Every Gallian remembers the last bend in the road. You come up from Rawalpindi with the pines closing overhead, the air thinning in the way it does nowhere else, and then the hill opens and the College is simply there — grey stone, unhurried, looking much as it looked the year you arrived with a tin trunk.
I made that drive again in May 2026, this time with a laptop bag rather than a trunk, for a reason that would have baffled the boy who first climbed those steps: a new website, and the digitalizing of how the place runs.
The Brief
On paper it was ordinary — the work one of my firms, Umaish Solutions, does for institutions and businesses around the world. A school needs a website. Parents need the admissions form. Prospective families, many of whom will never manage the drive before deciding, need to see what life here looks like.
In practice, nothing about it was ordinary. Most clients hand you brand guidelines and a list of pages. The College handed me a hundred and sixty-six years of institutional memory and a motto — Never Give In — that I had recited long before I understood it. Sir Henry Lawrence left those words at the Lucknow Residency, and the College built in his name in 1860 has left every Gallian since to work out what they mean. You do not put that on a homepage carousel and move on.
What the Site Had to Carry
The College is not one thing. Three different worlds — the Junior, Preparatory and Senior Schools — share one hundred acres; there is the academic record, the curriculum, the faculty and the results; and there is pastoral care, which is what parents think about at two in the morning.
Then there are the fixtures. I admit a bias: in my memory Wightwick mattered rather more than anything on my timetable, and an Inter-House final carried a weight nothing in a classroom did. Fixtures, results and Inter-House competitions therefore sit alongside music, drama, art and societies — a boy in the Prep School should find last term’s results as easily as his father finds the fee structure.
Most clients hand you brand guidelines. The College handed me a hundred and sixty-six years of institutional memory.
Then the part that will matter most to readers of the Journal: the Old Gallians. The alumni register, the notable alumni, the obituaries we would rather not need, and the magazine itself — in English and in Urdu — now sit where they can be found. A Gallian in Karachi should be no further from the College than one in Murree.
For the shop talk: the site is hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with PHP behind the admissions, enquiry and alumni registers; it took a month to build and two more to survive scrutiny, and went live in August 2026 at lawrencecollege.edu.pk. It is mobile-responsive, loads on the connection the hills offer in bad weather, and simple enough for College staff to keep current.
The People
This was assembled with real patience on the College’s side, and with the backing of the Principal, Brig. Jawad Ahmed Zaka, SI(M) (Retd), whose insistence that character and merit come before appearances is a serviceable brief for a designer too.
Mr. Amjad Mehmood, HOD Computer Science, Senior School, and Mr. Najam us Saqib, Computer Science, Prep School, supplied the institutional detail no outsider could have known — the corrections, the approvals, the quiet “actually, that date is wrong.” Ms Kiran, Computer Science, Junior School, held the content together through several rounds of review. Whatever accuracy the site has is largely theirs; the errors are mine.
I owe a particular debt to two Old Gallians, Saquib Munir Ahmed (Inter 1979) and Ali Qazi (Inter 2001), whose introduction and encouragement brought the project to my desk. Gallians look after one another. That is not sentiment; it is observably true.
The Last Bend
I have been asked whether it felt strange to render the College in code. It did not. The site is only the newest object in a long line — the crest redrawn in 1926, the College Alumni Journal you are holding — that holds the place still long enough to be looked at properly. Stone weathers slowly; websites rather faster. This one will need looking after.
But the hill will still be there at the last bend, and so will the two words underneath it all.
Never Give In.
A Note on the Gift
The website was designed, built and given to the College. Everything it holds — the history, the photographs, the rolls of Principals and Head Boys, the calendar, the words on every page — belongs to Lawrence College. The gift is the site itself, not what it carries.
What the site collects, and why, is set out in the Privacy Notice; how it is built to be usable by everyone is set out in the Accessibility Statement. The site is kept current by College staff — if something on it is wrong or out of date, the College Office would be glad to know.