Dr Afzal Mirza

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN MUSIC AND POETRY

2007-01-11T10:34:00.000-05:00

By Dr Afzal Mirza

There was a time when Mushaira culture was in vogue in Lahore. In his autobiography Intezar Hussain wrote of the Lahore after the 1947 partition when a large number of poets migrated to this city and Mushairas were commonly organised. "Almost everyday there would be a Mushaira somewhere," he wrote. And many poets who participated in these Mushairas read out their creations in a melodious way called tarannum. The term meant the melodious singing of a nazm or a ghazal without the accompaniment of music. My father used to tell me thatAllama Iqbal would recite his poetry in tarannum. Hafeez Jallundhri was another poet who recited his poetry in tarannum. Actually Hafeez knew the basics of classical music. He has also recited his Shahnama-e-Islam on Radio Pakistan in the accompaniment of Sarangi played byUstad Bundu Khan. Another poet who used to recite his poetry in tarannum was Ehsan Danish and because of this characteristic he was in great demand throughout India. But after the partition he gave up tarannum altogether.In an inter-school Mushaira in 1949 -- when I was a school kid --some known poets participated and many of those were the poets mentioned by Intezar Husain. One of these was Iqbal Safipuri who stole the show at this Mushaira. He was a thin man with a lean but melodious voice. He became a celebrity in Lahore in the early 1950s. At about the same time, the Red Cross organised a Mushaira in thePunjab University hall. Among the participating poets, was JigarMuradabadi who was known for his excellent rendition of poetry in tarannum. He was a dark-complexioned man with a black beard and was wearing a black sherwani with a black Jinnah cap in the Red Cross Mushaira. The edges of his mouth were smeared with excessive chewing of paan but he kept the audience spellbound with his beautiful tarannum:
Jab tak keh ghm-e-insaan say Jigar insaan kadil ma'mur nahin
Jannat sahi yeh dunya lekin jannat say jahannumdoor nahin
The show, however, was stolen by a young teenage girl -- all dressed in white called Zahra Nigah. She had a young and fresh voice then which touched every one's heart. It was for the first time that a woman had dared to enter the domain of Mushaira, hitherto exclusively monopolised by men. But her appearance changed the earlier trend altogether and people also started inviting women poets to theMushairas. Zahra Nigah, the elder sister of Anwar Maqsood and Fatima Surayya Bajya, had migrated from Hyderabad Deccan. After a couple of appearances in Mushairas she got married and migrated to the UK where she is now living a life of relative obscurity.Among others who made their debut in that Mushaira was one HabibJalib. A young man with long hair and nicely cut features, Jalib also succeeded in impressing the audience with his beautiful rendering of his famous ghazal:
Aik hamein awara kehnakoi barra ilzam nahin
Dunya walay dilwalon ko aur bohat kuch kehtay hain
Only Jigar, Zahra Nigah and Jalib were repeatedly called to the stage during this Mushaira. Afterwards, Jalib became a star poet. He had his own individual style of presenting his poetry and unlike other poets he maintained it till the end.Another poet who started as a tarannum poet was Qateel Shifai and his earlier rise to fame was due to his good voice but in his early forties he gave it all up. Nasir Kazmi was also one of those poets who could render his ghazals in tarannum but he gave it up at a later stage in his life. Tufail Hoshiarpuri was yet another poet blessed with good voice. He knew the intricacies of classical music as well. Zameer Jafri and Shaukat Thanvi also recited their poetry in tarannum, though their tarannum did not produce the desired effect. Also in 1950s, it was the Majlis-e-Iqbal of the Government College which had banned tarannum during its annual Mushaira. But in some of the meetings of the Majlis, Shakoor Bedil used to recite with tarannum on demand. The ban on tarranum was due to the fact that during the competition it was not possible to compare the poets who recited their poetry with tarannum with those who did not. I remember Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum asking Shakoor to recite a poem for him.Once Shakoor also recited M D Taseer's poem: Maan bhi jao/Janay bhido /Chorro bhi ab pichli batain. Shakoor Bedil had a trained voice.He was also the first playback singer of Pakistan. He sang for the movie Shahida as A Shakoor. At that time he was studying in the M A O .College Lahore. He was a short, dark and balding man who joined theGovernment College for his masters when he was in his thirties. His younger brother Khayyam is a known Indian composer.Many years later in one of the Oriental College Mushairas, a new poet stole the show. His name was Kalim Usmani:
Atish-e-gham to barrhaktihai mere seenay mein
Aanch kiyon aap kayrukhsar tak aa pohnchi hai
Usmani was a prote´ge of Ehsan Danish who had a large number of pupils. Usmani ended up writing for movies and produced many memorable songs. Saqib Zeervi was another tarannam poet much in demand in the Mushaira circuit. One of the poets who had a voice comparable to that of Jalib was Muzaffar Warisi. He became popular during 1960s and during Zia's dictatorship, he turned towards naatwriting. He is now a popular naat writer besides Mansur Tabish. Like Jalib, however, Warisi has maintained the quality of his voice even in the old age. There was one Rifat Sultan -- a poet from Shorkot --who used to present his poetry in compositions derived from ragas.Aiman Kalyan is quite a favourite raga among the poets and many of them presented their poetry in it. I remember an excellent poet from Jhang named Ram Riaz who had beautiful voice and wrote ghazals of high quality:
Tum to dunya kay mukhalif thay magar yehkiya hua
Tum peh hi chorr gayarang zamana apnna
As a student of the Government College Jhang, Ram along with his close friend Mahmood Sham participated in many inter-collegiateMushairas. Ram Riaz, being extremely sensitive, served as a teacher at many places and died prematurely. Then there was and is Aqeel Rubi who appeared a little later and could steal the Mushairas with his melodious voice. A teacher by profession, he has now given up reciting his poetry in tarannum.Among women poets, Zahra Nigah was later replaced by Munawwar Sultana Lakhnavi but she was no match for Zahra as far as the quality of poetry and presentation was concerned. She came into limelight because there was no one else to take the baton. A Sahiwal poet Bismil Sabri, also a protege of Qateel Shifai, also had good quality voice.Music and poetry are two inseparable things. Anyone who does not have a taste for music cannot compose balanced poetry. After all what distinguishes poetry from prose is the rhythm and the rhyme scheme.Barring prose poems, all other poetry is written according to certain rhyme scheme. Many poets who normally did not present their poetry in tarannum had an ear for music. Major Ishaq has written in his introduction to Zindan Nama that Faiz used to hum his verses while composing them. Some other poets who did not read their poetry in tarranum, in fact, lacked a quality voice.But the advent of the electronic media and the easy availability of a trained voice of a professional singer has changed the whole scenario. Now a poet needs not to be melodious to impress his audience. He can pass on his poetry to a reputed singer to sing and become famous as a result. The fact, however, remains, that with Mushairas becoming rare, the poets who presented their poetry in tarannum have also become few and far between.(Taken from Jang)

WHY DID MANTO MIGRATE TO PAKISTAN?

2007-01-03T17:13:00.000-05:00

Ace story writer Saadat Hasan Manto arrived in Pakistan sometimes in the beginning of February 1948 that is only six months after the partition of the sub-continent. They say that he was well-established in the Bombay’s film industry as a story and dialogue writer.He had personal friendships with most of the actors and producers of that period which can also be found in his collection of sketches written under the title Ganje Farishte (The featherless angels). Bombay was and perhaps continues to be the city generally considered as melting pot of different ethnic and religious groups. There were so many Muslims there who belonged to the areas that later on became part of Pakistan and they chose to remain there even after the partition. So what compelled Manto to leave India and settle in Pakistan? In his sketch of actor Shayam written under the title Murli Ki Dhun Manto has shed light on his mental condition at the time of partition and his decision to migrate to Pakistan.
He writes,”Those days when there was a bloody tussle going on between Hindus and Muslims on the partition of India and thousands of people of both the factions were being killed every day Shayam and I were sitting with a Sikh family that had migrated from Rawalpindi . The members of the family were narrating the tales of their woes which were very depressing. Shayam couldn’t remain unaffected by them. I could easily understand the disturbance that was shaking his mind .When we left that place I asked Shayam,’I am a Muslim. Don’t you feel like killing me?’.Shayam replied very seriously,’Not now….but when he was telling me the atrocities committed by Muslims on them I could have killed you.’ Hearing this from Shayam gave a big blow to my heart. May be at that time even I could have killed him. But afterwards when I thought over it and found that there was an enormous difference between the thinking of that period and now and then I could understand psychological background of all these riots resulting in the killing of thousands of innocent Hindus and Muslims.’Not now….at that time yes…why?’.If one closely follows he can find the true answer to the nature of human beings behind this problem.”
Manto then goes on to narrate the immediate reasons behind his decision to migrate. He writes,” The communal hatred was increasing day by day in Bombay. When Ashok Kumar and Wacha got the control of Bombay Talkies the important positions all went to Muslims. This resulted in a wave of hatred among the Hindu staff of the Bombay Talkies.Wacha received anonymous letters in which he was threatened with burning down the studio or killing important people. Wacha and Ashok did not give much imporatnce to these letters but being a sensitive person and a Muslim I was giving due importance to the situation and many times I mentioned my concern to Ashok and Wacha advising them to relieve me from Bombay Talkies. Actually Hindus were thinking that whatever was happening in Bombay Talkies was due to me.. But they (Ashok and Wacha) would say ‘Are you insane?’ I was really insane perhaps. My wife and children were in Pakistan when it was a part of India . From time to time some Hindu-Muslim riots would take place in that area but I understood it. But what this new name had made of that piece of land was beyond my comprehension.What is self rule? I had no concept of it……I couldn’t understand which was my country Hindustan or Pakistan and whose blood was spilling so callously every day? Where would they bury or burn those bones whose flesh had been devoured by vultures. Now that we had become independent who would be our slaves? And there was the question whether we had actually got independence or not?.There were answers to these question but those were Indian Answers, Pakistani Answers and British Answers….Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries—slave of prejudice…slave of religious fanaticism…slave of barbarity and inhumanity.”
Manto writes about the final moments of his departure in these words,” Shayam would look at me and smile although he knew my state of mind. I was very upset as to why Shayam did not think like me…but perhaps he had reached the conclusion that it was futile to ponder over what was going on in our envirionment.I thought a lot but could not come to any conclusion. At last getting fed up I said,’Okay let me go from here..’Shayam had night shooting. I started packing my baggage. The whole night I did it.In the morning Shayam came back from shooting. He saw my packed baggage and only asked me,’Are you going?’I also said only,Yes..’And after that we did not say a word about ‘migration’ (hijrat). He helped me in collecting the rest of the baggage and kept telling me stories of his previous night shooting and laughed. When it was the time of my departure he took out a bottle of brandy from the closet and made two pegs and handing me one said,’Hiptulla !’. I also said in return ‘Hiptulla” and with a big laughter he dragged me to his broad chest saying,’ you swine..’.I tried to stop my tears and he raised a sincere slogan,’Pakistan Zindabad’..’Zindabad Bharat..’ I said and went downstairs where truck was waiting for me. ” Manto came to Pakistan by a steamer and after disembarking in Karachi travelled to Lahore by train. Manto’s narrative in this sketch shows that there could be two main reasons for his migration to Pakistan. Firstly he missed his family who were already in Lahore and secondly he was not sure about his future because of the communal hatred that had reached Bombay as well. Manto mentions of a letter that Shayam wrote to him from Bombay that says,” Every one remembers you here. They miss your humorous anecdotes.Wacha thinks that you have dodged him because you left for Pakistan without informing him. It is ironic that one who was foremost in opposing the entry of Muslims in Bombay Talkies was the first one to escape to Pakistan making himself the martyr of his own ideology. This is Wacha’s point of view.”
Manto’s contemporary writer Upinder Nath Ashk on the other hand had a different story to tell about Manto’s decision of migrating to Pakistan. During early 1940s Ahmad Shah Bukhari (Patras Bukhari) had engaged a number of important writers in All India Radio where he was the director general. Among those writers were Krishan Chandar, Manto, Ghulam Abbas, Upinder Nath Ashk, Noon Meem Rashed, Mahmood Nizami, Meera ji and others. So there was a spirit of competition among these writers. In an article entitled Manto—Mera Dost Mera Dushman(Manto—My Friend, My Foe)Upinder Nath Ashk wrote about his antipathy and a strange type of friendship with Manto. He wrote, “ Manto had written about Bari Sahib( Bari Alig) that he was very sensitive person . But as I saw Manto he seemed to be influenced by Bari Sahib although he did not know this aspect of his character. The circumstances in which Manto disappeared from Delhi one day were almost similar to those in which he ran away from Bombay to Pakistan. In Delhi I was responsible for his flight but in Bombay it was Nazir Ajmeri. But in reality Manto was also himself responsible for this flight. In fight as long as he was on the giving end he was happy but when others would start using his tactics he used to run away. Talking about Nazit Ajmeri’s opposition that caused his flight from Bombay Manto once wrote,’ I thought a lot but could not understand anything. Then I told myself,’ Manto Bhai…you won’t find any way if you go straight so stop the car…go through the side street and from the side street I came to Pakistan.”” Ashk had thought that Manto could not compete with him in Delhi so he escaped to Bombay. In his article Ashk also mentions of strained relations between Manto and Rashed as he was also in his words “an authoritarian type..” Though Manto’s superiority over his contemporaries was unchallenged yet his problem was that he could not tolerate any criticism or would not allow any one to change any word or sentence in his writings which generally caused heart burning among them. But the question is if Manto left Delhi because of Ashk then why did he call him to Bombay to take up a job in Bombay Talkies? Ashk says that Manto did it to show his superiority over him. But it was common with Manto to help his friends to get jobs in Bombay’s film industry. He invited Ahmad Nadim Qasmi as well who went there but did not like the environment and came back. Ashk writes,” Although Ashok and Wacha were Manto’s friends and Manto joined Bombay Talkies with them but Manto couldn’t give any story there.Once when I asked Ashok as to why Manto left he said that he had written a story but we decided to take Kamal Amrohi’s ‘Mahal’. Manto did not say a word before leaving although we had said that after this we would make his story but he did not listen to us.’….Actually he got involved in such people there whom he had forced earlier to leave Filmistan. Yes, Ashok and Wacha did receive some letters because of placing Muslims in important positions but it was not easy to burn the studio and become jobless.Neither Shahid Latif, nor Nazir Ajmeri got scared due to these letters. The main reason of Manto’s disappointment was firstly the selection of the story of Nazir Ajmeri and secondly that of Kamal Amrohi. The day Manto found out about Kamal Amrohi’s story he decided to leave Bombay….Manto ran away from the arena due to his great egocentricity and perhaps that was the reason of his greatness.” (End)

CREATING MAGIC REALISM IN SOLITUDE

2006-07-12T10:41:00.000-05:00

Dr Afzal Mirza

While receiving Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez told his audience ,” I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.” This ”outsized reality” that the author of The Hundred Years of Solitude referred to and which was termed by critics as Magic Realism catapulted this prolific Colombian writer to the position of the most outstanding fiction writer of the present times. His hallmark is exaggerated realism interpersed by doses of fantasy that provides a metaphysical flavor to his writings. He is a story-teller par excellance and no wonder that by many he is considered as the greatest living writer.
Gabo, as he is popularly known among his Spanish compatriots was born in the Colombian coastal village of Aracataca in 1928. Situated at the northren most tip of the South America known as banana area this small town of his childhood was always called by him as “a wonderful place of ‘bandits and dancers’. Of those days he says,”My parents were poor. My father worked as a telegraphist. When my father wanted to marry the daughter of Col. Nicolas Marquez her family opposed it. After the wedding my father took a job in another town far from Aracataca…When my mother became pregnant with me in a gesture of reconciliation my grandparents said,’Come have the baby in our house.’Which she gladly did. After a while my mother returned to the village my father was working in and so my grandparents said,’Leave Gabriel with us to raise.’ The family was poor. Later on when my parents returned to Aracataca I went on living with my grandparents—where I was mostly very happy. I did that till I was eight when my grandfather died.”
For formal schooling he was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city at the mouth of the Magdalena River. After winning a scholarship later he went to a school near Bogota but he did not like Bogota finding it “dismal and oppressive.” H e was good at his studies but at the same time he was drawn towards literature and wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons. Against his temperament Gabriel’s parents were interested in making him study law so he went back to Bogota. In his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale he writes about those days,” I just dropped out of the faculty of law after six semesters devoted almost entirely to reading whatever I could get my hands on, and reciting from memory the unrepeatable poetry of the Spanish Golden Age. I already had read in translation and in borrowed editions all the books I would have needed to learn the novelist’s craft and had published six stories in newspaper supplements winning the attention of critics.”
When he was twenty three he adopted a lifestyle wherein he smoked sixty cigarettes a day of “most barbaric tobacco.” He writes,” For reasons of poverty rather than taste I anticipated what would be the style in twenty year’s time: untrimmed moustache, tousled hair, jeans, flowered shirts and pilgrim’s sandals.” His friends especially the girls thought him to be a “lost cause”. It was earlier when he had just finished his school and was preparing to go to Law School in Bogota he was introduced to a 13 year old girl named Mercedes Barcha Pardo. Dark and silent, of Egyptian decent, she was "the most interesting person" he had ever met. After he graduated from the Liceo Nacional, he took a small vacation with his parents before leaving for the University. During that time, he proposed to her. Agreeing, but first wishing to finish school, she put off the engagement. Although they wouldn't be married for another fourteen years, Mercedes promised to stay true to him. About this once he talked to journalist Claudia Dreifus ,”We became engaged in 1952 when I was working for Bogota newspaper El Espectador. Before the wedding the paper gave me the opportunity to go to Europe as its foreign correspondent. So I had to choose between doing something that I always wanted to do and the wedding. When I discussed it with Mercedes she said,’ It is better for you to go to Europe.’….However it was not very long before the dictator Rojas Pinilla shut down El Spectador leaving me stranded in Paris and broke. So I cashed the return part of my air ticket and used the money to continue living in Europe. I stayed there three years. She was absolutely certain I’d return. Everyone told her she was crazy….From Paris I wrote to Mercedes every week And after we were married to force her argument she would always say that you wrote such and such thing in your letters.” Settling in the Latin Quarter, he lived off credit, the kindness of his landlady, and money scraped up returning bottles for their deposits. Those days, influenced by the writings of Hemingway, he typed out eleven drafts of No One Writes to the Colonel. But he always acknowledged the major influence of Faulkner on his writings.
Subsequently he returned to Columbia to marry Mercedes and moved to Venezuela for a few years and then arrived in New York as the correspondent of Cuba’s news agency Prensa Latina. Having been associated with Fidel Castro of Cuba his entry was banned in his home country and USA. However the ban to enter his home country was lifted when he became a Nobel Laureate and Bill Clinton an ardent fan of Gabriel’s fiction removed restrictions on his entry to USA when he became the president. In the meantime he had moved to Mexico since 1961.The most interesting thing is that majority of his books were published because of his friends. He began his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude when he was 18. Only in 1967 after many years of struggle and frustration in writing it was published in Argentina and famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote,” a literary earthquake has shaken Latin America.” The critics regarded the book as a masterpiece of the art of fiction. Again it were his friends who took the manuscript of Leaf Storm (1955) to the printer when they found it on his desk after he was gone to Italy in1954. Llosa remarked that,” the truth is that without the obstinacy of his friends Garcia Marquez would perhaps still today be an unknown writer.” Autumn of the Patriarch considered to be the best modern portrait of a tyrant was published in 1975, and it was a drastic departure from both the subject and tone of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book was initially considered a disappointment by the critics, who were most likely expecting another book of A Hundred Years of Solitude type. Opinion has changed over the years, however, and many now consider this novel of shifting realities to be a minor masterpiece all in its own right.
Having leftist leanings Garcia Marquez was upset when Pinochet took over control of Chile in a coup de tat in which Salvador Allende was assassinated. He decided that he would write no more fiction until the American-supported Pinochet stepped down from his control of Chile, a decision he later rescinded. Now a famous writer, he was becoming more aware of his own political power and his increased clout and financial security enabled him to pursue his interests in political activism. Returning to Mexico City, he purchased a new house and stepped up his personal campaign to influence the world around him. Building on his actions of the last few years, he continued to divert some of his money into political and social causes. Politics, however, was not the subject of his next novel. Rather it was a love story. Turning again to his rich past for inspiration and material, he reworked his parent's strange courtship into the form of a decades-spanning narrative. In 1986 Love in the Time of Cholera was published which was well received.By now one of the most famous writers in the world, he bought residences in Mexico City, Cartagena, Cuernavaca, Paris, Barcelona, and Barranquilla and took part in the fields of his choice i.e. teaching, political activism and writing. In 1990 he wrote The General in his Labyrinth and two years later Strange Pilgrims. In 1994 he published his work of fiction, Love and Other Demons. This was followed in 1996 by News of a Kidnapping, a journalistic work detailing the atrocities of the Colombian drug trade. In 1999 he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and currently he is steadfastly fighting against this treacherous disease. Still he has not abandoned his first love i.e. writing. The first volume of his memoirs was published in 2001 as Living to Tell the Tale. The epitaph of the book reads,” Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” In 2004 appeared his last novel Memories of My Sad Whores. The second part of his memoirs is in the pipeline.(End)

THE STORY OF A DASTAANGO

2006-06-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ashfaq Ahmad utilised the techniques of modern media very well to do what he was best at -- telling stories

By Dr Afzal Mirza
In olden days when the written word was not much in vogue, there used to be people who would narrate stories in nightly gatherings which continue till the wee hours. The audience would sit totally absorbed in their tales of love, hatred, debauchery and chivalrous adventures. Had Ashfaq Ahmad lived during those days, he would be surely one of the top storytellers of his time. He would enthrall his audiences in the street of Peshawar, Lahore or Delhi. Or he might have lived and died in Garh Muktasir -- a small town of Ferozepur district -- unsung and unheard of.
Born in Garh Muktasir, Ashfaq came to Lahore during the upheaval of partition with many other people of his ilk. After settling down, they started holding gatherings in Lahore's Pak Tea House. They came from all parts of India. A Hamid -- a contemporary and a close friend of Ashfaq Ahmad -- in his writings drew beautiful picture of those days.
Among them were Ashfaq Ahmad, Ibne Insha, Sahir Ludhianvi, Zaheer Kashmiri, Safdar Mir, Ahmad Rahi, Intizar Husain, Hameed Akhtar and many younger writers who later became famous in Pakistan's literary circles. Initially they exchanged their experiences of partition because all of them had to wade through rivers of blood and fire to reach their adopted homes in Lahore. Soon they started putting down their feelings.
Many of them joined a radical movement called Progressive Writers Association. Some others were more interested in keeping an independent stance. Ashfaq Ahmad, though close to the progressive writers, did not join the movement and followed Manto, Intizar Husain and others in remaining independent of any associational identity.
I first saw Ashfaq Ahmad in Government College, Lahore, in early 1950s. I was a first year student there while Ashfaq Ahmad was in his final year of masters in Urdu. He was a handsome person with a fair complexion, brownish mustaches and a thick crop of hair on his head.
But he was a famous man even then. His juniors, including I, used to watch him with awe and envy. We were impressed with him because of his proximity to our teachers like Sufi Tabassum, Dr Sadiq, Safdar Mir, G M Asar and others.
Besides these famous teachers, Government College of those days had many students who were budding writers and who in later years made a name for themselves. But Ashfaq Ahmad, despite his friendly nature was more at home with his Pak Tea House buddies than he was with his college fellows. That was the period when Manto had written a number of masterpieces on the subject of partition as did many other senior writers like Ahmad Nadim Qasmi, Krishan Chandar and Rajindar Singh Bedi. It was in those heady days that a story entitled Gadarya (The Shepherd) created ripples in the literary circles. The story was written by Ashfaq Ahmad and soon his name became known throughout the subcontinent. Somewhat autobiographical it was the story of a Hindu school master who tutored Ashfaq Ahmad. The man was the model of a devoted teacher. An enlightened man, the old teacher called Dao Ji had as much knowledge of Arabic and Persian and for that matter Islam as many Muslims would not have. That is why when a Muslim mob encircled him and asked him to recite Kalima he shot back "which Kalima?" because he knew all the Kalimas. Gadarya was a moving description of the state of mind of human beings affected by the mutual hatred between different religious factions. This story catapulted Ashfaq Ahmad to the level of one of great short story writers of the subcontinent.
Even during his student days, Ashfaq Ahmad was writing for Radio Pakistan where he made many friends who included people like Mahmood Nizami, Masood Qureshi and Mumtaz Mufti. After completion of his masters, he joined Dayal Singh College Lahore as a lecturer. Situated in the heart of the city, this college had many writers on its faculty including Abid Ali Abid, Tajwar Najibabadi, Anjum Roomani, Shohrat Bukhari and Sajjad Rizvi.
But Ashfaq Ahmad was a restless soul who always longed for travel and learning. The opportunity to fulfil these desires came his way when he was offered a position in Italy where he was to work for the Urdu section of Radio Rome. In his story Fullbright, Ashfaq Ahmad has described how he managed to collect funds for traveling to Rome and how in this venture he was helped by a beggar. The story showed how Ashfaq Ahmad always looked for special traits among ordinary people whom he called babas. These babas became the subject of his talk shows after the advent of television.
Back from Italy, Ashfaq Ahmad married a former fellow student, Bano Qudsia (a famous writer in her own right). He also started a monthly magazine Dastaan Go. It was a unique magazine in the sense that it was shorter in size than other magazines. Ashfaq Ahmad used to design and print its title himself by a technique he had learnt from Italy. In editing he was assisted by his wife Bano Qudsia. The magazine remained in circulation for quite some time. But the venture did not succeed because firstly it was a purely prose magazine and secondly Ashfaq Ahmad was a writer not a businessman.
Then came 1958 and Ayub Khan imposed martial law in Pakistan. Ayub was advised by people like Qudratullah Shahab to expropriate Pakistan Times and other papers published by Progressive Papers Ltd. After these papers were taken over by the government, Ashfaq Ahmad was appointed the editor of one of them, weekly Lail-o-Nahar. Before him the magazine was edited by Syed Sibte Hasan.
Ashfaq Ahmad had the distinction of being first Pakistani editor whom Ayub Khan gave an interview. Though Ashfaq Ahmad tried to maintain the standard of the magazine but after the government take-over the circulation of all PPL papers nose-dived. Ashfaq Ahmad quit his job and was replaced by his teacher Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum as the editor of Lail-o-Nahar.
The journal seized publication after some time. It was then that Ashfaq Ahmad thought of starting a radio programme, Talqin Shah. The programme was a great success because Ashfaq Ahmad spoke in his native dialect and discussed day to day problems faced by common people with his companions. The programme contributed in a big way towards the media propaganda during 1965 Indo-Pak war.
It seems there were several agendas in Ashfaq Ahmad's mind at the same time. One of them was film making which also proved to be a commercially futile venture. Then TV came into the lives of Pakistanis and Ashfaq Ahmad wrote teleplays and serials that became very popular. Soon his name became a guarantee for the success of the play. He adapted his short stories from his book Aik Muhabbat Sau Afsanay into TV dramas, treating TV viewers to his crisp dialogues and beautiful treatment of the subject matter.
One side effect of his TV activities was that he stopped writing for the magazines. He did not produce any novel or collection of short stories during that period. Ashfaq Ahmad's fame as a prolific and popular writer made him a favourite with changing regimes of the country, especially the military governments who would like to take advantage of his writing skills. Ashfaq Ahmad, whose earlier writings were directly inspired by the problems of common people, had great communicative value for the governments who continued banking upon him without realising how much harm they were causing to his literary abilities in the process.
Of late Ashfaq Ahmad veered into mysticism under the influence of Qudratullah Shahab, Mumtaz Mufti and Masood Qureshi. He embarked on a new path that made some of his writings enigmatic to ordinary readers or viewers. His popularity, however, never waned.
During the last stage of his life, he reverted to TV and staged talk shows wherein he would keep his audience absorbed in his God-gifted capacity to speak alone for hours, telling anecdotes and stories about extraordinary traits found among common people -- his babas.
Last time I met him a few years ago at a dinner thrown by our common friend Dr Zia Samad, who was Ashfaq Ahmad's colleague in Dayal Singh College and later in Italy. I found that in real life he looked flabbier than what he appeared on the television. The gray beard had given him a look of elderliness and piety.
He was a modern day storyteller who lived in the age of printing presses and audiovisual electronic devices but still he was able to captivate his readers and listeners with his artistic rendition of stories and anecdotes.

in

AHMAD RAHI--THE LYRICAL POET OF PUNJAB

2006-05-10T20:48:00.000-05:00

By Dr Afzal Mirza

It was some time in 1952 that Ahmad Rahi's first book of Punjabi poetry appeared under the title of Trinjan. The book directly touched the sensibility of the reader
The theme of partition inspired many writers, mostly prose writers. Among them Saadat Manto stands out as the one who contributed the largest number of writings on this theme. In Urdu literature there are few poems on the subject which include Faiz's Subh-e-Azaadi and Qasmi's Phir Achanak Teergi Mein Aa Gae.
It goes to the credit of Ahmad Rahi that he wrote highly inspiring poems on the subject in Punjabi. One can also mention the famous poem by Amrita Preetam in which she addresses Waris Shah to wake up and see the plight of the blood-bathed Punjab. That poem became a classic.
Ahmad Rahi, who began as a promising Urdu poet and edited Savera, the journal of progressive writers, wrote his first Punjabi poem which was rendered as a song in one of the eraliest Pakistani films, Beli. Written by Saadat Hasan Manto and directed by Masud Parvez on the theme of partition, the film flopped at the box office.
It depicted the sorrowful plight of a girl kidnapped during the riots in East Punjab. When she was recovered by special recovery force and brought to Pakistan, her parents refused to accept her. Based on a true story, the film could not be properly filmed due to the lack of technical facilities in Lahore's only studio.
It was sometimes in 1952 that Ahmad Rahi's first book of Punjabi poetry appeared under the title of Trinjan. The book left the literary circles flabbergasted by its pathos and diction reminiscent of Punjab's folk tradition. It directly touched the sensibility of the reader.
The book brought into focus the old question of whether the Punjabi language could produce literature to match other languages, specially Urdu literature. Today the situation is different when much work has been done on unearthing the hidden treasures of Punjabi literature and a whole lot of Punjabi writers have started seriously writing in Punjabi.
In the early 1950s, it was a pioneering effort by Ahmad Rahi and the work he produced stands out as a landmark in Punjabi literature. One wonders why Rahi, who had made a name in Urdu poetry, chose to switch over to Punjabi and produce Trinjan.
Perhaps Punjabi was much nearer to the sensibility of Rahi because during his childhood he used to recite Yusuf Zulekha to his mother and while reciting some verses his eyes would fill with tears. Rahi has derived the pathos in his poetry from the condition of the common Punjabi girl who is not treated any better than animals in our feudal setup. Even the girl in his partition poems is a poor common female.
Jay enhan de mehlin ja ke
Choorre de chankare lutt
kharr de vanjare
Fer mein vekhdi mariye maye eh ucche mehlan vale
sarkare darbare jinhan hath khudai
Ucche ho ho behnde patke
ban ban behnde
(Trinjan)
Another aspect of Rahi's poetry is the influence of Punjabi folk tales and folk music. The folk heroines Heer, Sahiban, Sohni all are present as living characters. In one of the poems Je tu Mirza hondion Ranjhia Rahi gives a new dimension to the tale of Heer Ranjha in which Ranjha is shown as a passive character. Rahi compares him with the chivalrous character of Mirza and in his poem. Heer laments that if Ranjha had been like Mirza then she would not have to take poison. Then the story would have been different. For Rahi, Heer becomes the symbol of a typical Punjabi girl:
Kikli kaleer di
Chalaan pai maar di jawani
jatti Heer di
His fixation with the character of Heer is evident from the script and songs that he wrote for the famous movie Heer Ranjha. In another poem the poet advises Sohni:
Kache gharre dagha de jande
Pohanch ke advichkare
Ni mutiare vanjh karan vanjare
In an article on Ahmad Rahi's poetry, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi wrote, "There is lot of passion in his Urdu poetry but the people are now observing that in order to present his creative skills in a more vivid manner he has chosen a new course. And his gait on this new course is so beautiful and attractive that it has surprised the people of Punjab. After reading and listening to Rahi's poetry, they are saying that our Punjabi language is so sweet and flexible. It is due to Rahi's Punjabi poetry that people have now wiped the dust from the books of Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Ali Haider and Khawaja Farid and have started reading them... I remember that four or five years ago Amrita Preetam's famous poem Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu was published here for the first time,.I found..many...persons keeping its copy. When they were alone they would hum it and weep. It is the same with Ahmad Rahi's Trinjan. I don't know how this poem reached the villages but it reached there and I saw in one of the villages that young girls were singing it to the beat of the dholki. The girls kept singing and after some time I felt that their voices were choking because at that time they were singing those lines:
Nan koi sehrian wala aaya
te nan veeran doli tori
Jis de hath jidi banh ai lae
gaya zoro zori "
It is a pity that during the last few decades, Rahi got engaged in writing scripts and songs for movies. But he gave a literary touch to the songs. His role in improving the standard of Punjabi songs was akin to that of Sahir and Qateel in Urdu songs.
Now in his late 70s, Rahi is no longer active in literary or film work. Ill health and some tragedies compounded by pecuniary problems have forced this otherwise lively person into seclusion. Can the Academy of Letters do something for him?
Rahi and his co-travellers
The partition of the subcontinent brought in its wake bloody riots that resulted in the biggest human migration. The worst hit was the province of Punjab, which was partitioned on the basis of religion. No wonder that the Punjabis remember the partition with sorrow and anguish -- when they lost thousands of their dear ones and their ancestral abodes.
In utter destitution they landed on both sides of the border as refugees -- Muslims in Pakistani Punjab and Hindus and Sikhs in Indian Punjab. Among them were many reputed writers who felt emotionally shattered. While they converged from all over India, quite a large number came from East Punjab.
Thus in his autobiography, Intezar Husain talks of a number of writers who came to live in Lahore after partition. The city of Amritsar, not very far from Lahore and being a part of India now, had always boasted a large number of writers and intellectuals who were mostly Muslims. They also came over to Lahore.
Soon after finding shelter these writers resumed their literary activity and most of them gathered under the banner of Progressive Writers Association (PWA). Most were young and full of promise. A.Hameed, fiction writer, in his book on Ibne Insha has very beautifully drawn the picture of their first meetings in the Tea House. He describes how he met Ashfaq Ahmad, Ibne Insha, Safdar Mir and others there. Among these writers there was also Ahmad Rahi, a typical Amritsari.
A.Hameed once told me that Ahmad Rahi, whose real name is Ghulam Ahmad, was his school fellow. "In Amritsari families, at least one young man was supposed to be a wrestler. My own parents wanted me to be a wrestler," A.Hameed said to me.
Ahmad Rahi owed his physical appearance to his quest to become a wrestler at an early stage in his life. But both these friends chose to be writers instead. In Do Mulk Aik Kahani Ibrahim Jalees wrote how these young writers spent those early days after partition, when they were jobless and had nothing else to do, writing and spent days and nights together discussing the problems faced by the Pakistani 'proletariat'.
"We had hardly any money for cigarettes and smoked cheap biries. Safdar Mir would sing in a high-pitched voice these lines of Mahia:
Do pattar anaran de
Sada dukh sun sun ke ronde pathar paharan de
They were totally committed to bringing an equitable social order in the country. And Ibrahim Jalees tells us that when they were in lighter moods, Safdar Mir and Ahmad Rahi would compare the number of push-ups done in their daily routine of exercise.
The activity associated with PWA did not last long. The government that had come closer to America came down with a heavy hand on the communists and their fellow travellers. These writers were either hauled up by the state or gave up activism, finding different vocations for themselves. Many of them tried their luck in the fledgling film industry of Pakistan.

USTAD DAMAN--THE PEOPLE"S POET

2006-05-10T10:44:00.000-05:00

Ustad Daman lived and wrote poetry as someone always on the wrong side of the establishment
By Dr. Afzal Mirza
Ustad Daman was last seen on the funeral of Faiz Ahmad Faiz on November 20, 1984. He appeared terribly ill but he had managed to make it to Model Town to attend the funeral in a rickshaw. Although the mourners were visibly shocked by Faiz's death but whoever saw Daman was shaken by his condition. Those who had seen his wrestler-like figure in good old days could not believe their eyes to see the skeleton-like Daman arriving in the gathering with the help of two people.
There was a close friendship between Faiz and Daman and only a few days prior to former's death both of them had attended a dinner together at Munnoo Bhai's residence. At Faiz's funeral, Ustad kept repeating that it was his turn now. He joined his friend in death only thirteen days later on December 3.
Ustad Daman, whose real name was Chiragh Din, belonged to Lohari Gate, inside the old city of Lahore. His father was a tailor who ran a small shop of his own. His elder brother Feroz Din joined his father in running the shop but young Chiragh was not interested in pursuing the family profession. He instead wanted to get education and find a clerk's job. So he went to school, though this could not get him a clerk's job. Disappointed, he reverted to tailoring and started his own shop. But his heart was sold out to poetry. He would neglect his shop and attend poetry reading functions. He adopted Damdam as his pseudonym, following in the footsteps of his mentor Ustad Hamdam, but changed it to Daman after some time. The break came when he received his first remuneration for reciting poetry in a public meeting. And then there was no looking back.
In the beginning, Daman wrote poetry on traditional subjects like matters relating to heart but as the independence movement gained ground in pre-partition, India political themes also entered his poetry. Ustad Daman, in fact, belonged to that group of traditional Punjabi poets who would read poetry extempore while their pupils would keep the record. That is why they were called Ustads (mentors).
Faiz was right in calling Ustad Daman the Habib Jalib of Punjabi poetry. I remember having seen him first in the early months of 1950 in a public meeting outside the historic Mochi Gate of Lahore. The meeting was organised by newly-founded Awami Muslim League of Husain Shahid Suharwardy. Later this party was rechristened as Awami League. It was perhaps the first gathering of an opposition party in then newly set up Pakistan. Besides Suhrawardy some other political leaders of Punjab were also present in the meeting. Ustad Daman was called on to the stage before Suharwardy's speech. A wrestler-like figure clad in white Punjabi clothes, he emerged from behind the stage and started reciting some humorous verses full of jibes against the then prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan. Then he switched to a poem which he recited in the rhythm of famous Punjabi folk tale Mirza Sahiban.
Mainoon das oay Rabba mairia
hun das main kithay jaan
Main ohthay dhoondhan payaar noon jithay puttran khani maan
Jithay qaidi hoiyan bulbulan tay
bagheen bolan kaan
Ohthay phull p'ay leeran
jaapday tay kalian khilian naan
(O God, tell me where should I go
I am searching for love at a place where children disgrace
their mother
Where nightingales are caged and crows are left to shout in the
garden
Where flowers appear as rags and buds are not allowed to
blossom)
The whole poem was so moving that it brought tears to the eyes of the listeners. After reciting the poem, Daman withdrew from the stage amidst the shouts of "more, more" from the crowd.
It seems Mirza Sahiban's rhythm was Ustad's favourite because on the same rhythm he had written a hit song before the partition for a golden jubilee Punjabi movie Mangti.
Aithon udd jaa bholia punchhia
way toon apni jaan bacha
Aithay hasday phull gulab day
veri suknay dainday paa
Aithay dub dub moian sohnian
aithay lahu bharay darya
Aithay ghar ghar phaiyaan gadian beeba chhurian haith
nan aa
(Fly away innocent bird; save
your neck
Here the blooming roses are
spread to dry in the sun
Here Sohnis are destined to drown and rivers are full of
blood
There are gallows in every house; my friend, save yourself
from knives)
During the pre-partition days poets were also invited to political meetings organised by various political parties to enliven the atmosphere and create sympathies for the parties' respective ideologies. Every political party indeed had engaged a poet for their public meetings. For example, Ustad Ishq Lehr used to recite from Muslim League's platform whereas Daman at the meetings of India National Congress.
Daman, therefore, was first introduced to public recital of his poetry from the stage of Congress at a meeting also held at Mochi Gate. The star speaker of the gathering was Jawaharlal Nehru who so much liked Daman's presentation that a personal rapport instantly developed between the two. Many years later when Daman went to Delhi (India) to participate in an Indo-Pak mushaira he found that Nehru who had then become the prime minister was also present on the occasion. Daman stole the show at that mushaira with his verses that brought tears to the eyes of the audience:
Lali ankhian di pai dasdi ay
Roay toosi vi o roay asi vi aan
(The redness of the eyes tells us
That both of us have wept)
The partition, in fact, jolted Daman badly. He felt shattered by the loss of friends and pupils, many of them being Hindus and Sikhs. His miseries were compounded by the death of his wife at the same time in riot stricken Lahore. It is said that Daman had to hire labourers to carry her coffin to the graveyard. The incident made him an introvert and he shifted to a small room near Bhati Gate. He lived the rest of his life there as a hermit and received all his friends, many of them being celebrities, in that room.
Soon after the partition, most of the progressive writers' activities shifted to Lahore. Daman too joined their fold. He recited one of his famous poem Inqilab in one of the annual conferences of Progressive Writers' Association.
But the period of political freedom proved to be a short-lived in Pakistan. Under pressure from its new ally, the United States of America, Pakistani government banned the Progressive Writers' Association and its active workers were put behind bars.
Daman reverted to his room in Bhati Gate and started working on his project of writing a new Heer. The project couldn't materialise due to various reasons. During that period, he would sometime come to YMCA to attend the meetings of Punjabi Majlis organised by Safdar Mir. In one such meeting presided by Maulana Abdul Majid Salik, I saw Daman and Manto competing in reciting Punjabi bolis particularly of vulgar variety.
Like Habib Jalib, Daman was not an opportunist and always stood on the wrong side of the establishment. Many politicians would remain on friendly terms with him as far as they were in opposition. But once they would land in power, Daman would become a forbidden name for them because he would not mince his words and would criticise their actions in his verses.
It happened with him when Bhutto government came to power. In his usual style, he wrote some poems criticising the actions of the government. One such poem was against Bhutto's trip to Simla. Daman castigated Bhutto in this poem for raising the slogan of fighting India for 1,000 years on one hand and then going to Simla to meet Indira Gandhi on the other. The poem Ki kari janaan ain ki kari janaan ain became an instant hit.
A surprise police search of Daman's room followed and a 'bomb' was recovered, allowing authorities to register a case against him. This fake case left Ustad deeply depressed. His friends suggested that he should leave Lahore and hide at some other place for sometime. They took him to Sharaqpur but he returned the next day saying that he could not live without Lahore. Daman had earlier spurned Jawaharlal Nehru's offer to migrate to India because he couldn't leave Lahore.
The case finally fizzled out after sometime and Ustad continued with his literary pursuits. But now he spent more of his time in reading than writing. He stopped going to literary functions and would prefer remaining alone in his room. This loneliness together with pecuniary problems badly affected his health. For a year or so he continued to be in and out of hospital. In December 1984 his condition worsened and he finally breathed his last only two weeks after Faiz's death. Late Yunus Adeeb, Kanwal Mushtaq, Zaheer Akhtar and other friends of his have since then made valuable efforts to preserve and publish his writings.

THE TRUTH ABOUT BHUTTO'S INDIAN NATIONALITY SCANDAL

2006-04-09T18:08:00.000-05:00

Dr Afzal Mirza

After his retirement as deputy secretary ministry of foreign affairs in 1971 and serving as law revision commissioner in Uganda Syed Ali Raza chose to spend the rest of his life in Maryland USA and wrote his autobiography in two volumes under the title Mere Zamane (My Times). Unfortunately he died last year. Four years ago when I was forced by circumstances to shift to Baltimore I had the privilege of meeting the gentleman who by then had grown sufficiently old and it was difficult to communicate with him. However, his daughter Dr Attiya Khan who is an eminent physician and a literary figure, gave me Mere Zamane to read. The first volume of the book described Syed Ali Raza’s earlier life in UP, India, and his entry into the service at a lower rung but by the time the country was partitioned he had already become a superintendent due to his sheer hard work. On opting for Pakistan he was posted in the refugees ministry in Karachi. The ministry was later on renamed as the ministry of refugees and rehabilitation and soon after Ayub Khan’s martial law under Gen Azam Khan it was given the task of finalizing the rehabilitation work and winding up the ministry in a given span of time. As described by Syed Ali Raza soon after the partition the main task before the ministry was to frame the rules of business for rehabilitation work in the form of an ordinance which was not an easy task. Syed Ali Raza points out that it was more due to the diligence of the lower staff than the top bureaucrats that this work was completed in record time. It was during the same period that Syed Ali Raza first met Z.A. Bhutto. He writes: “The most complex case related to the funds deposited in the courts was that of a famous political personality of the country who later on served as minister in various ministries and prime minister and president of the country. He was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto whom I’ll mention as only Bhutto Sahib in (the) rest of my book. A few years after the signing of treaty on evacuee property Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto the father of Z.A.Bhutto came to my office with Bhutto sahib and asked me to take special care of this young man. From that time onwards Bhutto sahib was consulting me about his problems related to the evacuee property and I am proud to say that he would always treat me with honor and respect. Bhutto sahib’s problem was that when he was still a young lad his father Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto had given a house in the name of young Bhutto to the Bombay High Court as a court deposit. After some time with the permission of the court Sir Shahnawaz sold that house and deposited the amount of Rs 148000 in the same court as a deposit. In 1948 laws related to the evacuee property were enforced in India and Pakistan. So a request was made to the court for the release of the said amount. The request was turned down with the reasoning that because the amount was generated from an immovable property therefore it should be treated as immovable property. Since at that time there was no agreement between the two countries pertaining to the immovable property therefore this deposit could not be released. This was the position regarding this deposit in the name of Bhutto sahib when Sir Shahnawaz introduced him to me. The question was how to get this money released from Bombay High Court.”Syed Ali Raza continues: “At first we raised this issue in a meeting with Indian counterparts but they came with the same excuse that since this is related to immovable property so it does not fall in their jurisdiction…In the meantime in April 1954 the central assembly passed a resolution that a law pertaining to the immovable property left in India by refugees be framed and enacted. Now there were two options before Bhutto sahib. First, as per Indian government’s stand this money resulting from the sale of the immovable property be treated as immovable property and Bhutto sahib should file a case in a Pakistani court constituted for the purpose. Second, as per our stand after its conversion to cash this amount be treated as movable property and it should be paid to the claimant through Government of Pakistan. To reach success we kept ourselves engaged in both the options. We advised him under Pakistani law he should file a claim for immovable property before chief claims commissioner and try to get postponement of the verdict for the time being. So Bhutto sahib did the same. On the other hand in a meeting of the committee for movable properties we proposed that the matured securities of those who have migrated to India and which are in our possession should be released and given to India and Bhutto sahib’s deposit be taken out of Bombay High Court’s custody and given to Pakistani Custodian of Court Deposits. Upon this we were told in a meeting in New Delhi that Bhutto sahib had filed a request in Indian Supreme Court to declare him a non-evacuee. So as long as that court did not give its decision this matter could not be taken up and should be kept pending. This revelation was really surprising for us so the matter was deferred. On returning from Delhi I personally talked to Bhutto sahib and on his affirmation we discussed in detail the pros and cons of such a case and a possible verdict both in his favor or against him. So I advised him to withdraw the case from Indian Supreme Court. He followed the advice and sent a certificate to the effect to us. But somehow the news of Bhutto sahib’s request for declaring him a non-evacuee reached the political circles of the country and it was propagated that Bhutto was an Indian national.” In his account Syed Ali Raza has written about a gathering of his friends where a well-known religious leader was busy in a tirade against Mr Bhutto accusing him of being an Indian citizen. Syed Ali Raza interrupted the cleric and pointed out the true situation. He stated that Bhutto had given an application in the Indian Supreme Court to declare him non-evacuee but later on realizing its negative implications withdrew it. He was never an Indian citizen nor he would be so. Syed Ali Raza in his book wound up the Bhutto property issue in these words,” Let us now tell you how this matter ended. I had earlier written that there were some matured securities of a refugee who had taken refuge in India. So in the next meeting of the custodian of deposits of both India and Pakistan I handed over the securities of Indian evacuee after getting them released from a Pakistani court and asked my Indian counterpart to get the deposit of Bhutto sahib released from Bombay High Court and hand that over to us. So in the next meeting we received a check of Rs 168000 from them pertaining to Bhutto sahib’s deposit. Although the price of Bhutto’s property at the time of its sale was Rs 148000 but Bombay High Court also ordered to pay Rs 20000 as interest on that amount. After some time Bhutto again sent another application concerning this amount to me raising some newly conceived points but on my explaining that his demand was against rules withdrew it and never felt annoyed.”Syed Ali Raza writes that Bhutto never forgot that favor and when he became foreign minister offered him to join his ministry as deputy secretary and at a later stage as a director. Regarding Bhutto’s exit from Ayub’s cabinet he writes, “In the mid June all of us in the ministry had known that Bhutto sahib was leaving. Because Ayub Khan was annoyed with him therefore most of the ministry people were scared of any retribution on meeting him. The feeling I had for him and his kind attitude towards me I have mentioned earlier in the book. So I considered it my moral duty to pay him a farewell visit and although my well wishers in the ministry warned me against the consequences and particularly told me not to go in my personal car to see him because secret service people were noting down the numbers of the nameplates of such cars but I went in my personal car. Bhutto sahib immediately called me in. He looked tired and a bit upset. He told me, ’Yes, Ali Raza I am leaving’. I shook his hand bidding him good by and with difficulty controlled the tears that swelled up in my eyes.”
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THE LAST POEMS OF FAIZ

2006-04-04T11:57:00.000-05:00

Dr Afzal Mirza

Ghubar-e-Ayyam is the last anthology of Faiz poems written between 1981 and 1984. These poems are also included in his bigger anthology entitled Nuskha Hae Wafa. The book begins with the Bedil’s Persian couplet:
Har kuja raftam ghubar-e- zindagi dar pesh bood
Yarab ien khak-e-pareeshan az kuja bardashtam
(Where ever I go the dust of life hangs in front of me. How could I bear this cloud of strewn dust). The contents of this short collection all represent a state of mind where the poet near the fag end of life reflects about his past and takes stock of his achievements and losses. Faiz as we know had lived an eventful life but the last years of his life were spent in exile in frustration and depression. Earlier he suffered incarceration at various stages in life. He was first imprisoned in March 1951 in connection with the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. This was a period of great stress for him because he could even face a death penalty for some of the charges against him. That is why he wrote:
Maqam Faiz koi rah mein jacha hi nahin
Jo koo-e- yaar se nikle to soo-e- daar chale
(Nothing attracted Faiz’s attention in between. Leaving the street of his lover he went straight to the gallows)
When Ayub Khan imposed martial law in the country he was among the first ones to be hauled up. So he remained behind the bars from December 1958 to April 1959. This also included some time spent in the notorious investigation center in Lahore Fort where every internee was subjected to third degree methods. It is in one of the cells here during that time that famous activist Hasan Nasir was tortured to death and it was declared that he had committed suicide. So when Pakistan came under Ziaulhaq’s ruthless regime Faiz thought it proper to leave the country and he remained in exile till late 1983. This time Faiz was saved by his old friend and co-accused of Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case Col. Arbab Niaz Muhammad who happened to be a minister in Ziaulhaq’s government.

Faiz had first time suffered a heart attack in 1967 and he recorded his feelings in a poem with the same title:
Dard itna tha keh us raat dil-ewehshi nein
Har rag-e-Jaan se ulajhna chaha
(There was so much pain that the wild heart wanted to clash with every vein of life)
And he ends his poem on these lines;
Aur jab yaad ki bujhti hui shamaon mein nazar aya kahin
Aik pal akhiri lamha teri dildari ka
Dard itna tha keh is se bhi guzarna chaha
Ham nein chaha bhi magar dil na theherna chaha
(And when in the dying lights of memory I found a last moment of your love
There was so much pain that I wanted to skip it. I wanted to sustain but the heart was not prepared to do it)
Then in 1972 Faiz wrote a poem entitled “Jis roz qaza aye gi” (The day death will come).It shows that even in those days when Faiz was advising ZAB government as Cultural Adviser the earlier set backs of his life had left a deep impression on him. So he started thinking about death again with which he had a brush earlier during 1950s. However this time it was due to heart ailment. He surmised:
Kis tarah aye gi jis roz qaza aye gi
Shayad is tarah keh jis taur kabhi awwal-e-shab
Be talab pehle pahal marhamat-e-bosa-e-lab
( How would it come when the death would come. Perhaps like this that some one in the early night offers a kiss without asking).
His vision of death is both a benign one and painful. That is why he concludes his poem with these lines:
Jis tarah aye gi jis roz gaza aye gi
Khah qatil ke tarah aye keh mahboob sifat
dil se bas hogi yehi harf-e-widaa ki surat
lillahah alhamd ba-anjam-e- dile dilzadgan
Kalma-e-shukr banam-e-labe shireen dahanan
(It could come either like a killer or like a beloved; But on my lips there will be praise for the heartbroken people and words of thanks for those having sweet lips)

But in Ghubar-e-ayyam Faiz opens his book with a poem Tum hi kahjo kiya karna Hae(You should tell me what can be done). The poem was written in 1981. The poem covers the struggle of those progressive people who together with Faiz had dreamt of an egalitarian future for Pakistan and had made sacrifices. He remembers that when they had embarked upon this journey they were young and full of promise. They had thought that achieving their goal would be an easy task. But this did not happen. There were so many unforeseen counter forces that impeded the struggle. ”Now we may analyze our failure and blame any body for it but the fact remains that it is the same river and the same boat and you have to tell what to do to treat these wounds on the chest of the country” he concludes. In another poem written the same year Faiz lamented that we couldn’t do anything because while the others were waging a struggle we kept silently watching:
Ham na is saf mein the aur na us saf mein the
Raste mein kahrre un ko takte rahe
Rashk karte rahe
Aur chup chaap ansoo bahate rahe
(We were neither in this line nor that
We kept standing and watching them on the way
Watching them enviously
And shedding tears quietly)

Faiz who had spent most of his time in Beirut editing a magazine named Lotus decided to return to Pakistan in 1983 a year before his death. His health had further deteriorated because he witnessed the worst type of holocaust in that civil war torn country where he was most of the time confined to his apartment as the war waged outside. It is here that he met his famous admirers Dr Eqbal Ahmad and Edward Said. For Eqbal Ahmad, a poem by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, "Dawn of Freedom", captured the pathos of decolonization. In 1980 Ahmad introduced Edward Said to Faiz who was in exile in Beirut, and their oft-recalled evening of poetry recitation inspired Said's essay, "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile". Back in Lahore Faiz’s spirit regaled although he was in and out of hospital. Lahore appeared gloomy and sad to him:
Go sab ko bham saghar-o-bada to nahin tha
Yeh shehr udas itna ziyada to nahih tha
Thak kar yunhi pal bhar ke liye aankh lagi thi
So kar hi na utthein yeh irada to nahin tha
(Although every one did not have the privilege of enjoying drinks
but this city was not so sad earlier as now. Having tired I closed my eyes for a few moments. That I would never wake up was not my intention).
In Mayo Hospital he wrote a poem entitled Is waqt to yun lagta hae (It seems like this at present). It reflected the feelings of a person in a state of limbo.:
Is waqt to yun lagta hae ab kucch bhi nahin hae
Mehtab na suraj na andhera na savera
(It seems at present as if there is nothing around
The moon or the Sun darkness or the morning)
But he is not intimidated by the situation he is in:
Mana keh yeh sunsan gharrri sakht karri hae
Laikin mere dil yeh to faqat ik hi gharri hae
Himmat karo jeene ko to ik umr parri hae
True that this desolate moment is greatly testing
But o my heart it’s just a single moment
Be strong you have a lifetime to live)
In another incomplete poem Yeh kis dayar-e-adam mein…. Faiz has expressed similar sentiments saying “ In a strange atmosphere of intoxication we are lost my friend where neither the sound of the drinking buddies nor the sound of breaking of a heart could be heard.”

Then during the same period he penned his poem Idhar na dekho (Don’t look here) in which he lamented that all those who had at one time represented a spirit of struggle and bravery are now sold out to the forces of reaction but look towards those “ who offered the Dinars of their blood for free and when they were gone lying in their graves they look generous and magnanimous and also look towards those who decorated their bodies with the crosses of truth and are now prophets among the people.” And there is a ghazal that Faiz wrote a few days before his death that read:
Bohat mila na mila zindagi se kam kiya hae
Mata-e-dard baham hae to besh-o-kam kiya hae
Kare na jag mein alao to sheir kis masraf
Kare na shehr mein jalthal to chashm-e-nam kiya hae
Ajal ke haath koi aa raha hae parwana
Na jane aaj ki fehrist mein raqam kiya hae
He pointed out that “some note is coming through the hands of death and we don’t know what is written in it.” And it came on November 20, 1984. (End)

INSIDER'S ACCOUNT OF NAWAZ SHARIF -CLINTON FRIENDSHIP

2006-03-25T18:03:00.000-05:00

Book: ENGAGING INDIA

(Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb)

Author: Strobe Talbott

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, Washington D.C.

Pages; 268 Price:

Dr Afzal Mirza

America's former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott’s latest book Engaging India though meant to describe Indo-US relations during Clinton’s times has much to reveal about Pakistan as well. Talbott who worked for 21 years in Time Magazine as a columnist and correspondent before becoming the deputy secretary of state had old association with Bill Clinton being his contemporary in Oxford days when the later was a Fulbright scholar there in late 1960s. It seems both of them shared a common fascination for India triggered by history books read by them.“ I remember him toting around Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli for several weeks in the fall of 1969 and talking about it in pubs and in the kitchen of the house we shared. Then same year he read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the first time,.” writes Talbott about Clinton. Again Talbott’s wife Brooke Shearer also stayed with an Indian family in 1968 when she visited India sponsored by Experiment in International Living. So India was close to Talbott’s heart when he took over as the deputy secretary of state. But the problem was that to the chagrin of Clinton administration India carried out nuclear tests in 1998. The situation was worsened by the fact that India kept their preparation for the tests so secret that CIA or any other American agency could hardly get a clue of it. Thus it was a great set back to the technical superiority of American intelligence. Talbot writes that the whole administration turned against India and wanted to clamp stringent sanctions. India justified its tests by pointing to its two neighbors “China an overt nuclear weapons state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962 and Pakistan a covert nuclear weapons state that had committed aggression against India three times and that continued to sponsor terrorism in Kashmir.” Talbot responded to the occasion by developing direct rapport with Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh from whom it appears that Talbot is enormously impressed. That is why the back flap of the book carries a picture of the two. The purpose before Talbott was that having accepted the fact that India was a nuclear power the efforts should now be directed to bring round India to sign NPT or CTBT.

The dust had not yet settled after Indian tests that Pakistan also announced its intention to retaliate with their own nuclear blasts. The most stressed man at this juncture was Clinton who did not want that Pakistan should follow suit. Thus the administration planned to prevail upon Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif not to go ahead with his plans to explode its nuclear devices. Talbot has described details of the administration’s efforts towards this end. While he describes in details the discussions he had with Jaswant Singh who skillfully sold the BJP government’s point of view to his American counterpart but it hardly satisfied Clinton and his close circle of advisers. Now when they come to know that Pakistan was also preparing to effectively reply to Indian tests they came into action. Talbottt writes, “ Clinton telephoned Nawaz Sharif the Pakistan prime minister, to whet his appetite for the planes, huge amounts of financial aid and a prize certain to appeal to Sharif--- an invitation from him to make an official visit to Washington. Sharif was not swayed.’ You can almost hear the guy wringing his hands and sweating,’ Clinton said after hanging up” Having failed to evince any reply from Sharif Talbott was directed by the president to visit Pakistan and make the case to Nawaz Sharif personally. An invitation to their visit could only be obtained through the good offices of Gen. Jahangir Karamat. Which according to Talbott proved that ‘ the civilian leaders were in a state of confusion perhaps discord and the military called the shots in Pakistan.’ In Pakistan they first met foreign minister Gohar Ayub and foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad who did not agree to American proposal. Shamshad to the disliking of Americans was more vocal. He writes, ’The people of Pakistan’ added Shamshad Ahmad ,’ will not forgive those in this room if we do not do the right thing. “Then they meet General Karamat, the favorite of Talbott and all other authors (from Zinni to Tommy Franks). “ He heard us out and acknowledged the validity of at least some of our arguments….His government was still wrestling with the question what to do….There was more generally Karamat talked about his country’s political leadership a subtle but discernable undertone of long-suffering patience bordering on scorn.” Briefing them with the historic Indian attitude towards Pakistan Karamat assured them that “ given the political, military, historic and economic stakes involved the Pakistani government is carefully weighing what to do.” Then they met prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Talbott writes, “ What we got from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was a Hamlet act, convincing in its own way----that is I think he was genuinely feeling torn—but rather pathetic….On this occasion he seemed nearly paralyzed with exhaustion, anguish and fear. He was literally just as Clinton had sensed during their phone call---wringing his hands. He had yet to make up his mind but he said,’ I am an elected official and I can not ignore popular sentiment.’” When Talbott revealed to Sharif the Clinton plan of ‘dramatizing’ the world’s gratitude to him during the latter’s visit to USA if he just refrained from testing Nawaz Sharif asked Talbott, “Will Clinton promise to skip India on his trip and come only to Pakistan?” There was no way he could promise that but he told Sharif that Clinton would recalibrate the length and character of the stops in Delhi and Islamabad. He writes,” Sharif looked more miserable than ever.” Kashmir came up repeatedly during the meeting and Nawaz Sharif told him that Kashmir and not nuclear issue was at the core of the tension between India and Pakistan. Talbott did not enjoy his dealings with Shamshad and goes on to write,” Towards the end of the meeting Sharif asked every one but me to wait outside. Shamshad seemed miffed. He glanced nervously over his shoulder as he left.” Sharif told him in privacy that if he did as they wanted the next time “you came to Islamabad you would find yourself not dealing with a clean-shaven moderate but and Islamic fundamentalist ‘with a long beard.’” Pakistan went ahead with its tests and when Talbott broke the news to Clinton ,”He scowled, looked down at floor and silent for what seemed a long moment, ’That’s bad’ he finally said shaking his head ,’real bad. Those folks have got a kind of genius for making a bad deal worse’. Clinton said that he wanted to get into that situation there but that would be harder now..

Talbott writes that Nawaz Sharif a number of times asked Clinton to mediate on Kashmir between India and Pakistan as America did between Israel and Egypt but Clinton would express his inability saying that for mediation both the parties should approach the mediator. In this case India was not interested. But it seems that Clinton was definitely interested in easing out situation between the two nuclear neighbors as he mentioned to his advisors. They had a solution of the problem by dividing Kashmir along the LOC and giving more autonomy to Indian –held Kashmir. Clinton might have personally helped in its solution but according to Talbott, Kargil episode was yet another event that disappointed Clinton enormously. He has written in details what happened between Clinton and Nawaz Sharif on that occasion under the heading From Kargil to Blair House. He writes about the Lahore Summit between Vajpai and Sharif and Musharraf’s elevation as Chief of Army Staff in these words,” It quickly became apparent that the new chief of the army staff Parvez Musharraf had even less regard for Sharif and the civilian leadership than his predecessor Karamat. In particular Musharraf found the Lahore Summit galling” About Kargil he writes,”The American Government followed the conflict with growing alarm which could easily become a nuclear cataclysm…Tony (Zinni) warned Musharraf that India would cross the LOC itself if Pakistan did not pull back. Musharraf professed to be unimpressed. Back in Washington the administration let it be known that if Sharif did not order a pullback we would hold up $ 100 million IMF loan that Pakistan sorely needed….. We did not know whether Sharif had personally ordered the infiltration above Kargil (doubtful) reluctantly acquiesced in it (more likely) or not even known about it until after it happened (possible). But there was no doubt that he now realized that it was colossal blunder.”

Talbott writes that “through our ambassador in Islamabad Sharif begged Clinton to come to his rescue with a plan that would stop the fighting and set the stage for a US-brokered solution to Kashmir,” In reply to Sharif’s phone call Clinton said that he would consider it only if Pakistan first unilaterally withdrew. ”The next day Sharif called to say that he was packing his bags and getting ready to fly immediately to Washington--- never mind that he has not been invited. ‘This guy‘s coming literally on a wing and a prayer ,’said the president,” Sharif was not given the proper protocol and was received by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia and brought to Blair House who informed the Americans that ‘they should be prepared to deal with a man who was not just distraught about the crisis but terrified of the reaction from Musharraf and the military if he gave in to American pressure.’ Talbott suggested to the president that if Sartaj Aziz and Shamshad would participate in the meeting it would not be a productive so president should have a two to one meeting with Sharif attended by one aide of Clinton. In the meeting instead of relenting Sharif made matter worse by linking withdrawal from Kargil with solution of Kashmir dispute .Talbott writes that Clinton came as close to as I had ever seen blowing up in a meeting with a foreign leader. But after giving him a lecture on history Clinton switched from “chastising Sharif for the reckless stupidity of Kargil to complementing him on his earlier contribution to moment of diplomatic promise.” “Having listened to Sharif’s complaints against United States he had a list of his own and it started with terrorism. ..Clinton had worked himself back into real anger—his face flushed. ..Sharif seemed beaten, physically and emotionally. He denied he had given any orders with regards to nuclear weaponry and said he was worried for his life.” The meeting however ended on a happy and friendly feeling on Clinton’s part after Sharif signed the press note “ As the president and his advisers were leaving Blair House Shamshad Ahmad scurried after Sandy with alterations he wanted in the text. Sandy kept walking and said briskly over his shoulder ,’Your boss says it’s okay as it is.’” (End)

Review: FAITH AT WAR

2006-03-15T14:38:00.000-05:00

A political travelogue

By Dr Afzal Mirza
Faith at War:
A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu

Written by:
Yaroslav Trofimov
Published by:
Henry Holt & Company,
New York

Price: $26.00
Pp. 312

As the name indicates this insightful book of Yaroslav Trofimov, a Russian immigrant and journalist, is a political travelogue. Trofimov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, to a mixed family of Russian Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish lineages. About his early life he writes, "I spent part of my childhood living a happy colonial life on the African island of Madagascar where my father taught statistics at a local university. Having left Ukraine before it re-emerged as a separate country, I lived virtually my entire adult life first as a student and a journalist in New York City and then as a foreign correspondent based in France, Israel and Italy -- my new home country."
The book under review is based on Trofimov's experiences as a Wall Street Journal reporter on assignment in various Muslim countries. During the period between 1999 and 2001 he roved through the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and the Balkans. The book covers Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali and Bosnia.
The travelogue begins with the author's comments on the political systems of the countries he visited. "For most Muslim nations political independence has brought no reprieve. A glaring exception in the global embrace of democracy, the Islamic world -- outside a few happy enclaves remains a frustrated swath of the planet Earth where citizens chafe under brutal regimes, often propped up by the West and where mineral wealth developed by the foreigners is the main source of prosperity."
The first two articles of the book are about Saudi Arabia. Trofimov travelled into hitherto forbidden and undiscovered areas of the oil-rich kingdom meeting the common people. His first impression after visiting the office of a Saudi minister was that "the whole room badly needed fresh paint, and parts of the kitsch plasterwork on the ceiling had fallen off; one piece hung precariously by the wire. My tea glass was chipped too." He wonders where all the oil money is going if it is not being spent on the public buildings.
"Saudi International Airports, unlike the separate royal terminals used by the fleets of princely jets and hidden from public scrutiny, had become so dreary and drab that they wouldn't be out of place in the poorest parts of Africa. In the dusty back streets of Riyadh and under the decayed lattice windows of the old city of Jeddah the stench of open sewage gave off the unmistakable sign of an economy in a tailspin."
The author says that although slavery was formally abolished in 1962, the progenies of freed slaves were told to settle in a special part of Riyadh without any government assistance in obtaining education and jobs.
Of his visit to one such slum area the author writes, "As soon as I stepped out of the car a crowd gathered around me, men with wrinkled weary faces and pus-filled eyes, toothless women wrapped in black clothes. Several immediately started shoving petitions in my hands,'they are illiterate but they think you are from the government and can give them money,' the minder said."
As the people were complaining to the author a police car arrived and the officer dispersed the crowd and made the author leave the place.
A Saudi professor back in the hotel told him, "We are being robbed. Why is it that a barrel of oil costs US$20 like in the 1970s while a car that we buy from the Americans costs US$10,000 not US$1,000 like back then?"
The author tells that "as the protests against the American presence (in Saudi Arabia) grew in the mid-1990s the Saudi government dispatched to prison at least 400 dissident clerics, academics, and professionals". Among them were two fiery clerics, Salman al-Awada and Safr al-Hawali. Later, he maneuvered to meet Awada whose feelings the author conveys in these words: "While tepidly condemning the Sept. 11 attacks the Sheikh made it clear that he was no fan of America which was guilty of terrorism in his eyes. His bottom line was that Muslims are facing annihilation from massive attacks by the immoral and greedy West. It was again the familiar discourse of the battle of good and evil."
On the other hand another religious leader Mohsen al-Awaji was more emphatic in his talk with the author. While supporting the suicide bombing he claimed that he wanted to improve women's rights and eventually extend freedom of religion to the whole kingdom. He campaigned for freedom of press and Western-styled democratic elections. "We want a reasonable relationship with the Royal family, not the one of masters and slaves," he said.
About the Saudi ruling family, Trofimov says, "Like the Soviet Politburo in the 1980s 10 top rungs of the Saudi ruling family are hard for outsiders to scrutinize. The ones who know what?s going on in the family don't talk. And the ones who talk don't know."
In the meeting with Prince Talal bin Abdelaziz, a brother of King Abdullah, the author was told, "The family is divided -- we used to come together but now we see each other only on rare occasions."
About the reforms he had this to say, "The UN will ask us one day. Why are you not giving minorities their rights? Why do we always have to wait for pressure from outside? Our curricula are known to be backward. Is it plausible that Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where there are no cinemas and the women can't drive?" The author says that after listening to Prince Talal he understood why he couldn't find a single Saudi who believed that Prince Talal would ever be a king.
Trofimov went to Iraq from Kuwait. He moved with the American army that advanced into Iraq. They were given to understand that they would be received with open arms in Iraq and would be garlanded and that was the reason why all the media was moving with the army. They were told that the Shia Iraqis were the worst affected during the Saddam regime and they would be the first to embrace the advancing American armies. All their hopes were dashed to the ground when they found that the Shia Iraqis gave more tough reception to the advancing Americans than the Sunni Iraq.
"My plans to install myself in Basra's Sheraton had to wait -- the city wouldn't fall to the British troops for almost three weeks. Fighting continued to rage just north of the Safwan clover leaf. This was the perception that from the first days of the invasion Iraqis would have of their liberators. Just as they did in Zubayr, American and British forces would later stand by and watch as looters destroyed and torched government buildings, hospitals, museums, and hotels across the land -- culminating in a April 9 2003 looting free-for-all in Baghdad," writes the author.
Among the people he meets a school teacher who tells him, "We are Iraqis and we will defend our country and defeat the aggressors." An engineer says, "The Americans are destroying our country. There will be fight."
During his long sojourn in Iraq, Trofimov found out that most of the US Marines were young men who had no war experience nor they knew how to handle alien people in a foreign land. Their behaviour on the other hand was that of occupation forces that was annoying for the local population.
"Our people have seen Americans in Hollywood movies and were impressed with how educated and polite the Americans are on the screen but now these people have seen your soldiers in real life. And they are very surprised that the Americans have turned out to be so rough and so rude?" said an Iraqi. By the end of his visit the author was fed up with the feeling of being an unwelcome intruder in a dangerous, disembowelled and yet boundlessly proud land.
During his visit to Kabul after the American invasion and installation of Karzai, the author met the dean of Kabul University, Professor Kazem Ahang, who summed up his feelings in these words, "The intellectuals feel now that America is colonizing Afghanistan and the rest of the people don't know why the Americans are here. They only see that more time goes by the more American presence is growing, so far nobody has seen where this American money is spent, whereas with the Soviets it was visible. The only thing we have seen from the Americans is their soldiers."
In his meeting with Noorzai, the chairman of Afghan Human Rights Commission, Trofimov is told that "the war is going on not because the Taliban are strong but because the government is weak; we all know that the Afghans need the help of friendly countries but also that the Afghans are culturally and religiously different from these countries. The conflict springs from these differences."
The author also writes of his short visit to Timbuktu in Mali and is surprised that it was the only country in the Muslim world where democracy is being practiced in its true spirit.
As a whole the book is a must read and could also be a source of enlightenment for the Bush administration itself.
Top

REMEMBERING HABIB JALIB

2006-03-11T21:19:00.000-05:00

By Dr Afzal Mirza

In one of his rare articles famous intellectual Dr Eqbal Ahmad highlighted the common greatness of Faiz and Jalib. He wrote,” Faiz and Jalib shall live in our collective memory and shape our consciousness long after the dictators have been forgotten. Their talents were not unique. Critically judged, Jalib was not a great poet. Several of his contemporaries had greater talent. Yet he shall be remembered more than most of them for his universal affirmations of life, and his uncompromising opposition to oppression and injustice. Faiz was the greater poet, no doubt, but he too had competitors, among them Rashid and Meeraji. Yet he has touched us as no modern Urdu poet has. If I were to explain his extraordinary power as poet l would offer first his qualities of humanity. These attributes Jalib shared with Faiz; and in this lay their common greatness.” In his article Dr Eqbal has found genuine common ground between the two celebrated poets of the country who made a great contribution towards the awakening of masses in their own individual styles. The good poetry is always characterized by its appeal to the sensibility of its readers and listeners. Jalib was different from his contemporaries as his simple and emotional poetry directly appealed to the hearts of his audiences who would experience a unique emotional surge in their collective psyche. Those who would listen to his poems in public meetings were subjected to a strange emotive experience that would either charge them into high frenzy or move them to spontaneous tears.
Jalib was born in Hoshiarpur (East Punjab) in 1928 but spent his younger years in Delhi where he studied in the Anglo-Arabic School. Smitten by muse at an early age he adopted Jalib as his pseudonym ameliorating a classical Delhi poet called Jalib Dehlvi. Like all other poets Jalib’s earlier poetry was characterized by romantic feelings. In 1947 when he was 19 years old India was partitioned and like all other Indian Muslims he migrated to Pakistan. Initially he landed in Karachi and found a job as a proof reader in Daily Imroze Karachi at a very nominal salary. In Karachi soon he got recognition as a budding poet with a beautiful voice who was invited to functions more to recite other poet’s verses than his own. In his book Gumshuda Loag Agha Nasir remembers of a function held in his College where Jalib was invited to recite Faiz’s poetry. May be at that stage he was shy of reciting his own poetry before general public. But it was in a Mushaira held in Lahore in 1949 that Jalib recited his own poetry and stole the show. In his memoirs Chiraghon ka Dhuan Intizar Husain has mentioned of those times when many poets migrated to Lahore and Mushairas used to take place on almost every other day. The Mushaira I am mentioning was the Indo-Pak Mushaira in which Jigar Muradabadi and Jagan Nath Azad had come from India and Jalib and Zahra Nigah came from Karachi. It was actually a maiden appearance of these two budding poets in Lahore and both of them stole the show in presence of well known Indian and Pakistani poets. In that Mushaira Jalib recited his famous ghazal:
Dil ki baat labon par la kar ab tak ham dukh sehte hein
Ham ne suna tha iss basti mein dil wale bhi rehte haein
Jalib so much impressed the audience with his rendering that he was asked to recite his poetry several times. May be it was this ovation that prompted him to shift to Lahore permanently. But Lahore of that period was full of literati and literary movements.
Those who think Jalib underwent a sudden transformation in his poetic diction after Ayub’s martial law forget that in his early days in Lahore Jalib used to regularly participate in the meetings of the Progressive Writers Association till the time it was banned by our pro-American government. Though the major content of his poetry was amorous and romantic but in lesser aggressive manner he would write verses with progressive content:
Kaliyan royein ghunche royein ro ro apni ankhein khoein
Lambi taan ke chaen se soyein iss phulwari ke rakhwale
However his style and content underwent a drastic change in 1959 when after Ayub’s martial law the civil liberties were curtailed and the government came with a heavy hand on the progressive writers. While on one hand Qudratullah Shahab, Jamiluddin Aali, Ashfaq Ahmad and others tried to woo the writers to support the regime by joining the Writers’ Guild and arranging free trips for them within and outside the country, the government took over Pakistan’s independent newspapers and brought them under the umbrella of National Press Trust. The freedom of expression was curbed with a heavy hand of censorship. Jalib was a man of the street. He hated dictatorship in all its manifestations. I remember that in a Mushaira held in Abbottabad in 1959 where Faiz was also present Jalib recited a purely romantic poem.
Rah e subhe ashqi mein kahin shaam a na jaye
Tujhe bewafa kahoon mein woh maqam a na jaye
But soon after that in a radio Mushaira held in Rawalpindi Jalib startled the organizers with his verses:
Kahin gas ka dhuan hae kahin golion ki barish
Shab-e-ahd-e-kamnigahi tujhe kis trah sarahein
The Mushaira which was being aired alive was switched off and the poor station director Syed Ataullah Kalim was penalized for this boldness of a harmless poet. After this he gave no respite to the regime as he started his tirade with full force. When Ayub regime enforced their tailor-made constitution Jalib wrote his most popular poem:
Deep jis ka mahallaat hee mein jaley/Chand logon kee khushion ko lay kar chaley/ Voh jo sayay mein har muslehat kay paley/Aisey dastoor ko subh-e-beynoor ko/ Main nahin maanta, main nahin jaanta(A lamp only in palaces lit/Shed light for a chosen few/Shade in which one has to fit/Such rites and lightless dawns/I will not accept; I refuse to know.)Translated by Khushwant Singh
The poem catapulted Jalib to national fame and then there was no looking back. The poem became very popular throughout the country as it represented the true feelings of a majority of Pakistanis. Around that time, in a mushaira at Jauharabad, the audience demanded from Jalib to recite this poem. He had just started off when he was stopped by Justice S.A. Rahman who was presiding over the function. Undeterred, Jalib shouted back, “You cannot stand between me and my audience,” and continued with his poem to the chagrin of the chief guest. In another incident it is said that West Pakistan Governor, none other than the dreaded Nawab of Kalabagh, invited filmstar Neelo to dance in front of a foreign dignitary. As she refused, the police was sent to bring her forcibly to dance, which led to a suicide attempt on her part. This incident inspired a poem by Jalib, which was later included by Neelo’s husband Riaz Shahid in his movie Zarqa. The song was:Tu keh nawaqif-e-aadab-e-ghulami hae abhiRaqs zanjeer pehan kar bhikiya jata hai(You are not aware of the protocol of a king’s court. Sometimes one has to dance with the fetters on).The song has since then become a classic of poetry of resistance.
The contribution of Jalib towards political awakening during Ayub period was best expressed by Syed Sibte Hasan the noted leftist intellectual in these words,” The dictatorship of Ayub Khan will always be remembered for the fact that this dark period brought forth people like Justice Kayani and Habib Jalib. When the true history of this nation is written, then the world will know that these were the people who put life in the fading pulse of the nation at that time of fear and terror, when one was afraid even to breathe. What is this power that makes this gentle person fight against evil and insist on truth? In fact this power is due to the love of the people which lends bravery and enthusiasm to Jalib. Habib Jalib has sacrificed his self and his poetry for the common good of the people.”
Due to his daring revolt against the order of the day, Jalib was banned from official media but he remained undeterred. He rather started a tirade against the tyranny with more resolution. It reached its climax when Fatima Jinnah decided to contest elections against Ayub Khan. All democratic forces rallied round her and at her election meetings, Jalib used to recite his fiery poems in front of an emotionally-charged crowd. His most popular poem at that time was:Maan kay paon talay jannat hai idhar aa jao(The paradise is under the feet of the mother. So come into her fold).
Jalib became a celebrity and every opposition party tried to woo him into their fold. Jalib had friends among the top politicians of Pakistan ranging from Suharwardy to Bhutto.They say about Suhrawardy that whenever he would be in Lahore often he would invite Jalib and ask him to recite his poems especially the verse he liked most:
Koi to parcham le kar nikle apne gariban ka Jalib
Charon janib sannatta hae weerane yad aate haen
In 1970 there was a wave of support for socialism and the rightist parties all got together to defeat the leftists. Jalib then wrote beautiful poems giving new secular meaning to their slogans. In his poem ‘Pakistan ka matlab kiya’, he wrote:Roti, kapra aur dawa/Ghar rehne ko chhota sa/Muft mujhe talim dilaMein bhi Musalmaan hoon wallahPakistan ka matlab kya/La Ilaha Illalah.Amrika se mang na bhik/Mat kar logon ki tazhikRok na jamhoori tehrik/Chhorr na azadi ki rah/Pakistan ka matlab kya/La Ilaha Illalah.Khet waderon se le lo/Milen luteron se le loMulk andheron se le lo/Rahe na koi alijahPakistan ka matlab kya/La Ilaha Illalah.In the 1970 elections Jalib was offered a provincial assembly ticket by Bhutto provided he joined PPP, but Jalib declined the offer, fought the election on a NAP ticket and lost it. Jalib had to face the wrath of all governments—no matter whether they were martial law regimes or quasi-democratic in nature. He, in fact, was not the compromising type and therefore Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship became a favourite topic of his poetry when the latter toppled Bhutto’s government and seized control of the country. One can’t forget his poetry that was circulated by word of mouth or by photocopies during Pakistan’s worst period of dictatorship.Zulmat ko Zia, sarsar ko saba, bande ko khuda kya likhna
In a country where dictatorships are a norm the presence of a brave poet like Jalib is always needed to raise the morale of the people in those times of depression and despair.(Jalib died on 12th March 1993)

THE BARD AND THE CITY

2006-03-04T10:57:00.000-05:00

By Dr Afzal Mirza

From Mir Taqi Mir to Munir Niazi every poet of repute has in one way or the other referred to a city or “shehr” in their verses. The city is sometimes their home town which they had to leave by force of circumstances or in many cases it is the city of their beloved. Mir remembered his hometown when he had to migrate to Lucknow in search of livelihood. Nostalgically he wrote:

Dilli keh aik shehr tha aalim mein intikhab

Rehte the muntikhab hi jahan roozgar ke

Faiz, Nasir Kazmi, Faraz and Munir Niazi don’t name it but call it “shehr”. They say about the dwellers of Peshawar that instead of naming it they always refer to their city as “shehr” as a gesture of love. Many years ago when I visited the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia I was surprised to observe that they also referred to their city as “shehr”—a Turkish tradition perhaps. Faiz wrote ravishing poems on Lahore naming it as the city of lights.

Basta hae is kohr ke peeche raushanion ka shehr

Nasir Kazmi wandered in the dark streets of Lahore in search of the “lost ones” as did Shohrat Bukhari. Munir Niazi called it “Us bewafa ka shehr” and Safdar Mir prayed for it in his native Punjabi

as “Jeeve shehr Lahore.” But it was poet Saifuddin Saif who highlighted his deep emotive experience while referring to the word “shehr”. This word in his long and short poems symbolizes the painful separation from his beloved. It can be compared to the word ‘rail garri’ or train which came to be a symbol for the separation of lovers. In the words of Munir”

Rail ki seeti baji to dil lahu se bhar gaya.

Saifuddin Saif came to Lahore after partition from Amritsar as did his many contemporaries and juniors like Ahmad Rahi, A.Hamid, Zahir Kashmiri, Shahzad Ahmad, Javed Shahin, Ahmad Mushtaq, Salahuddin Nadim and others. Famous writer Saadat Hasan Manto also belonged to Amritsar but he arrived in Lahore from Bombay as he had shifted there much earlier than 1947.Some of these writers were introduced to the realm of literature by Saifuddin Saif but many were inspired by the literary stalwarts that had converged on Amritsar in 1940’s as teachers in the MAO College that competed with the Khalsa College in a big way. Some of these luminaries were Dr Rashid Jahan, Rashiduz Zafar, M.D.Taseer and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Iqbal was a rage during the decades preceding his death in 1938 and thereafter but as his poetry became more and more sophisticated and philosophic the younger generation found catharsis in the writings of romantics and romantic revolutionaries.

On international level the Second World War had produced an economic depression that had also affected the socio-economic conditions of India. The poverty and unemployment had given impetus to the freedom struggle and many parties with revolutionary ideas appealed to the sensibilities of the frustrated youth of the country. Many writers therefore aligned themselves with the progressive writers movement operating on international level with a program of economic emancipation through socialistic principles while others like Saif found solace in some indigenous revolutionary movements. He initially joined Khaksar Movement that strove for the revival of Caliphate through a militant struggle but sometimes before the partition he distanced himself from any political activity and aligned himself with those writers who believed in literature for sake of literature.

Like all well known writers Saif started writing very early in his youth. Being a genuine poet he received an early acclaim and his popularity reached its zenith during his College days when he became star poet of all Mushairas in Amritsar. He had a melodious voice that left a deep impact on the sensibility of listeners. Thus even as a College student he had a large following among the youth of Amritsar who almost ‘worshipped’ him. Soon his fame spread beyond Amritsar and his ghazals and poems became popular in the literary circles of the country..

I first became familiar with his poetry during my college days when in early 1950’s besides Faiz’s Dast-e-saba two more books appeared in the market and became instantaneous hits. These were Saif’s Kham-e-Kakul and Adam’s Kharabat. Some of the ghazals from Kham-e-Kakul became so popular that people used to quote them in the gatherings. I remember that in a discussion in the Punjab Assembly one of the members retorted to a remark of another member with Saif’s line “Ronay wale tujhe kis bat pe rona aya.”

His poetry was characterized by the pain of separation and early setbacks of life. His admirer of College days poet Shaukat Rizvi whom I met in Abbottabad always talked of him with respect and so did poet Shahzad Ahmad. They would always refer to him as Saif sahib. Shaukat told me that Saif’s poetry resulted from an unsuccessful love affair. Like Sahir Ludhianvi Saif expressed his emotional grief in highly inspired verses:

Tumhare baad khuda jane kiya hua dil ko

Kisi se rabt barhane ka hausla na hua

Shaukat told me that the above-mentioned verse was the outcome of his failure in his intense love affair. In another verse in the same vein he wrote:

Chamak ke aur barhao meri siah bakhti

Kisi ke ghar ke ujalo tumhe kisi ke kaya

In a similar mood of utter frustration Saif wrote his famous ghazal that became a hit song of Saat Laakh:

Qarar lootne wale qarar ko tarse. Shaukat told me that Saif showed this ghazal to Faiz Ahmad Faiz who was his teacher in MAO College Amritsar. “On reading this ghazal Faiz smiled and said ,’Barkhurdar, mahbooba ko kabhi bad dua nahin dete,’” he remarked. As happens in most of the cases the poet’s lady love after marriage departs for another city and thereafter poet’s all attention is focused on that city. The long poems and some of the ghazals of Saif written during that period therefore project the feelings of the poet when he thinks of that city or has to travel to that city. His long poem Jab tere shehr se guzarta hun an abbreviated version of which appeared in film “Vaada” beautifully represents those emotions:

Koi pursan-e-haal ho to kahun

Kaisi andhi chali hae tere baad

Shama-e-umeed sarsar-e-gham mein

Kis bahane jali hae tere baad

Jis mein koi makin na rehta ho

Dil woh sooni gali hae tere baad

Din guzara hae kis tarah maen ne

Raat kuonkar dhali hae tere baad

Roz jita hun roz marta hun

Jab tere shehr se guzarta hun

Saif used to recite this poem in Mushairas in Amritsar with beautiful tarranum and used to spellbind the audience. Poet Shahzad Ahmad once told me that “we used to look towards Saif sahib with great admiration and pride when he used to come to the stage to recite his poetry and wanted to emulate him.” After migrating to Pakistan Saif neither participated in Mushairas nor himself recited this poem anywhere. I remember that many years later short story writer Nawaz once recited this poem for Mahmood Naazir (grand son of olden days poet Khushi Ahmad Naazir of Jogi fame) and myself in an exclusive sitting. He copied the style and rendition of Saif being his friend, admirer and witness of the recital of this poem in Amritsar. Frankly speaking the rendering of this poem in “Vaada” was nothing compared to the intensity of feelings with which Saif used to render this poem. Saif also wrote a poem Main tera shehr chorr jaoon ga which Mujib Alam sang in his melodious voice for “Shama and parwana”. Shehr or city was also intensely present in his ghazal:

Main akaila nakhl-e-sehra ki tarah hun kya karun

Yaar tere shehr mein aghyar tere shehr mein

Teri rusvai ka dar sau bar wapas le gaya

Shauq laya hae mujhe sau bar tere shehr mein

Jis ke shanon par teri zulf-e-parishan thi woh Saif

Dhoondhta hae saya-e-deewar tere shehr mein

The city of Amritsar can rightly boast of its role in the cultural development of Lahore after the partition. So much so that Beli -the first movie made in Pakistan was all an Amritsar- affair with Saadat Hasan Manto as the writer, Masud Parvez as the director, Rashid Attre as the music director and Ahmad Rahi as the lyricist. Keeping himself aloof from the literary activity Saif also got himself involved in this genre of art and initially wrote songs for pictures like Hichkole, Vaada, Anarkali, Qatil, Gumnam to quote a few and then at later stage himself decided to wield the megaphone by writing and directing one of Pakistan’s golden jubilee hits Saat Laakh. In this movie poet Shahzad Ahmad assisted Saif as assistant director.. Shahzad thereafter never tried to enter the domain of films. However Saif produced and directed another remarkable Punjabi movie entitled Kartar Singh. Inspired by the theme of partition Saif showed the humane side of a Sikh. He once told his friends that he reluctantly decided to make this film because it could raise controversy. Those still remembering the holocaust of 1947 could hardly accept the character of a Sikh who could be something other than an evil. But the picture that reminded the viewers of Ahmad Nadim Qasmi’s Parmeshar Singh and Ashfaq Ahmad’s Gadarya became a great success and initiated a new trend of purposeful films in Punjabi language. As the age overtook him Saif gave up the hard task of making his own films but continued to write songs for his Amritsari friend and assistant director Hasan Tariq’s independent movies. During his film-making career the writing of serious poetry naturally took the second place in his priorities but as the poet Jan Nisar Akhtar (father of Indian lyricist Javed Akhtar) once wrote “ The time has come that critics should also give due consideration to the film poetry of accomplished writers while evaluating their contribution to literature.” (End)

ALL HIS CHARACTERS

2006-02-27T10:45:00.000-05:00

D.H. Lawrence, whose life was marked by volatile loves and disappoinments, was the prototype of many of his fictional characters

By Dr Afzal Mirza

David Herbert Lawrence, known to the world as D.H.Lawrence, had unusual experiences as a child and a young man that drew him into introversion and restlessness. Born to a coal miner, Arthur Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence never liked his father because he was either doing his work or boozing and never spent any time with the family. He was excessively drawn to his mother, an ex-school teacher, who looked after him alone, and David, too, became the sole focus of her affection . When David's elder brother expired. David's father outlived his mother but their relations remained the same throughout their lives.
David had a sickly childhood that kept him in and out of school. Tall and blond and frail, he was not unattractive but he kept himself to himself and did not play with other boys, who generally jeered at him. Thus a feeling of loneliness developed in him that brought him nearer to the muse than to human company.
That is the period when he really worked hard and won a scholarship to go to high school, becoming the second miner's son from the county ever to go to a high school. Having finished school, he found a job in a surgical goods factory and, for the first time, he got the taste of the world outside the shelter of home.
His biographer, John Worthen, writes an incident in the factory that had deep impact on his Lawrence's psyche. "The work girls at Haywoods (factory) shocked him with the stories of their boyfriends and they soon did rather more. They set on him one lunch break and attempted to remove his trousers -- a time-honored rite of passage for new employees. Lawrence set about those girls with teeth, hoof and claw. In rage he could be a very demon." After the incident Lawrence did not like to work in the factory and tried to find other means of earning a livelihood. The other job he undertook was that of a teacher something of which his mother also approved. His experience as a teacher is expressed in his novel 'The Rainbow'. A teacher May Chambers, three years older than him, once told him, "you seem like a girl sometimes." But later on he became friendly with her. At her house he met Jessie Chambers, the younger sister of May, and had his first love affair with her. To her Lawrence showed the poems that he had started writing when he was still in high school. With her he discussed all the writers that they both enjoyed reading, including George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert.
To get his teacher's certificate Lawrence had to attend a training college but he did not have the means. So he appeared in King's Scholarship examination, in which he excelled, and decided to go to Nottingham University College. It is at this stage that he started writing his first novel, then called 'Laetitia' but published later as 'The White Peacock'.
After finishing training college Lawrence started his career as an elementary teacher at Croydon. The salary of the teacher was not enough for him, so writing was a necessary to him to make a living . Before he started publishing his works he once commented that "I feel as if I stood like a naked slave in the market under the glances of a crowd of fools safely swathed in stupidity." And when his work was published he said, "I lie exposed and quiveringly vulnerable in print." While he shifted to Nottingham College his mother was diagnosed of cancer. When she died in 1912, he wrote to a friend, "She was my first great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman, as strong and steadfast and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whip-lash and as kind and gentle as warm rain and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us."
Frieda entered his life after the death of his mother. She was the German wife of his professor in Nottingham College, older than him and a mother of three children. She came from the German aristocracy. Her brother was the famous Red Baron of Germany. Blond, buxom and bored by her marriage to Lawrence's tutor Ernest Weekely, she had enjoyed many affairs while holidaying in Germany, long before the long and tall Lawrence appeared in their home to keep an appointment. Meanwhile, Lawrence had had a couple of affairs after breaking up with Jessie. However, his intellectual friendship with her had persisted and he continued to send her his poems and writings.
Initially Frieda was not serious in her affair with Lawrence and she told her daughter that "all she expected from this striking young man was 'an affair and no more'". Worthen writes that "For Lawrence, Frieda really was the woman of a lifetime; within a few days he told her she was the 'most wonderful woman in all England.'.But although Frieda was attracted to him and eventually found herself in love with him, she had not the least intention of leaving her husband or children... ". But when the affair became known, Frieda's father, Friedrich von Richtofen, commented that "the last thing he wanted was Frieda mixed up with an 'ill-bred, common, penniless lout.'" When she left England for her hometown Metz with Lawrence, he had just eleven pounds in his pocket. In Germany, being unacceptable to Frieda's parents, they lived at different places and Lawrence worked on his novel 'Paul Morel', which appeared at a later time under the name of 'Sons and Lovers'. After completing his novel he sent it to the publisher. In its foreword he spelled out his literary philosophy. "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true."
Getting a divorce from her husband, Frieda married Lawrence and they returned to England. In 1914, the First World War had started and life in Europe had become difficult. Frieda's German background did not make it easier for them. Lawrence openly opposed the war. In 1915 he wrote, "War finished me; it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes." When he would go out singing German songs with Frieda the war-hit Britons would consider it unpatriotic. It is during this period of despair and darkness that Lawrence got inspiration from a Hebrew hymn entitled 'Rannani' and invented 'Rananim' or 'The Island', a Utopian concept of communal life at some place far way from England. He planned it together with John Middleton Murry, the husband of writer Katherine Mansfield, and tried many a time to give it practical shape. During that period he became friendly with Cynthia Asquith and Bertrand Russell, especially the later, who saw in Lawrence a man gifted with startling insight and invited him to develop a course at Cambridge, but after some time both parted ways due to Lawrence blaming Russell "of having a contradictory nature". Then in autumn 1915 his book 'The Rainbow' was attacked in reviews calling for 'suppressing the book as it could inflame public morality'. The book was tried under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 and the magistrate ordered the book's destruction.
Lawrence was disheartened with his literary setbacks, but amazingly he continued writing with the same zeal. Sometimes he had to write and rewrite his books. His health was not so good since childhood. His life with Frieda was also not very pleasant and there were violent fights between the two. After the war was over they again moved to Europe, shuttling between Germany and Italy. Then in 1922 they undertook a journey to Ceylon and, disliking its hot and humid weather, moved onwards to Australia. From there they sailed to San Francisco and then moved to New Mexico where he chose Taos to live, where he wrote his novel 'The Plumed Serpent'. After a bit of travelling in America they returned to Europe in 1925. The thin red-bearded Lawrence had showed symptoms of tuberculosis in New Mexico but had never seriously tried to get himself cured of this disease.
'Lady Chatterley's Lover' kept him occupied from October 1926 to the publication of its third version in 1928. The book, published in unexpurgated form in England in 1960, altered his reputation permanently. It earned him more money than he had made in his entire career. The inspiration for the book had been derived from his own situation at that time. According to Worthen: "He was all the characters. Due to his liberating relationship with an older and experienced partner he knew Constance's situation very well. He was also Mellors, the working class man who moved into middle class but felt at home nowhere. And he was Clifford the writer, the husband now no longer feeling desire, prepared for his wife to have an affair with another man." The fact is that when Lawrence was down with tuberculosis Frieda had developed a relationship with Ravgali, a former army man depicted as Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Frieda lived with Lawrence until his death at the age of 44 in Vence (France) on March 3, 1930. One of Lawrence's friends, Aldous Huxley, and his wife Maria Huxley, comforted him as he lay dying and paid for his friend's burial. Frieda went to America with Ravgali in 1931 and in 1934 published an extremely moving book about her life with Lawrence. She died in 1956.

POETRY,TREASON AND INSANITY

2006-02-26T22:02:00.000-05:00

Dr Afzal Mirza

Ezra Pound’s biographer David Heyman writes of the poet’s predicament at the time of fall of Italy in these words,” Then on April 28,1945 Pound’s universe crumbled completely. Benito Mussolini attempting to escape was caught and killed on the shore of Lake Como by angered partisans…. A day or two later without firing a shot the Americans occupied Rapallo. The next day they came for him. They were not Americans but communist partigiani. There were two of them both armed with Tommy guns. The poet, his Legge Four Books opened wide on the desk, was working on a translation of the Book of Mencius. Olga Rudge had gone into town to buy the paper. Dorothy Pound was paying the weekly visit to Ezra’s aging mother in Rapallo. Rumor has it that the gun butts sounded twice against the door. Pound went to open. Ezra slipped the Confucius and the Chinese dictionary into his pocket and left the keys with the girl who lived on the first floor. He preceded the two men down the winding mountain trail to a waiting car. He was handcuffed and driven away.” Thus one of the most remarkable poets of the twentieth century who coined the term Imagism was driven away and handed to the Counter Intelligence Center Genoa for interrogation. What Pound said during those investigations is still buried in the archives of the Department of Justice in Washington D.C. but he was moved to Detention Training Center Pisa. This is the town of Italy known for the famous leaning tower of Pisa. In the Center the war criminals mostly murderers and rapists who were about to be executed were detained in iron cages. Pound’s cage was tenth at the end. Pound called his cage “gabbia” gorilla cage. It was six by six and a half feet. A tarpaper roof provided little shelter from sun or rain. By night a special reflector shed glaring light onto his cage alone. He slept on the cold cement floor and ate the meager food once a day. His toilet was a tin can. For three weeks he was kept in the cage. He couldn’t stand the strain and collapsed. He lost his memory and became extremely thin and weak. Then he was taken out of the cage and lodged in a large tent in the medical part of the camp. Impressed by his fame as a poet, the medical staff allowed him to use the type writer of the dispensary. On it he typed his poetry—the Cantos that became his identity.
and there was a smell of mint under the tent flaps
especially after the rain
and a white ox on the road towards Pisa
as if facing the tower….
(Canto LXXIV)
He wrote as if he would not survive the experience, as if he expected to be shot at any time. In the meantime his friends in States started a bid to trace him and get him freed. Six months after his imprisonment the poet was handcuffed and flown from Rome to Washington. As he stepped from the plane photographers and reporters clustered around him on the airport.It reminded of the days before the beginning of the World War II when in 1939 he had returned to the United States his home country from Italy.
Born in Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound studied at the University of Pennsylvania for his Masters degree. Cutting short his teaching career as an instructor at Wabash College Indiana in 1908, he set sail for Europe and stayed in Venice for several months. He liked this city of canals with its rich heritage of art and history. He wrote here several poems and compiled his first book of poetry. But after several months pecuniary problems drove him to London. Finally settling in London, he met his hero, W. B. Yeats and befriended many literary personalities who were yet the beginners. The leading literary figures of that period were James, Conrad, Hardy and H.G. Wells --all stars of fiction and Shaw in theatre. Between 1908 and 1911 he published six collections of verse, most of it dominated by a passion for Provençal and early Italian poetry. Modernizing his style, he launched the Imagist movement in 1912, advocating concreteness, economy, and free verse. The range and brilliance of Pound's contacts in all the arts convinced him that London was to be the centre of a new Renaissance. He cast himself in the role of an editor contributing to Yeats's mature style, discovering and promoting Joyce and Eliot.
Attracted to Mussolini by his energy and his promises of monetary reform, Pound naïvely assumed that the Italian leader could be persuaded to put Douglas's theory into practice. At first, the main target of Pound's attacks was 'usury', which he depicted (e.g. in Canto 45) as an unnatural force that polluted the creative instinct in humanity. By about 1930 the usurers he condemned were usually Jews. In the later 1930s Pound devoted much of his energy to defending fascism and trying to avert war. In 1939 he had returned to the United States as a self-styled peace broker in a bid to prevent the war to happen Then he was in his mid-fifties and had already made a name as a poet and a literary figure in the circle of W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway. E.E.Cummings and others. His friends advised him not to express his political views in America but restrict himself to economic field. The foremost question in every one’s mind was; would there be a war? He met the press at the harbor and his defense of Mussolini and his policies and remarks about contemporary writers and books raised a furor. “I regard the literature of social significance as of no significance. It is pseudo-pink blah.” He told everywhere that Mussolini represented the only logical answer to bourgeois materialism and Marxist determinism. He painted a pessimistic picture of the future of United States and his friend Carlos William wrote later,” The man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of fascism out of his brain during the next few years which I seriously doubt that he can do.” He left again for Italy leaving behind lot of controversial speeches, statements and writings in America that supported fascism.
Back in Italy he started a full-fledged onslaught on the Allied powers through the media and in support of Hitler and Mussolini while the war ravaged. His return to America in 1945 was as a sixty years’ old prisoner set for trial on charges of treason. The defense attorney took the plea of insanity of his client and contacted his old friends for their testimonies. Hemingway wrote back that he could attest to Pound’s madness and believed that his friend’s mind and judgment had become progressively impaired over the past ten years with occasional flashes of brilliance. He blamed the poet’s condition partially on the false flattery of an unscrupulous few who had taken advantage of his “ever-mounting vanity”. The evidence was collected to prove that Pound was no longer of sound mind. So he was sent to St. Elizabeths purgatory (hospital)until his sanity was restored. Ezra Pound remained in purgatory until 1958. In 1957 some of his friends and admirers started a campaign to get him freed from purgatory. Among them were people like Robert Frost, Eliot, Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Kilpatrick, Dag Hammerskjold and others. He was officially discharged from St. Elizabeths on May 7, 1958 and sailed for Italy again with his family on the last day of June. He announced,” “after the fogs of London and Paris I have found in Rapallo sunshine and possibility of renewing myself; it had been a good place for poetry. It was actually the place where most of the Cantos were written.” Based in Italy Pound made short visits to other European countries and a two-week stay in US as well but during the tail end of his life he settled in Venice---the city where he had landed in 1907. Absorbed in his own universe he spent the last days of life in that city of canals. During those silent years he celebrated his 87th birthday. Two weeks before his birthday he read at a small café for an intimate gathering of friends the final fragment of his The Cantos:
I have tried to write paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak that is paradise
Let the Gods forgive what I have made
Let those I love try to forgive what I have made
(Post Script to The Cantos)
Ezra Pound whom James Joyce called “the unpredictable bundle of electricity” and T.S.Eliot termed as “the one responsible for the twentieth century revolution in poetry” passed away in sleep peacefully in 1972 in Venice.(The End)

LAST DAYS OF A LITERARY LEGEND

2006-02-22T11:47:00.000-05:00

>>By Dr Afzal Mirza>>
What did Manto so prematurely in? Excessive drinking, unjust criticism, a>sense of separation from his friends of Bombay and permanent pecuniary>problems he faced in Lahore>>

Saadat Hasan Manto arrived in Pakistan sometime in 1948. Before that he was well settled in Bombay where with his perspicacity he had attained an>important position as a writer of fiction and film scripts.There he had a circle of friends ranging from literary stalwarts to famous>actors and directors. He was not happy in bidding farewell to the city that had given him so much in terms of fame and fortune. His friends like Ashok Kumar and actor Shayam tried to prevail upon him to forget about migrating to Pakistan. They would tell him that things would>settle down soon and his family, he had sent to Lahore amidst all the heat of partition, would be able to come back. But as he wrote in one of his>Bombay stories "aur bazoo wali gali say ho kar man Pakistan chala aya" (And taking a side street, I came over to Pakistan).
Lahore of 1948 was much different from Lahore of today. The after effects of partition were evident from every thing. The biggest transmigration of>people in human history had left its deep impact on the atmosphere of the city. Convoy after convoy of refugees was arriving in a state of utter destitution. The people had lost their identities and were trying to re-establish themselves in new environment. Manto arrived during those trying times and tried to settle down with his family. They say Qudratullah Shahab who was then a director of industries offered to allot Manto an ice factory. But how could a man sold to literature become a business man? As expected, Manto declined the offer. Before partition, Lahore was one of the major film centres of India but most of the film-makers who were non-Muslims migrated to India. So this avenue was also not available to Manto. Masud Parvez, his friend from Amritsar and Bombay, produced a film, Beli, which was based on a Manto story but it flopped. So to make both ends meet Manto reverted to story writing. This was the most productive period of his literary career. Rather I would say that in Bombay Manto used to spend much of his energy on film writing but in Lahore he got engaged in writing stories exclusively for newspapers>and magazines.Those days one could find Manto in the evenings either on Macleod Road or on The Mall. He would regularly visit Tea House where most of the writers used to meet. The period following partition affected almost every important writer. But Manto wrote outstanding pieces on the ravages of pre- and post-partition>religious frenzy, not realising that Chaudhry Muhammad Hussains of this world -- who had prosecuted him for his earlier stories Kali Shalwar and Boo -- were still there to catch him for 'obscenity' in his writings.Thanda Gosht was published in magazine Javed edited by Arif Abdul Mateen.>Both Manto and Arif were prosecuted for this. When Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi published Manto's story Khol Do in Naqoosh, he was warned and the paper's issue was banned. Both these stories depicted the black side of the post-partition period. All this discouraged Manto as well as his publishers who were afraid of publishing his pieces. Those days Manto also wrote indiscriminately. The remuneration offered to>writers was very poor. However, due to his popularity, Manto could at least get his payment in advance but the return on his hard work was so meager that he was in perpetual pecuniary problems. It was during this period that>he wrote to one of his friends, Ghulam Mustafa, in Karachi, "Some law suits and monetary problems have made me so miserable that I cannot explain my condition to you. When I received your money order, the same day I received a summon from the high court to present myself before the court in order to explain why my story Thanda Gosht should not be banned. I appeared that day but hearing was not held that day. On fourth day, judgement was announced>in>my absence that the story be banned." The perpetual disappointments aroused in Manto nostalgic feelings about his past especially the good times he had spent in Bombay. So while living in Lahore he mentally sojourned in Bombay. Then he wrote the character sketches of his Bombay friends like Ashok Kumar, Shayam, Nargis and stories like>Mamad Bhai, Mummy, Mozaile, Babu Gopi Nath etc. "I am not happy in Lahore. I miss Bombay where I had all my friends. There I got married and my first daughter was born and the second began her life," he wrote. After all Lahore was a much smaller city as compared to Bombay with few opportunities and Manto needed money to live. In Bombay he was used to lavish living and consuming best drinks. In Lahore both these things were missing. He wrote, "You think that I am a broke but actually that is not so.Here in Pakistan my income is around seven or eight hundred rupees per>month. But it is not sufficient for me. My personal expenditure alone is thirty to forty rupees a day." This monetary problem together with consumption of cheap liquors told heavily on his health. In Lahore when he arrived he was in his>mid-thirties. Then he was healthy with long brown hair and a glowing Kashmiri complexion. He used to dress very meticulously. He cut an impressive figure. He had piercing brown eyes that darted out of his thick-rimmed glasses. And in a few years time we saw him with a pale face and yellow sunken eyes. His hair were fast getting gray and were disheveled and he would walk with faltering gait. He was so frustrated that to an editor who had asked for his photo he wrote, "My brother, why are you demanding a photograph from me. I am fed up>with my own face. Yes, I am prepared to write for you." Generally speaking the people were not averse to his drinking but were not>prepared to bear the expenses for it. Once he told Farigh Bukhari who castigated him for excessive drinking, "Brother, I don't like it myself. But if I get it so scarcely then why shouldn't I drink to my fill. People think>that I drink to enjoy. Rather it has become an ailment for me. It is an old habit. How can I get rid of it now? I tried to give it up many times but it has so much affected my nerves that I can hardly leave it. Just imagine who would be happy to drink after borrowing or begging or hiding one self and listening to the jibes of friends and foes. Under these circumstances how could it be termed as enjoyment."This irreversible habit made him highly touchy. He would not tolerate any criticism. He would roughly rebuke any one even his close friends who tried to point out any shortcoming in his writing. He was excessively upset because he had been equally condemned by the progressives and the rightists for 'obscenity'. He could understand the attitude of the obscurantists but would lament at the criticism by the leftists. He used to say in despair, "My talent has become a problem for me. I wish I were not a writer...Who is more progressive than myself. I am one of the founders of this movement. I am the one who introduced realism in literature. My friends now charge me for obscenity. They say that throwing of garbage in the open is against the hygienic principals. They want to conceal the muck in their basements but they forget that it could create a bigger epidemic in society than plague or cholera. ...if they do not consider me progressive let them do so. I am not>progressive I am Manto only Manto." Manto's popularity, however, had made him a star attraction at every literary gathering that he attended in Lahore. He read his masterpieces in some of the annual meetings of Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq. Manto had his unique style of presenting his stories. He would read them>slowly with pauses and deliver the dialogue in a dramatic style -- a trait he developed due to his long association with film industry. Those who>listened to his rendering of Toba Tek Singh in YMCA Hall packed to capacity>would hardly be able to forget the great impact it had on the audience. There was absolute silence in the hall when he finished it and there were tears in every eye. His presentation of Mozaile in another meeting also left every one stunned.

WHEN MANTO CAME TO GOVERNMENT COLLEGE LAHORE

2006-02-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

Dr Afzal Mirza
Saadat Hasan Manto died in Lahore in January1955 at a relatively young age of forty two years. Originally hailing from Amritsar he had shifted to Bombay in early 1940s where he was in great demand as story and dialogue writer for Indian movies. As now Bombay was even during pre-partition days the major film center of India. Before moving there Manto had a short stint at Delhi where he worked for All India Radio writing features and dramas. Famous humor writer A.S.Bokhari (Patras) was the director general of broadcasting and he had attracted a sizeable number of writers to Delhi. They included Krishan Chandar, Opindar Nath Ashk,Rajindar Singh Bedi and many other well known writers of the period. Manto’s fame traveled to Bombay where he was offered by the owner of weekly film magazine ‘Musawwar’ to work as its editor. There he made lot of friends in the film industry and was hired by Bombay Talkies to write stories and dialogues for its productions. By the time Pakistan became a reality Manto was nicely settled in Bombay enjoying a life of comfort and effluence—a rare thing for a writer. A few months before the independence he sent his family to Lahore believing that when things would settle down he would recall them. But the things never settled. The large scale carnage that followed independence continued unabated and even a relatively peaceful Bombay known as the melting pot of the religions was also affected. He became restless there and wanted to join his family and in early 1948 against the advice of his friends shifted to Lahore. Thence began a period of great stress and struggle for Manto because the whole country was in the grip of turmoil.
Manto’s nephew Hamid Jalal who was a reputed media man himself got his family settled in a flat in Lakshami Mansion located in the center of Lahore in the vicinity of the Mall. So Manto on arrival in Lahore joined his family comprising his wife Safia and two daughters. His wife Safia was a remarkable lady. She was already well known in the literary circles because she had been mentioned in many of Manto stories. A typical Kashmiri woman Safia was fare complexioned like Manto himself and wore glasses on her sharp nose. In Lahore’s literary circles she soon became a known figure because she would escort her husband in most of his meetings and functions. She would bravely face embarrassments that her husband used to cause by his blunt statements sometime in high spirits. We first time saw the couple at the meeting of Majlis-e-Iqbal of Government College Lahore where Manto was invited to read an article.. GC of those days had a number of important writers among its teaching staff and students. Among the teachers one could name Sufi Tabassum, Safdar Mir, Ashfaq Ali Khan, Dr Ajmal, Dr Sadiq, Dr Nazir Ahmad and G.M.Asar . While among the students one could count Ashfaq Ahmad, Muzaffar Ali Syed, Shahzad Ahmad, Akhtar Ahsan, Javed Shahin and many other budding writers. As a tradition Majlis used to hold its meetings in the college staff room. But on that occasion the staff room fell short of space because a large number of students came to listen to Manto. Many of them therefore watched from the corridors.
Manto accompanied by his wife was ushered in the room by G.M.Asar who taught Urdu in the college and was Manto’s neighbor in Lakshmi mansion flats. Hailing from Madras he wrote beautiful English. It was said that Asar was a boozing partner of Manto as well. Manto had a glowing Kashmiri complexion and wore light brown shirwani on silk kurta –pajama and had a Salim Shahi sandal in his feet. He had a crop of thick brown hair on his head and a pair of brown eyes darted out of the lenses of his thick-rimmed glasses perched on his slightly slanting nose. He sat down on a sofa flanked by Safia and Prof Asar. Lutfulmannan Sahir was the secretary of the Majlis who made a short introductory speech inviting Manto to read his essay entitled “How I write a short story.” The essay was later on included in one of his books of articles. Manto had his unique style of writing simple prose and would read it slowly giving pauses at appropriate places. That evening he mesmerized his audience with his personality and his reading style. He began by saying that “ I do not write a story rather a story writes me.” He talked of the three aspects of the process of writing a story. Firstly what sort of environment he requires to write a story. He said that he didn’t need any specific environment because he could keep on writing while his children played around and sometime even disturbed him. “But before writing a story my condition is like a hen who wants to lay an egg.” He said he was quite particular about the type of paper and fountain pens for writing. He always wrote on smooth papers with expensive pens. “I write 786 on the top of the page and then start writing and then it goes on and on.” In Delhi and Bombay Manto used to write with an Urdu type writer machine that he had purchased in Delhi but in Lahore since he did not have such a type writer he used to write with a pen. Then came the question how did he conceive the ideas for his short stories. Manto said that he derived his concepts from different sources. “Every morning I go through the newspaper to find whether there is any news that could trigger some idea,” he said. In his day to day dealings he observed the people and would sometime come across a man or a woman who could become the character of his story. Many years later travelogue writer Mustansar Husain Tarar whose family also came to live in one of the flats in Lakshami Mansion wrote in his autobiographical novel Raakh how Manto tried to’ blackmail’ his hero to tell him the details of his love affair to weave a story around that character.
In the question-answer session that followed the article many questions were asked about the charge of obscenity leveled on his writings and he strongly defended himself even getting very blunt sometime. A questioner asked him whether after reading his own story it had ever occurred to him that he had transgressed certain limits. ”No.” he retorted. “If I had felt like that I wouldn’t have defended it in many courts of the country.” To the question why doesn’t he write a novel Manto replied that he did not possess the concentration which is required to write a novel. After conceiving a character it was difficult for him to hold him on for more than the time required to write a short story. “I can’t keep him with me for more than that but for a novel sometimes it takes years to hold him on,” he told the audience. After the meeting Manto was encircled by the students for his autographs and he was so happy to oblige them. The meeting took place sometimes in 1951. Then he was in his late thirties. He had arrived in Pakistan only three years earlier but the four years that followed were so stressful for him that in a couple of years one could feel that he was not the same Manto we saw in the Government College. During that period he wrote indiscriminately almost an article a day. One could see that it was affecting his health and quality of work adversely. The problem was compounded by his consumption of cheap liquors. One could see him now with withered cheeks, pale complexion, graying disheveled hair and a faltered gait. It seemed that he was driving fast towards his end which came on a cold day of January 1955—fifty years ago. Indubitably he was the greatest Urdu short story writer of the last century.(End)

Book Review: The World Was Going our Way

2006-02-16T12:30:00.000-05:00

Book: THE WORLD WAS GOING OUR WAY
(The KGB and the Battle for the Third World)
Authors: Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
Publisher: Basic Books New York
Pages: 675 Price:$29.95

THE KGB OPERATIONS IN THE THIRD WORLD

Dr Afzal Mirza

In America the classified documents of various departments are declassified periodically so that the public especially the academia could have access to them .Some people who have contacts in the administration sometimes lay their hands on some beefy classified information and produce articles and books. So there are several books based on the material pertaining to CIA operations in various countries of the world especially the third world countries.. In this context one could name The Inside Story by Andrew Tully (1962), The CIA-- A Forgotten Story by William Blum (1986) and The Cultural Cold War by Saunders (2000). Recently two other books on CIA activities have come in the market i.e. CIA at War by Kessler and the Trial of Henry Kissinger. But there was hardly any material available concerning Soviet intelligence agency KGB as Russians strictly guarded their secrets. Vasili Mitrokhin a KGB employee who was in 1972 made responsible for moving the KGB’s foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters outside Moscow spent more than a decade clandestinely making notes and transcripts of these highly classified material. He then hid it beneath the floor of his house. After the fall of Soviet Empire Mitrokhin tried to pass on this material to American Embassy in Latvia but they refused to accept it doubting about its credibility. He then passed it on to the British embassy who involved Christopher Andrew a professor of history at Cambridge University to decipher and retrieve the material whose many pages had all gone soiled and unreadable. The result was their joint first book entitled The Sword and the Shield (1999) based on the Soviet secret operations in Europe and America. Now the present book being the second volume of Mitrokhin Archives has appeared a year after Mitrokhin’s death in 2004. Andrew has given the detailed biography of Mitrokhin in the foreword to the book. Unlike other non-fictional books The World makes interesting reading as it covers Asia, The Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Though the book carries interesting description of KGB’s involvement in the third world countries and its liaisons with the leadership of those countries it also provides information on KGB’s local agents revealing names of some of them while others have been mentioned under their code names. The part of the book dealing with Asia could be of special interest to us because it tells about KGB’s operations in Pakistan and it’s role during various events leading to the break-up of the country. It was always an open secret that KGB like its American rival CIA provided funds to some organizations and local operators but the most interesting thing is the way KGB influenced the public opinion and created bias among the leaders about their opponents. The authors open the chapter on Pakistan with the statement,” The Soviet Union’s special relationship with India drastically limited its influence in Pakistan. Gromyko (Soviet Foreign Minister) complained of the ‘insidious (Western) web’ into which Pakistan fell almost at the outset of her existence as an independent state. The KGB also found authoritarian military regimes which governed Pakistan for most of the cold war period more difficult to penetrate than India’s ruling Congress Party.” The authors write that according to the KGB files about twenty leading Karachi and Hyderabad communists set up a small underground party with the cover name “Sindh Provincial Committee” which maintained secret contact with KGB’s Karachi residency. The Committee was kept going by an annual Soviet subsidy of $25-30000. Another small Communist underground party in East Pakistan also received covert funding…. Moreover a number of SPC leaders made what KGB considered handsome profits from the privileged trading contracts with the Soviet Union.” According to the authors during Ayub’s period the KGB had a number of agents in the Pakistan foreign ministry and diplomatic corps who provided information by photographing documents. “The most senior Pakistani diplomat identified in the files as GREM was recruited in 1965 and became ambassador later on. The only KGB agent in the Foreign Ministry whose identity can be revealed is Abu Sayid Hasan (codenamed GULYAM)…After his foreign assignments in 1979 before his death he moved to the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport.” The one who served them very diligently was ALI who held a senior position in the military communications centre in Rawalpindi

According to the authors the main job of these agents was to spread suspicion of the United States.”The main target of the influence operation was the flamboyant Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.The operation REBUS in the a spring of 1966 was principally designed to reinforce Bhutto’s hostility to the United States by passing to the Pakistan government forged documents that US ambassador McConuaghy was plotting the overthrow of Ayub Khan, Bhutto and other ministers. The operation seems to have some effect at least on Bhutto who was convinced for the rest of his life that his removal from office in June 1966 was the result of American pressure.” As Yahya took over the power the KGB then embarked upon operation RAVI to make Yahya Khan suspicious of both China and USA. After this operation came operation PADMA which was meant to persuade Yahya Khan that Chinese are inciting rebellion in East Pakistan. Mitrokhin writes that, “ after the partition of India in 1947 when shown a map of the divided Pakistani state Stalin had commented,’ Such a state cannot survive for long.’ ” So in 1969 KGB started to cultivate Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. In the eyes of Russians Mujib was more acceptable as he had no deeper relations with China as against Bhutto who was not acceptable to both Russia and USA. Mitrokhin writes, “ It was evident by the fact that no significant Soviet dignitary visited Pakistan during ZAB’s five and half years’ tenure in office despite his own two visits to Moscow.”

Regarding KGB’s influence in Pakistani media the book relates,” During the mid-1970s the KGB substantially increased its influence in the Pakistani media. In 1973 according to KGB statistics it placed 33 articles in the Pakistani press –little more than 1 percent of the number in India. By 1977 the number had risen to 440 and the KGB had acquired direct control of at least one periodical….Disinformation fed to Bhutto government claimed that the United States considered Pakistan too unreliable an ally to deserve substantial military aid. Washington was allegedly increasingly distrustful of Bhutto’s government and regarded Shah of Iran as its main regional ally. The Shah was determined to become the leader of the Muslim world and to regard Bhutto as a rival. He was also reported to be scornful of Bhutto’s failure to deal with unrest in Baluchistan and to be willing to send in Iranian troops if situation worsened there. By 1975 the KGB was confident that active measures were having a direct personal influence on Bhutto….Among the initiatives by Bhutto that annoyed the Kremlin was his campaign for a new economic world order to redress the grave injustice to the poorer nations of the world. “ Bhutto’s plan to hold non-aligned summit in Islamabad in 1976 was also seen with disfavor in Kremlin so KGB embarked upon a plan to discredit Bhutto’s initiative and the countries like Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana, Cyprus, Yemen, Mexico, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan and Nepal were approached with the message that Islamabad conference would weaken the NAM.” So instead of the conference the government of ZAB was overthrown by the army in 1977.

Thereafter the KGB offensive started against Ziaulhaq because of his involvement in the Afghan war but Zia was kept informed by CIA of the measures taken by KGB that included to devise ways of working with Pakistani opposition forces to destabilize and eventually overthrow the Zia regime.. Here the authors have given details of the activities of Murtaza Bhutto and his Al-Zulfikar outfit and various KGB operations in collaboration with Murtaza. Most of the details of these activities have been incorporated by Andrew borrowing information from Raja Anwar’s book The Terrorist Prince. KGB also tried to create dissensions in the Pakistani Army by printing pamphlets and planting news in India concerning Pakistan’s piling up of chemical and biological weapons. The authors conclude the chapter on Pakistan by saying, ”When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir became Prime Minister after Zia’s death in 1988 she showed little enthusiasm for Mujahideen operations in the final stages of war. Had she become Prime Minister earlier or Zia been assassinated in 1982 the history of war in Afghanistan would have been significantly different.”

This voluminous book has plenty of material on other countries like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Japan, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan , Cuba, Chile etc. Mitrokhin has mentioned how Indira Gandhi had gone close to Soviet Union or how they influenced Allende in Chile or influenced Mujib in Bangladesh. All in all the book is worth reading but the question of credibility remains unanswered as Christopher Andrew has tried to fill up the gaps in the stories by relying on various non-Russian books. For instance the whole Bhutto period has been covered by quoting from Rafi Raza and Raja Anwar’s books. Frankly speaking the book does not consist of the Mitrokhin’s papers alone but has been supplemented by Andrew’s own studies as he is considered as an expert in strategic intelligence and has been assisting CIA . (End)

Book Review: CIA AT WAR

2006-02-08T13:47:00.000-05:00

Book: THE CIA AT WAR

(Inside the Secret Campaign against Terror)

Author: Ronald Kessler

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press New York

Pages 362 Price: $ 27.95

CIA’S COVERT OPERATIONS

Dr Afzal Mirza

There is a long list of CIA’s covert operations in various parts of the world since its creation in 1947 by President Truman. After the World War II a period of cold war started and America’s top priority became the containment of Soviet Russia’s growing influence in the third world. In his book Cultural Cold War written by Frances Stanar Saunders the author made use of the declassified material and made startling revelations how CIA engaged some of the celebrated writers of the world in a propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union. The long list included people like Andre Gide, George Orwell, Andre Malraux, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Robert Lowell and others. Many writers who unknowingly supported the CIA sponsored Forum for Cultural Freedom later on renounced their support because they were not aware that it was a CIA forum. They were Bertrand Russel, Jean Paul Sartre, W.H.Auden . Saunders also threw light on how CIA made use of this forum in denying Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda in 1962 through enormous propaganda campaign. Neruda however bagged this prize much later in 1971. Again much came to light when the CIA’s secret papers seized by Iranians when they stormed CIA’s regional center in Tehran in 1979 were made public. In them one could find how CIA had informers every where in the region including Pakistan and how big officials of this country were passing information to CIA. Even their names were mentioned but surprisingly they continued to serve the government of Pakistan even after that exposure.

Kessler who has written a very readable book The CIA at War has not only made use of declassified material but also collected information after interviewing fifty current CIA officers as well as George Tenet who till recently was the director general of CIA. When Kessler talked to him he was still in service but he resigned after the report of 9/11 commission where much blame was also laid on the poor intelligence reports coming from CIA. The way Kessler has projected Tenet it appears that he was perhaps commissioned by the latter to do the job as he was under immense pressure after 9/11. Tenet son of a Greek immigrant and a graduate of Georgetown University and with a master’s from Columbia University was actually hired by Clinton administration and Bush made him continue in his job. Kessler himself is a former investigative reporter of Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and has written thirteen non-fiction books many of which are bestsellers. Before talking about CIA’s recent operations Kessler has described some of the earlier interesting projects. For instance in 1967 during the Kennedy administration Castro was the focus of CIA’s activity but Castro was outsmarting them. .Kessler writes,” The CIA plotted to humiliate Castro with his own people by trying to get his beard fall off –something that only someone whose level of maturity had not advanced beyond kindergarten could have dreamed up.’ He tells of a report by CIA inspector general of August 25, 1967, that” counted number of other bungled attempts to assassinate Castro or embarrass him with his people. Under one such plan CIA would spray the air of a radio station where Castro broadcast his speeches with hallucinogenic agent similar to LSD. Another scheme was designed to contaminate the cigars smoked by Castro with a chemical that would create’ temporary personality disorientation’. A third idea w as to introduce thallium salts into Castro’s shoes so his beard would fall out. This would destroy his public image.” The author writes that “the stupidest scheme was to enlist the aid of mafia in killing Castro.” A lethal pill containing botulinum toxin was produced that was to be administered to Castro in food. The gangsters couldn’t however carry out the plot.

The author further informs us that “ After fumbling in Cuba, the CIA went on to try to control elections in Chile. In 1964 the agency spent 2.6 million to support the elections of the Christian Democratic candidate Eduardi Frei to prevent Salvador Allende ‘s accession to the presidency. In 1970 the CIA tried to mount a military coup in Chile to prevent confirmation of Salavdor Allende ‘s victory in Chilean presidential election. It also spent $ 8 million to prevent his confirmation—all in vain.. The CIA also became involved in covert action and paramilitary actions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Nicaragua.” However Kessler is silent about the assassination of president Allende and bringing General Pinochet to power in Chile. He has also not mentioned a word about the murder of Patrice Lumumba. According to Kessler the CIA intervention in Afghanistan began in 1980 when they supplied money and weapons to Afghan mujahideen . He terms this intervention highly successful.The Soviets withdrew in 1989 that gave the biggest set back to Russia and brought the cold war to an end. Kessler thinks that as soon as Soviets withdrew America should not have withdrawn from Afghanistan and helped to create a stable government. Kessler quotes Richard Kerr a deputy Director CIA as saying,” If America had remained in Afghanistan after Soviet withdrawal it is less likely that Taliban would have come into existence.” Another writer Steve Cole also thinks on the same lines. He goes to the extent of saying that .”Had they allowed Hafizullah Amin to continue in Afghanistan there would be no Taliban and no Al Qaeda.”

In 1986 Regan administration gave more powers to CIA by creating a Counterterrorism Center “to allow CIA to identify terrorists who had committed crimes against Americans abroad and to help bring them to justice.” The first project of the Center was to deal with Abu Nidal organization. This organization was founded by Sabri Al-Banna in 1937 in Palestine. In 1970s and 1980s according to the author Abu Nidal organization killed or wounded nine hundred people in twenty countries. Their targets were Israel, Jews and moderate Arabs, Europeans and Americans. In 1974 Abu Nidal broke away from PLO accusing Yasser Arafat of abandoning its fight against Israel. Kessler tells us that before al Qaeda Abu Nidal was the number one terrorist threat. The CIA recruited a key source within the organization and prepared a comprehensive report on the organization and its financial backers and arms suppliers and called this as The Abu Nidal Hand Book. Kessler writes that the book was published and its publication had the desired effect. The governments in Europe squirmed and terminated their dealings with Abu Nidal. Abu Nidal became paranoid. “CIA fed his paranoia by sowing rumors who were in fact loyal to Abu Nidal. The result was a blood bath…Soon ANO vanquished.”

The modus operandi of CIA was recruiting agents, analyzing images from spy satellites and intercepting communications. But in some regions these agents couldn’t work ‘effectively’ He cites the example of Pakistan .”Even a Muslim CIA officer with native language abilities could do a little more in this environment than a blond, the blue-eyed all-American. Case officers cannot escape the embassies and consulates in which they serve. A US official overseas photographed and registered with the local intelligence and security services can’t travel much particularly in a police-rich country like Pakistan without the host services knowing about it.” The author has given details of the operation by which Aimal Kasi who had killed CIA employees in front of its office in Washington DC was caught.. The incident happened in 1994 but it took them several years to catch him. Ultimately what happened was that in 1997 several of Kasi’s bodyguards approached a State Department officer in Karachi who put them in touch with a CIA officer there.” They told her they could pinpoint Kasi’s location in return for the reward money then set at $2 million…Eventually the CIA agreed to increase the reward to $5million.The agency obtained support for the operation from the Pakistani government. For days with the help of Pakistani agents the local FBI agent and two members of the hostage rescue team conducted surveillance of the Shalimar Hotel in Dera Ghazi Khan in central Pakistan. … Kasi fought but was not armed. Kasi then 33 was staying there.” After several years of trial Kasi was sentenced to death by injecting drugs. At the time of his death in 2002 the author says “he held up two fingers. It was either a peace sign or a victory sign.”

The author thinks that when it came to bin Laden Tenet was not content to convey warnings. He wanted bin Laden and cohorts killed. That was the only way to deal with al Qaeda. But he is critical of Clinton saying “ Clinton a master of spin tended to look no further than the next day’s headlines.” “After 9/11 the new challenge was radical Islamists and an Arab world where the media were anti-American,.” Kessler thinks. He describes how in 2002 they apprehended Abu Zubaida from a villa in Faislabad . The CIA seized ten thousand documents and translated and analyzed them He tells how CIA restarted the practice of hiring non American journalists and mullahs.” Besides paying Mullahs CIA created fake Mullahs-- recruited agents proclaiming themselves as clerics who took a more moderate position about the non-believers,” he reveals. “ The CIA’s use of Islamic leaders was not without precedent: During the Iranian hostage crisis CIA paid Mullahs to issue fatwas stating that taking hostages was against Islam….In seizing key al Qaeda operatives in countries like Pakistan the CIA usually working with FBI pinpointed the locations of terrorists and informed the local security service. As an example the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate(ISID) of the Pakistan military might make the arrest. However aware that the Taliban had penetrated the ISI in the past, the CIA and FBI staked out the neighborhood where arrests were to take place often wearing disguises,” he writes.” The book carries many so-called achievements of CIA during the Tenet period. Winding up his story, Kessler emphasizes the need for strengthening CIA and giving it more funds and staff –something suggested by 9/11 commission report also. But all his efforts to build up the image of Tenet crashed as in view of the criticism against CIA in the 9/11Commission Report he decided to resign and was replaced by Portar Goss just a month before the 2004 elections.(End) .

BOOK REVIEW; ENGAGING INDIA

2006-02-08T13:11:00.000-05:00

Book: ENGAGING INDIA
(Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb)
Author: Strobe Talbott
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, Washington D.C.
Pages; 268 Price:

Dr Afzal Mirza

American former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott’s latest book Engaging India though meant to describe Indo-US relations during Clinton’s times has much to reveal about Pakistan as well. Talbott who worked for 21 years in Time Magazine as a columnist and correspondent before becoming the deputy secretary of state had old association with Bill Clinton being his contemporary in Oxford days when the later was a Fulbright scholar there in late 1960s. It seems both of them shared a common fascination for India triggered by history books read by them.“ I remember him toting around Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli for several weeks in the fall of 1969 and talking about it in pubs and in the kitchen of the house we shared. Then same year he read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the first time,.” writes Talbott about Clinton. Again Talbott’s wife Brooke Shearer also stayed with an Indian family in 1968 when she visited India sponsored by Experiment in International Living. So India was close to Talbott’s heart when he took over as the deputy secretary of state. But the problem was that to the chagrin of Clinton administration India carried out nuclear tests in 1998. The situation was worsened by the fact that India kept their preparation for the tests so secret that CIA or any other American agency could hardly get a clue of it. Thus it was a great set back to the technical superiority of American intelligence. Talbot writes that the whole administration turned against India and wanted to clamp stringent sanctions. India justified its tests by pointing to its two neighbors “China an overt nuclear weapons state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962 and Pakistan a covert nuclear weapons state that had committed aggression against India three times and that continued to sponsor terrorism in Kashmir.” Talbot responded to the occasion by developing direct rapport with Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh from whom it appears that Talbot is enormously impressed. That is why the back flap of the book carries a picture of the two. The purpose before Talbott was that having accepted the fact that India was a nuclear power the efforts should now be directed to bring round India to sign NPT or CTBT.

The dust had not yet settled after Indian tests that Pakistan also announced its intention to retaliate with their own nuclear blasts. The most stressed man at this juncture was Clinton who did not want that Pakistan should follow suit. Thus the administration planned to prevail upon Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif not to go ahead with his plans to explode its nuclear devices. Talbot has described details of the administration’s efforts towards this end. While he describes in details the discussions he had with Jaswant Singh who skillfully sold the BJP government’s point of view to his American counterpart but it hardly satisfied Clinton and his close circle of advisers. Now when they come to know that Pakistan was also preparing to effectively reply to Indian tests they came into action. Talbottt writes, “ Clinton telephoned Nawaz Sharif the Pakistan prime minister, to whet his appetite for the planes, huge amounts of financial aid and a prize certain to appeal to Sharif--- an invitation from him to make an official visit to Washington. Sharif was not swayed.’ You can almost hear the guy wringing his hands and sweating,’ Clinton said after hanging up” Having failed to evince any reply from Sharif Talbott was directed by the president to visit Pakistan and make the case to Nawaz Sharif personally. An invitation to their visit could only be obtained through the good offices of Gen. Jahangir Karamat. Which according to Talbott proved that ‘ the civilian leaders were in a state of confusion perhaps discord and the military called the shots in Pakistan.’ In Pakistan they first met foreign minister Gohar Ayub and foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad who did not agree to American proposal. Shamshad to the disliking of Americans was more vocal. He writes, ’The people of Pakistan’ added Shamshad Ahmad ,’ will not forgive those in this room if we do not do the right thing. “Then they meet General Karamat, the favorite of Talbott and all other authors (from Zinni to Tommy Franks). “ He heard us out and acknowledged the validity of at least some of our arguments….His government was still wrestling with the question what to do….There was more generally Karamat talked about his country’s political leadership a subtle but discernable undertone of long-suffering patience bordering on scorn.” Briefing them with the historic Indian attitude towards Pakistan Karamat assured them that “ given the political, military, historic and economic stakes involved the Pakistani government is carefully weighing what to do.” Then they met prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Talbott writes, “ What we got from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was a Hamlet act, convincing in its own way----that is I think he was genuinely feeling torn—but rather pathetic….On this occasion he seemed nearly paralyzed with exhaustion, anguish and fear. He was literally just as Clinton had sensed during their phone call---wringing his hands. He had yet to make up his mind but he said,’ I am an elected official and I can not ignore popular sentiment.’” When Talbott revealed to Sharif the Clinton plan of ‘dramatizing’ the world’s gratitude to him during the latter’s visit to USA if he just refrained from testing Nawaz Sharif asked Talbott, “Will Clinton promise to skip India on his trip and come only to Pakistan?” There was no way he could promise that but he told Sharif that Clinton would recalibrate the length and character of the stops in Delhi and Islamabad. He writes,” Sharif looked more miserable than ever.” Kashmir came up repeatedly during the meeting and Nawaz Sharif told him that Kashmir and not nuclear issue was at the core of the tension between India and Pakistan. Talbott did not enjoy his dealings with Shamshad and goes on to write,” Towards the end of the meeting Sharif asked every one but me to wait outside. Shamshad seemed miffed. He glanced nervously over his shoulder as he left.” Sharif told him in privacy that if he did as they wanted the next time “you came to Islamabad you would find yourself not dealing with a clean-shaven moderate but and Islamic fundamentalist ‘with a long beard.’” Pakistan went ahead with its tests and when Talbott broke the news to Clinton ,”He scowled, looked down at floor and silent for what seemed a long moment, ’That’s bad’ he finally said shaking his head ,’real bad. Those folks have got a kind of genius for making a bad deal worse’. Clinton said that he wanted to get into that situation there but that would be harder now..

Talbott writes that Nawaz Sharif a number of times asked Clinton to mediate on Kashmir between India and Pakistan as America did between Israel and Egypt but Clinton would express his inability saying that for mediation both the parties should approach the mediator. In this case India was not interested. But it seems that Clinton was definitely interested in easing out situation between the two nuclear neighbors as he mentioned to his advisors. They had a solution of the problem by dividing Kashmir along the LOC and giving more autonomy to Indian –held Kashmir. Clinton might have personally helped in its solution but according to Talbott, Kargil episode was yet another event that disappointed Clinton enormously. He has written in details what happened between Clinton and Nawaz Sharif on that occasion under the heading From Kargil to Blair House. He writes about the Lahore Summit between Vajpai and Sharif and Musharraf’s elevation as Chief of Army Staff in these words,” It quickly became apparent that the new chief of the army staff Parvez Musharraf had even less regard for Sharif and the civilian leadership than his predecessor Karamat. In particular Musharraf found the Lahore Summit galling” About Kargil he writes,”The American Government followed the conflict with growing alarm which could easily become a nuclear cataclysm…Tony (Zinni) warned Musharraf that India would cross the LOC itself if Pakistan did not pull back. Musharraf professed to be unimpressed. Back in Washington the administration let it be known that if Sharif did not order a pullback we would hold up $ 100 million IMF loan that Pakistan sorely needed….. We did not know whether Sharif had personally ordered the infiltration above Kargil (doubtful) reluctantly acquiesced in it (more likely) or not even known about it until after it happened (possible). But there was no doubt that he now realized that it was colossal blunder.”

Talbott writes that “through our ambassador in Islamabad Sharif begged Clinton to come to his rescue with a plan that would stop the fighting and set the stage for a US-brokered solution to Kashmir,” In reply to Sharif’s phone call Clinton said that he would consider it only if Pakistan first unilaterally withdrew. ”The next day Sharif called to say that he was packing his bags and getting ready to fly immediately to Washington--- never mind that he has not been invited. ‘This guy‘s coming literally on a wing and a prayer ,’said the president,” Sharif was not given the proper protocol and was received by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia and brought to Blair House who informed the Americans that ‘they should be prepared to deal with a man who was not just distraught about the crisis but terrified of the reaction from Musharraf and the military if he gave in to American pressure.’ Talbott suggested to the president that if Sartaj Aziz and Shamshad would participate in the meeting it would not be a productive so president should have a two to one meeting with Sharif attended by one aide of Clinton. In the meeting instead of relenting Sharif made matter worse by linking withdrawal from Kargil with solution of Kashmir dispute .Talbott writes that Clinton came as close to as I had ever seen blowing up in a meeting with a foreign leader. But after giving him a lecture on history Clinton switched from “chastising Sharif for the reckless stupidity of Kargil to complementing him on his earlier contribution to moment of diplomatic promise.” “Having listened to Sharif’s complaints against United States he had a list of his own and it started with terrorism. ..Clinton had worked himself back into real anger—his face flushed. ..Sharif seemed beaten, physically and emotionally. He denied he had given any orders with regards to nuclear weaponry and said he was worried for his life.” The meeting however ended on a happy and friendly feeling on Clinton’s part after Sharif signed the press note “ As the president and his advisers were leaving Blair House Shamshad Ahmad scurried after Sandy with alterations he wanted in the text. Sandy kept walking and said briskly over his shoulder ,’Your boss says it’s okay as it is.’” (End)

WATTENBERG'S GIFT TO BOOK LOVERS

2006-01-26T13:30:00.000-05:00

.Wattenberg with his books

WATTENBERG’S GIFT TO BOOKLOVERS
Dr Afzal Mirza
In the downtown Baltimore on Vineyard Street there is a gray single-storey structure that reminds you of a storage house. Above its closed door hangs a simple hand-written placard saying ”The Book Thing of Baltimore.” The place remains closed on other week days except on Saturdays and Sundays. On these two days the whole space in front of the building bustles with cars and other visitors. There are people bringing boxes full of books to donate and others who carry away books –each book stamped with the notice” Not for Resale. THIS IS A FREE BOOK.” Watching from outside one could hardly discern that the barrack-like building carries more than 250000 books and all donated. It is a fairly congested area where majority of middle class people live. Most of them are blacks but perhaps they are the people who deserve such a facility most. America has an excellent library system. You have a central library in every county and then there are branches in smaller towns. The Baltimore city has a central county library too and a number of other libraries including the famous Pratt Library. The membership of these libraries is free. I remember that when after acquiring membership of Baltimore County Library I asked the desk clerk how many books could I borrow at one time. To my astonishment she replied smilingly, “As many as you could carry.” Beside these libraries there are hundreds of libraries in educational institutions. But the novel idea of Book Thing was conceived in a beer bar where Russell Wattenberg worked as a bar tender.
A native of Brooklyn (New York) Wattenberg was passing through Baltimore when he stopped to fill petrol in his car. He liked the atmosphere so much that he decided to stay here for good. Back in New York his parents spent weekends buying and selling stuff at flea markets and once in junior high school young Russell got in trouble for selling candy in the cafeteria. Going through his parents’ house in upstate New York after his father untimely death in 1994, Wattenberg found the left- over things of the old man’s career as a salesperson: two 5-gallon buckets of DDT; enough liquor to stock a small store; cases of pens, pencils, and other school supplies; and 3,000 three-ring binders. But soon he realized that such a small store and these items wouldn’t generate enough money to make his both ends meet. So he also started buying and selling items in flea markets till his chance encounter with Baltimore, the beautiful harbor town of Maryland.
Wattenberg then in his mid-twenties moved to Baltimore in October ‘95 and got a job tending bar at Dougherty’s Pub in Mount Vernon. On Friday afternoons, a group of teachers gathered regularly at the bar and griped about the shortage of libraries in city schools. (According to Baltimore City Public School System officials, only one-third of the city’s 180 public schools have functional libraries open daily and operated by librarians.) Moved by their stories, Wattenberg emptied his tip jar one day and went garage-sale shopping, returning with nearly 300 used books. The next time the teachers came in for a beer, he tossed them the keys to his van and told them to take what they wanted. When once asked why did he use his own money to buy books for other people? “It is my passion because I love to read. They have always been around in my life. It is something very comforting and empowering, having the books around,” Mr. Wattenberg replied. The teachers were thrilled, and the used-book shopping became a habit. By the spring of 1998 Wattenberg was making trips to poorer neighborhoods on his days off, laying out trays of books on a corner and hollering “Free books!” to passersby. After renting a basement space near his home in 1999 Wattenberg gave up bartending and founded the non-profit Book Thing of Baltimore. Soon other people heard about what he was doing and started bringing him books, hundreds of thousands of books. He began distributing them to the public from his basement apartment.
Then the whole neighborhood got involved. Volunteers built bookshelves to house the books. Neighbors raised funds to pay Wattenberg a small salary, so that he could stop working extra jobs. Last year he shifted to the present independent premises. The “Book Thing” grew, as if by magic. Folks with unwanted books learned that Wattenberg would take them. Literacy programs would call to see if he could help.
Assisted by a group of volunteers Wattenberg has arranged the books in proper shelves under appropriate headings. Inside you will find stacks of books, shelves of books, boxes of books, about 250,000 books in all, arranged in general categories. The biggest section is that of books on fiction which is lodged in the main larger room Then in the smaller rooms there are books on history, politics, languages, travel and textbooks of medicine, engineering and finance. The whole interior has a modest décor. There is no air conditioning and there are simple cemented floors and simple shelves. Almost everything is donated. You can carry as many books you like but you have only to enter the number of books you are taking in the register kept near the entrance door. In the course of the typical weekend, according to Wattenberg the Book Thing gives away about 10,000 books, and takes in about the same amount. He believes that people deserve and need books, whatever their background.. Actually, his motivation is less complex. Says Wattenberg: “It makes me feel good.” Some people asked him if he would ever consider charging for his books—a dime, or even a penny—Wattenberg is emphatic. “Never,” he says. “That would ruin everything.” All I’m doing is taking books people don’t want and giving them to people that want ‘em,” says the beefy, bearded Wattenberg ( in his mid thirties now) in the accent of his native Brooklyn, N.Y. “Everybody says, ‘What’s the catch? What do I have to sign? What’s the suggested donation?’ The hardest thing is to convince people the books are really free.” (End)

Book Review

2006-01-25T18:06:00.000-05:00

Book: The World is Flat
(A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)
Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York
Pages: 488 Price: $ 27.50

GLOBALIZATION—THE NEW TRENDS
Dr Afzal Mirza
This best selling book has been written by Thomas L. Friedman a foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times. He has already authored three best selling books namely From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989),The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999) and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002). This is his yet another book on globalization and as usual by inserting lot of statistics and anecdotes from his personal interviews with a large number of people he met during his travels as a journalist Friedman has produced a commercially successful best seller. The proof of its success lies in the fact that it is on the bestsellers charts for the last 20 weeks and is being profusely quoted here and there. Highlighting the present trend of outsourcing in America Friedman has developed a couple of theories on globalization that sound interesting. The first theory is that The World is Flat and that is also the title of the book that attracts many readers for the book. What does he mean by the flatness of the world? He says that when Columbus sailed in three ships with a crew of three hundred people in search of India he accidentally discovered America. India was a great source of attraction for him because of its gold and spices and other exotic goods. On his return he reported to the King and Queen of Spain that the world was round. When Friedman undertook his journey to India he traveled with a small crew of photographers of Discovery Times .When he returned from India he reported to his wife that world was flat.
Friedman led his crew to Bangalore to visit the operations of an Indian company called Infosys. From downtown Bangalore when he drove through the pockmarked road with sacred cows, motor- rickshaws and horse-driven carts all jostling along to arrive at the facility he found a different world inside. “A massive resort-size swimming pool nestles amid boulders and manicured lawns adjacent to a huge putting green. There are multiple restaurants and a fabulous health club. Glass and steel buildings seem to sprout up like weeds each week.” A visit by the crew to the global conferencing center there found a massive screen on the wall—the biggest digital TV screen Friedman had ever seen. On that screen he was told that tele-conferencing could be carried out with people from Boston, New York, London, Sam Francisco all alive simultaneously. Above the screen there were eight big clocks each showing time of different zones of the world from US East/ West to GMT, Japan, Singapore Australia and Hong Kong. The boss of the facility Nilekani told Friedman,”Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” He meant that countries like India now compete in the field of globalization. According to the author what that man was saying was that the playing field was being flattened. “Flattened? Flattened? My God he‘s telling me the world is flat.”
What was going on inside that facility was indeed amazing. Friedman tells that the companies of America have outsourced much of their work to this Bangalore facility. If you have rented a car from Avis in America say in Chicago the bills are processed from Bangalore. The bills of General Electric for American consumers are prepared and issued from India. You travel by Delta Airlines or any other American airlines and if you have any lost baggage problem it is traced from Bangalore. Friedman describes how in his hotel room he was visited by a young Indian asking him if he could assign his personal income tax returns preparation to him. ”But I work in USA and receive my salary there,” Friedman tells the young man. “No problem, sir,” replies the young man ,” we are already doing it for hundreds of Americans here in India.” Then he goes on to tell the author that many small and medium sized tax consulting companies have already outsourced their work to Indians because it is much cheaper here to process it. What they do is, he explains, they assign a fictitious name to the customer and pass on his income details to them which Indian accountants process and send back the income tax statements for submission to American Revenue Service after just changing back the original name on the statement. Friedman writes,” In 2003 some 25000 US tax returns were done in India. In 2004 the number was 100,000. In 2005 it is expected to be 400,000. In a decade you will assume that your accountant has outsourced the basic preparation of your tax returns---if not more. It is interesting to know that there are 25000 people sitting in a building in Bangalore and a majority of them are making promotional calls for various products and customer service in US.

Friedman has written about an interesting discussion he had with an Indian company boss. When he asked the him far could they go in outsourcing ? For instance you can’t outsource the serving of a steak or giving a hair cut. The man replies,” But we are coming close to exporting a haircut, the appointment part. What kind of haircut do you want? Which barber do you want? All those things can and will be done by a call center far away. “His next program?. He had been talking to an Israeli company that is making some big advances in compression technology to allow for easier and better transfer of CAT Scans via the internet so you can quickly get a second opinion from a doctor half a world away. Later Friedman came to know from a John Hopkins Hospital researcher that in many small and medium sized hospitals in US radiologists are outsourcing reading of CAT scans to doctors in India and Australia. The advantage is that it is day time in India and Australia while it is night in US so after- hours coverage becomes possible. Friedman is a journalist and after listening to this outsourcing in other sectors he thought of journalism too and he talked to Tom Glocer the boss of Reuters .He was informed that “ with 2300 journalists around the world in 197 bureaus catering for a market including newspapers, investment bankers, stock brokers, radio, television and Internet outlets Reuters has a complex audience.” About trying to practice outsourcing in Reuters Glocer told Friedman, “ So the first thing we did was hire six reporters in Bangalore as an experiment. We said, ’let’s let them just do the flash headlines and the tables and whatever else we can let them to do in Bangalore. India is an unbelievably rich place to recruit people with not only technical skills but alsos financial skills.’” Thanks to outsourcing Glocer has cut the entire Reuters staff by roughly a quarter.

Broadly speaking Friedman has divided the history of globalization in three eras. The first lasted from 1492 when Columbus set sails for America to 1800. He calls it Globalization: 1.The key agent of change during this era was how much muscles you had. That means how much horse power, wind power or steam power you had. The second era Globalization 2 lasted roughly from 1800 to 2000 interrupted by the Great Depression and World Wars I and II. This shrank the world from medium size to small size. He thinks that driving force during this era were multinational companies. The multinationals went global for markets and labor spear- headed by joint stock companies and industrial revolution. The world shrank because of faster means of communication and computers. Globalization 3 is shrinking the world from small size to tiny size leveling the competition field or flattening the globe. And the main instrument of this age is not hardware but software that empowers individuals. The role of individuals and companies in the present era Friedman discusses in his theory called The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention. He explains how it would work. He says that in the course of his work for this book he met Michael Dell the CEO of Dell computers. He found out that the company sells 140000 to 150000 computers every day. Now as you receive an order with your specific requirements the whole machinery comes in to action. The company has six factories around the world—in Ireland, China, Brazil, Tennessee, Texas and Malaysia. The specific order given by Friedman was designed in Texas. There are thirty main components of a computer and each one is produced in dozens of factories in different parts of the world. For example the microprocessor comes either from Intel factories in Philippines, China, Costa Rica or Malaysia. Its memory comes from Taiwan, Korea or Germany etc. etc. These are just two out of thirty components but there are still 28 components that are procured from hundreds of factories located around the world. The criterion for location of these facilities is nothing but the peaceful and stable environments as well as stable political systems prevailing in those countries. Thus India is one such country because of its consistent democratic tradition. One can understand why Pakistan is not there.
According to the author the biggest test case of Dell theory is China versus Taiwan where during the last elections “motherboards won over motherland” but the theory is already proven in case of India and Pakistan. When in 2002 India and Pakistan were positioned against each other and there was a global panic that the two old adversaries armed with nuclear weapons might come to the point of collision then it was the Bangalore top executives who prevailed upon the prime minister Vajpayee not to indulge in such a venture which would ruin the fast developing economy of India. Because in that eventuality the US and European companies would withdraw the outsourcing and India’s economy would collapse. Friedman thinks that the conflict was not prevented by the intervention of United Nations or any political power but the interdependency of economic interests of the countries prompted by the expediencies of Globalization 3. (End)

Haneef Ramay

2006-01-08T11:08:00.000-05:00

Haneef Ramay--A MULTIFACETED PERSONALITY

Dr Afzal Mirza

When in 1967 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto launched Pakistan Peoples Party at a gathering of like-minded people it was not just a coincidence that majority of them were intellectuals. They were quite different from the later crop of the politicians that emerged after 1985 elections who were mainly from feudal class or businessmen and other nova riche upstarts. The reason was that the political parties boycotted the elections and genuine politicians did not contest the elections.In spite of his feudal background ZAB had an intellectual streak in him. His Oxford days friend Prof Rashid Badshah used to tell me that Bhutto was a voracious reader. So among that group in 1967 one could find those who used to participate in heated political and academic discussions at different forums and were determined to change the exploitative system of the country. Haneef Ramay happened to be an important member of that group. I had first seen him in Government College Lahore where he was a little senior to us and was doing masters in economics. In early 1950s GC could rightly boast of a number of students who later rose to prominence in different walks of life in the country. Ramay’s contemporaries were Muzaffar Ali Syed, Ghalib Ahmad, Javed Shahin, Mahmud Salim Jillani (now Dr M.S.Jillani) Shahzad Ahmad, Dr Mahbubulhaq and others who were all boarders of the new hostel where the famous poet and academician Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum was the superintendent. The atmosphere was thus most congenial for literary and artistic activity. Ramay a thin lean. an introvert and shy person at that stage did not show any interest in the college union activities and college politics but loved to paint and participate in the literary gatherings of the college as a back bencher.

After his masters he joined the family publishing business and used to embellish the books published by Maktaba-e-Jadid with his calligraphic designs. During those days his company published two beautifully Ramay designed books of poetry authored by Majid Amjad and Akhtarul Iman. He was also involved in Company’s literary quarterly magazine Savera and to him goes the credit of introducing famous novelist Abdullah Hussain to the literary world. As the story goes Abdullah Hussain whose real name is Mohammad Khan wrote his novel while working as a shift chemist in Daudkhal Cement Factory and brought it to him for publication. Ramay suggested to him to change his name to Abdullah Hussain as Mohammad Khan would not attract the readers and before publishing the novel he published some of his short stories and novellas in Savera under his new pen name to prepare the ground for publication of Udas Naslein. His plan worked and Abdullah Hussain is one of the country’s important writers. As after the take over of Progressive Papers Ltd by Ayub government the circulation of Lail-o-Nahar was dwindling Ramay took the right decision of starting a weekly magazine Nusrat. As against the original Lail-o-Nahar Ramay’s magazine was apolitical with emphasis on literary writings of all schools of thought. Ramay as portrayed by some writers was never a supporter of progressive writers’ movement. He was more inclined towards religion and spirituality which can be seen from his later writings in his books Dubb-e-Akbar, Islam ki Roohani Qadrein, Maut Nahin Zindagi and his only English novel Again. It seems that at a later stage he drew inspiration from his teacher Safdar Mir who was experimenting in metaphysical thought after delving deep into Marxism. So his magazine Nusrat started publishing articles on religious issues written by the writers who espoused for Ijtihad and bringing Islam in line with modern day requirements. Among them one could find Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, Safdar Mir, Ghulam Jillani Barq, Prof Muhammad Usman, Fateh Muhammad Malik and others. It was during that period that I met him for the first time in his small office on Macleod Road. I was accompanied by Prof Tahir Farooq .I had written a few poems and a translation of Alberto Moravia for Nusrat and Ramay was happy that I came to see him. He had a pleasant personality. Being artist he grew long hair and interestingly he never changed his disposition even after becoming the chief executive of the provincial government. Incidentally my old College friend Javed Shaheen was also working in Nusrat those days. Both Ramay and Javed Shaheen entertained us to tea and discussed the current literary situation including a few of my contributions to the magazine.

Ramay’s involvement in political affairs began in 1964 when Ayub Khan contested elections against Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah. As we remember it was a tough competition and ruling circles were greatly scared of the popularity of Miss Jinnah. The ruling party appointed ZAB as its general secretary and Ramay joined its publicity wing and I believe that not only Ramay’s company made some money out of it he also came closer to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In 1970 elections therefore ZAB made him in-charge of the publicity wing of PPP and he discharged his job with great success. Ramay’s Nusrat which was hitherto apolitical suddenly became a political magazine and its enormous popularity led Bhutto to make Ramay as the editor of daily Musawat. When Bhutto’s manifesto of socialism came under fire from the rightists and ruling circles it was Ramay who gave it the name of Islamic Socialism and wrote forceful articles in its support. These articles and writings of some other writers were later published in the book entitled Islamic Socialism edited by Haneef Ramay. After the dismemberment of Pakistan when PPP formed the governments in the left-over country Ramay served as finance minister and chief minister of Punjab. His appointment as chief minister of Pakistan ‘s feudal dominated biggest province where thus far only politicians of feudal background had assumed this office was indeed unprecedented . Unlike other Punjab politicians Ramay came from a middle class background. Their family had migrated to Lahore from a small village near Shiekhupura a small town a few hours’ distance from Lahore. As expected his tenure therefore did not last long and soon he had to part ways with his party and its chief. His fault was that he espoused the cause of the ordinary people of Punjab. Unfortunately his political career took him away from literature but as chief minister he made it a point to initiate some of the development projects related to art and literature. Among these the building of Arts Council designed by Nayyar Ali Dada is a living testimony to his devotion to art. Whenever free from his other obligations he would also participate in literary functions. I remember that only once I met him in passing when he was in power. He had come to preside over the launching ceremony of Mahmood Shaam’s book entitled Cardiospasm. It goes to his credit that in spite of his heavy duties he made it a point to chair the function of his old literary friend.

Falling from grace cost him heavily. He had to undergo incarceration and that too in Lahore Fort‘s infamous interrogation center. He was released when the government changed. Ziaulhaq like all military dictators wanted to elicit the support of all those who were victimized by the previous government and for a while Ramay did think of supporting the dictator . Those days he and Shaheen Ramay came to an exclusive dinner at my brother in law Dr Salman Siddiqi’s house and we talked about the current political situation . He was upset with what happened to him but soon regained his poise and gave up the idea of supporting the martial law regime because it was against the principles he stood for. During that period he took some decisions that he would later on regret. To participate in the elections called by Zia which were then called off by him Ramay formed Musawat Party. Soon he realized that a politician with middle class background and scarcity of funds can not run a political party and he merged it into Jatoi’s National Peoples Party. When the elections were postponed indefinitely he chose to go into exile in USA. There he ran a gas station and concentrated on calligraphy and worked on a novel in English . When political activities were resumed in Pakistan he returned to Pakistan and rejoined Peoples Party. During the second tenure of Benazir Bhutto he contested elections from Lahore and won a seat in the provincial assembly. He was then elected as speaker of the Punjab Assembly.

As speaker and later when Farooq Leghari dissolved the assemblies he resumed his public activities holding exhibitions of his calligraphic paintings and speaking at functions. Disgusted with another dictatorship in the country he shifted to America again and was living in Florida with his second wife Joyce for the last few years. His English novel Again was published by Xlibris Corporation USA in 2000. The novel as its flap indicates is, “An elegant vision of the regeneration of our global human family, symbolized by Adamian, Second Adam. He is sent to the first Adam to obtain the essential human experience on which to rebuild a more loving, joyous and hopeful world.” He recently returned to Pakistan for a short stay but slipped and fell in his son’s home just a day before his departure for USA. Perhaps the fate wanted him to be buried in the soil of his native land. Ramay was a down to earth person. Last time I met him when he was waiting in a queue to enter the hall in Lahore where Naom Chomsky had come to speak. He had no pretensions of being a former speaker, governor or a chief minister. He was the same thin lean and tall person but his long thick hair had gone gray and there were wrinkles of years on his face. It never occurred to me that I am meeting him for the last time.(End)

THE POET IN EXILE

2006-01-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

THE POET IN EXILE

Dr Afzal Mirza

There seems to exist a strange relationship between exile and incarceration. In the foreword to Faiz’s second book of verses inspired by incarceration entitled Zindan Nama Major Ishaq wrote, ”The jail is like a magical mirror where the images of character and not faces appear in strange dimensions…The reason is that the person’s whole world gets confined into the four walls of the jail which creates in him a feeling of despondency… …Under such conditions it is no wonder that one can not maintain ones usual personality traits. But one must appreciate those people who can keep their poise even then.” According to Major Ishaq Faiz Ahmad Faiz was one such balanced personality. In the same way some one living in exile leaves his familiar cultural and literary environment and goes to live in an alien ambience totally different from his own. One of Faiz’s ghazals of exile days begins with the verses:

Sharh-e-firaq-o-madh-e-lab-e-mushkbu karein

Ghurbat kade mein kis se teri guftgu karein

Yar ashna nahin koi takrain kis se jam

Kis dilruba ke naam peh khali subu karein

These two verses of this ghazal describe the poet’s utter sense of frustration over being lonely and without any friends who knew his beloved or with whom he could talk about his beloved. Such a situation could be counterproductive for those poets who thrive on the spontaneous appreciation and encouragement and are devoid of a mission and ideology. It has been observed that many poets either cease to write or write very scarcely under the changed circumstances. But Faiz’s was a different phenomenon and we find that the flow of muse did not stop with his various stints of exile.

The history of exile is as old as the history of mankind. Writers and poets have throughout the history been forced by various reasons to leave their homelands and move to strange lands. Sometimes they went into exile to oppose the established order from outside because it became impossible for them to wage their struggle from inside the country. There were some other writers who left their homelands because they didn’t enjoy the intellectual freedom in their own country. There is a long list of celebrated writers who abandoned their sweet homes and undertook the travesties of exile and among them one could count writers like Ovid, Dante, Miguel de Unamuno, Rafael Alberti, Yannis Ritsos, Pablo Neruda, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Witold Gombrowicz, Ivan Bunin, Hermann Broch, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Bertolt Brecht, Saint-John Perse, Anna Seghers, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sadik Hidayet, Nâzim Hikmet, Mahmud Dervis, Adonis and Milan Kundera. There were some other writers like James Joyce, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Cavafis, and Lawrence Durrell who willfully went into exile.

Talking of Faiz one finds that there are two periods in his life which could be called periods of exile. Those periods are 1962-64 and then 1978 to 1982.

To find reasons for his long sojourns abroad one has to look into the factors that prompted him to leave the country. Faiz was an ideologically motivated person. From the day one he aligned himself with the progressives and although he never became a card-carrying member of the communist party he had his sympathies with Soviet version of socialism. The very first poem that he wrote after the partition entitled Dawn of Freedom landed him in trouble with rightist forces and he was condemned by the rightist press for writing such an “unpatriotic” poem. In 1951 he was arrested in connection with the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. Faiz and all the Rawalpindi case accused were freed in 1954. Ayub took the reins of the government in October 1958 and all the leftists including Faiz were arrested within two months of the imposition of martial law. Then Faiz had just returned from an Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Tashkent and was not quite keen in going into exile. The Russian translator of his poetry Aleksander Surkov recorded his conversation with Faiz in Tashkent in these words, ”Then incidentally our conversation turned towards politics .’So what are your future plans? ’Faiz looked towards me with deep black eyes full of sadness but there was still smile on his lips. ’Just this that first I’ll go to London. There I’ll see some of my friends who had left Pakistan recently. Obviously after this I’ll go to Karachi. Lahore-- that is to my country.’ ‘But you know now there is…’ A feeble smile was still floating on his lips .’In that case I must go back to my country.’ ‘So then imprisonment is sure..’ ‘Perhaps…But for a high mission one must not hesitate to go to jail.’ ‘And if there is some place worse than that ?.’ The poet glanced out of window where a statue of Tolstoy was standing in the middle of the lawn, looked at the cold and autumn smitten sky. The smile was still there. After a while he said in his usual style,’ If there is some thing worse than jail then it will be bad but you know a struggle is after all a struggle.’”

So the Faiz returned and was as expected arrested and spent some time in the infamous Lahore Fort.. He was released in April 1959 and in the mean time the Pakistan Time of which he was the chief editor had also been expropriated. Being jobless he took a low-key job of the Secretary Lahore Arts Council. In 1962 Faiz was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for which he was allowed to go to Moscow. After receiving the award he spent some time in globetrotting. A significant output of that period was his interesting travelogue of Cuba where he went as a special guest of Fidel Castro. Having reached London at the end of his travels he decided to stay there in exile. Although he had a number of friends and admirers in London and he was also joined by his family members he felt as fish out of water. He missed his country which he named as the ‘forest of yellow leaves.”

During his first period of exile Faiz doesn’t seem to be prolific and the few of the poems that he wrote are present in his fourth collection of poetry called Dast-e-tah-e-sang (TheHand Under the Stone).However he wrote some prose also.. It appears that the political situation of the country was too disturbing for this sensitive person. The most moving poem of this period was Khusha Zamanat-e-gham written in London in which he salutes his motherland and wishes well to “ all those who live in lightless dwellings and sleep on the dust .“ He wrote:

Har aik kushta-e-nahaq ki khamshi peh salam

Har aik deeda-e-purnam ki aab-o-taab ki khair

(I salute all those who are silent in the face of injustice and wish well to those whose eyes are filled with gleaming tears)

The second period of Faiz’s exile begins in 1978. It happened after Ziaulhaq had imposed martial law in the country and dismissed the democratically elected government of Z.A.Bhutto. Faiz had worked with Bhutto as his adviser on cultural affairs and was a well known progressive. The new regime was using religion as their political tool to win favor of the masses. Under the circumstances there was an imminent chance of Faiz’s arrest. The poet discussed it with his wife Alys and they decided to leave the country. Faiz spent this period in Beirut where he was asked to edit Lotus the journal of Afro- Asian writers. One wonders why Faiz chose to live in a civil war torn city where bomb explosions and shelling were order of the day and one had to live a life on razor’s edge. His wife Alys also spent some time with her husband and used to tell friends that Faiz would always show his characteristic calmness even when the shells rained all around.. Faiz’s poetry written during this exile is collected in a short book entitled Mere Dil Mere Musafir. The book begins with this short but beautiful poem Dil-e-Man Musafir-e-Man:

Mere dil mere musafir

Hua phir se hukm sadir

Keh watan badar hon ham tum

Dein gali gali sadaen

Karein rukh nagar nagar ka

(My heart—the traveler/Again there are orders/That you and I go into exile/ Shouting in every street/ And moving from city to city)

There is an impact of sadness on his poems given in this book. All the poems are reflection of the agony felt by the poet due to the political conditions of the country. Teen Awazein, Yeh matim-e-waqt ki gharri hae , Ham to majboor-e-wafa hain have been written in the same mood. There are some poems written on the Palestinians’ ongoing struggle fro the emancipation of their homeland. The same trend continues in some of the poems of that period in his last book Ghubar-e-ayyam.

Faiz was the type who couldn’t live away from his country for long. Each moment of exile was in fact very heavy for him and to the surprise of his friends and admirers he decided to return to Pakistan in 1982. Why he chose to return at that time is not clear. When he returned in 1964 then Ayub’s glory was on the wane and some semblance of democracy had been restored. In 1982 Zia was still firmly in saddle and democracy was a distant cry. It is said that his Rawalpindi Conspiracy case co-accused Col. Arbab Niaz was instrumental in his return. Strangely enough this communism sympathizer had taken a U-turn and was Zia’s minister. He arranged a meeting between Zia and Faiz. No one knows what transpired in that meeting but Agha Nasir of TV fame has written in his book Gumshuda Loag that,”Arbab Sahib told me later that his(Faiz’s) meeting with Zia was very brief. He told Faiz ,’You are a valuable asset of our country .Why do you live outside the country? There is no restriction on your living in Pakistan.’ Then Faiz said ’I know there is no restriction on my living here but I want that I may be allowed to leave the country whenever I like.’ Gen. Zia said,’ yes that will be so,’ and the meeting ended,’ With that ended the second self-exile of Faiz Only a year and a half later Faiz Ahmad Faiz left for a never-ending exile. (End)

Faiz died on 20^th November 1984