikes as I walk the marble lined forecourt which surrounds the shrine itself. Bulleh Shah, for all his unorthodoxy, now lies under the shadow of a high-rise concrete minaret, one which is as alien to the milieu that surrounds it, as I suspect bulleh would today have be in our age of myopic religious fixity. And if there was any propriety left, any modicum of magical mysticism, the department of auqaf ensures the last cruel twist – for at the feet of the sarcophagus lies a chipped deep green metal donation box, double padlocked and sealed.

This for man who eschewed so famously, the vices of materialism and pretences of social standing. Of his many verses that have passed down the ages, I think of how Bulleh is said to remarked:

Aa Bullaya chal authay chaliye
Jithe baithan saare anne
Naan koyee saadi zaat pacchaane
Te naan koyee sanoon manne

Come O Bulley, let us go;
where sit only the blind
for then, none will know our creed
and none will believe us

But while his true message, particularly his anti-establishment discourse has been whitewashed, fumigated and conscripted into being the lynchpin in a money-spinning enterprise, there is a far more telling insight that the desecration of Bulleh Shah’s message also offers of our contemporary society. A society which seems ebullient in its overdosing on imported plastic culture, in all its ugly manifestations – and it certainly runs deeper than merely gleaming edifices.

Globalization may have its defenders – but to see our contemporary culture turned into an amalgam of the borrowed and the stolen, lacking context or indeed any meaning; it’s not just the philistines who are discontent.

Bulleh’s rustic, earthy idiom openly targeted the incumbency, activism pushing at fetters of what today seems inviolable, even unmentionable boundaries. Take this on trust, for hundreds of years after being interred; I wonder if his words may indeed be too controversial to print today.

But as I turn away, I tell my self that perhaps it is only inevitable that the message of Bulleh shah, like others be steamrolled by the great juggernaut of social conformity. It seem difficult after all, to map the world bulleh shah lived in to our own. For all the centuries that separate us, it seems impossible that anybody could so thoroughly and completely re-interpret the conventions of society and live to tell the tale. Here where rivers froth with blood for far less.

Our regression into the insular dogmatism and the inability to respect differences has cost us profoundly. Where our rich heritage of liberal pluralism has slowly eroded, supplanted by the intolerance of others, so have the ilk of bulleh and other of the Sufi tradition vanished. Men who questioned the status quo, and who are indelibly liked to a period of great renaissance, of cultural experimentation, of progress and ideological creativity. So much of the poetry that our languages are celebrated for is traced to this epoch where differences of opinion existed and were even encouraged. Where music, art and ideologies from across the world melted, mixed and reformed.

This is significant not just as a romantic lamenting the stagnation of one of the most colourful facets of our culture, but really, even more functionally relevant.

For this spirit of inquiry that comes about from minds unfettered, liberated from the pettiness of conventionality; basking in the fire that questions, that has no respect for incumbency, is what drives society, all of society forward.

Today, where ’Pakistan studies’ begins in 1857- and forms the only tenuous link to a rich past we slowly forget, and unlearn – our apathy leads us into casting ’liberalism’ as an alien principal, a precept somehow foreign and even wrong.

Its seems little wonder then, that the decedents of those who crafted the mausoleums of Multan, such as that of Shah Rukh-e-Alam today seem happy erecting callous edifices that are a testament to nothing but our own colossal failure of imagination.