Following is one of Mirza Ghalib’s famous ghazals. We think it will be interesting if we let our readers try to translate it. You can choose a language and style of your own. You can translate it in English or salees (easy) Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi etc. You can translate it funny, silly or melancholy. You can turn it into a ‘azad nazm’ or even make ‘nasr’ (prose) or a story out of it. Wanna take this challenge? Bring out your creativity. There is no wrong answer here.
This is not a eulogy or a tribute to Ahmed Faraz, for I never knew Faraz personally. Nor is it a comment on his poetry - I am not qualified to do that. It is just a memory of a few impersonal encounters with Faraz that came rushing to my mind when I heard of his death a week or ten days ago.
As students at Peshawar, we often saw Faraz on campus. He taught Urdu. (Poetry, I guess. What else?). He was a noted poet even then but, among the students on campus, he was equally known, if not more, for his bohemian lifestyle .
Peshawar University campus, built at the foot of the Khyber, was then 5 miles away from Peshawar city. It still is, but now you cannot tell where exactly the city ends and the university begins. Peshawar Sadar, in the cantonment area, was the happening part of the city. It was here that you found trendy cinemas and cafés, bookshops and upscale stores.
The Sadar was to Peshawar what the Mall Road was (or still is?) to Lahore. The Greens Hotel served Murree beer to its customers in a bar tucked away upstairs. (Prohibition came later, in 1972, when MMA’s version 1.0 came into power in the NWFP.) A few minutes down the road, the upscale Dean’s Hotel, even though it had cast off most of its colonial trappings, still retained its colonial architecture and continued to serve mulligatawny soup and caramel custard, and, of course, beer and other drinks, in a more formal setting.
In the evenings, the students would descend upon Sadar to watch movies, to gossip over a cup of tea in the cafés, and to just walk up and down the short stretches of the main Sadar Road and the Arbab Road, watching people. The Capital and Falak Sair were the two elite cinemas that showed English movies ; Silver Star and Café Alig were the two popular cafés; London Book Depot was the big bookshop; Bandbox were the drycleaners and Medicose were the chemists. Not far from these places, on the main Sadar Road, across the bus stop, was this little paan and cigarette shop, a khokha, which did brisk business.
I do not know if Faraz visited the Greens or the Dean’s but he often stopped by at the cigarette shop. He would come on his noisy motorbike (it was before he graduated to the white Volkswagen), stop in front of the shop, and, without switching off the engine or getting off the bike, buy his cigarettes and paan, and breeze away. The alacrity with which the vendor stepped out of his khokha to serve Faraz suggested that Faraz had a running account with the vendor or perhaps he was an ardent fan of the poet - or both.
Ahmed Faraz (January 14, 1931 - August 25, 2008)
He was considered one of the greatest modern Urdu poets of the last century. Faraz is his pseudonym ‘takhallus’, whereas his real name is Syed Ahmad Shah. Ahmed Faraz died at Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad on August 25, 2008
Ahmed Faraz, who has been compared with Mohammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, holds a unique position as one of the best poets of current times, with a fine but simplistic style of writing. Even common people can easily understand. Ethnically a pashto speaking Pashtun, Ahmed Faraz studied Persian and Urdu at the Peshawar University. He later became lecture at the Peshawar University.
I am watching television right now and every news channel is reporting the latest interview by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. This interview came as a surprise to many people here in Pakistan and is sending shock waves around the world (wait and see after 4th July holiday in US).
Dr. Khan, who remains popular across Pakistan has lived in the shadows since 2004, confined to his Islamabad home. People of Pakistan last saw him in a tearful televised confession in which he admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. President Musharraf has been telling Pakistanis since 2004 that Dr. Khan did it for money and personal greed. In his interview on May 30 2008, given to British newspaper Guardian, Dr. Khan claimed that he took the blame on himself in the national interest. Dr. Khan has been in the news for last few weeks because of his detention case in the Islamabad High Court but today he returned to the spotlight with a new twist: that North Korea received centrifuges from Pakistan in a 2000 shipment supervised by the security forces during the rule of President Pervez Musharraf.
According to Dr. Khan, the uranium enrichment equipment was sent from Pakistan in a North Korean plane that was loaded under the supervision of Pakistani security officials. He claims that the security forces had “complete knowledge” of the shipment and that it must have been sent with the consent of President Pervez Musharraf. Dr. Khan also disclosed that North Korea gave 200 missiles to Pakistan during Kargil War on his request without any payment. However, the government sources have completely rejected the statement, saying such reports are part of propaganda against Pakistan’s nuclear program.
Dr. Khan has often insisted in recent past too that if anything at all was smuggled to North Korea, Iran or Libya, it was in complete knowledge of Pakistan Army, particularly the ISI Chief Gen. Mahmood Ali Durrani (later the Pak Ambassador to US and currently national security adviser) and other officials in-charge of logistics etc. as it was not possible for him to do something like that alone. The centrifuges are large cylinders which cannot be just transported in a brief case. They need special care for transportation. American officials have even given the flight numbers which allegedly transported the nuclear material.
Despite an erroneous news earlier that renowned poet Ahmed Faraz had died in a Chicago hospital, the news right now is that Ahmed Faraz is still alive, but not at all well, struggling for his life in a Chicago hospital.
Here is the latest from The News:
CHICAGO: Renowned poet Ahmed Faraz is alive and still under medical treatment at a local hospital here, said his physician Tahir Rohail, brushing aside the earlier report of his death aired by state TV. He said Ahmed Faraz is seriously ill at a hospital in Chicago where necessary medical treatment is being provided to him.
Others are still reporting his death, seemingly based on a TV channel news item. It seems - we hope - that the TV channel jumped the gun on this and Faraz Sahib is still alive.
We have, of course, written multiple times on the legendary poet - including here, here and most recently here. I shake as I type this and I pray that we will NOT be writing about his demise anytime soon. For me Faraz has always been a fighter, and we are rooting for him in this fight too. Here is some of Fawaz the fighter:
We certainly pray that he is and that he will remain alive and kicking for a long time. But (earlier) reports, from people close to him, seem to suggest that his condition is very critical and it has been and remains a touch and go situation. He needs our prayers.
As reader zamanov has reminded us elsewhere, today marks Dr. Abdus Salam’s 10th death anniversary.
It should be a moment of deep reflection for all of us. He would have been as great a man as he was even if he did not won the Nobel Award in physics. But we would have conveniently forgotten him. That he did win the Nobel Award is a source of cosmetic and hollow pride for many Pakistanis. Cosmetic and hollow because it is also a source of visible unease. Even when we acknowledge that he was a great scientist (after all, the Nobel Committee thought so), we are uncomfortable acknowledging that he was a great man whose significance goes beyond his science.
As a brutally honest editorial in today’s Daily Times points out, “we are scared of honoring Dr. Salam.” We must not be.
The Daily Times editorial says all that needs to be said; it is worth reading, worth thinking about, and worth quoting in full:
Reference: http://thenews.jang.com.pk/
KARACHI: Seven successive blasts within one hour rocked the provincial metropolis on Monday, killing two people and injuring around 38 others, besides raising the spectre of ethnic violence. The miscreants targeted the suburbs of the city.
Intelligence sources claimed that the criminals wanted to provoke ethnic violence in the city. The deceased were identified as Abdul Latif belonging to Qasba Colony and Azeem of Pak Colony.
According to eyewitnesses, the first blast took place near Banaras Chowk at about 6:45pm. Two speeding coaches collided due to the panic created by the blast, resulting in a number of injuries. While the injured were shouting for help, another blast rocked the Banaras Zainab Market within five minutes of the first explosion.
Yet another blast took place when an explosive device planted on a motorcycle parked near the fruit vendors at Banaras Chowk went off. Several people were injured by splinters from the three home-made devices.
Reference: http://pakistaniat.com/
It is not often that one dares to place a headline as bold as the one above. We have used such superlatives a few times before, but very few: for the dialogues from Maula Jatt, for the blockbuster movie Aina, twice for the PTV show Fifty-Fifty, once for the show and once for its skits (both times with question marks), and once for the miracle cricket match in Sharjah and Miandad’s fabulous sixer to clinch the game on the last ball. Today, we use it again.
Khalid Abbas DarThis is certainly not the best work of Khalid Abbas Dar - for my money, the most brilliant stand-up comic Pakistan has ever produced (I was never a fan of his stage dramas, but his solo routines, especially the old PTV ones were a superb - but it may well be the funniest hockey commentary ever, anywhere. Khalid sahib’s all-time greatest performance is the “classical” singing he does with made up words - it is side-splitting funny - originally recorded during the 1971 election transmission and recorded multiple times later.
God, You created the night, I made the lamp
You created the earth, I made earthen pot out of it
It is me who created the mirror out of stone
It is me who made elixir out of poison
Today Pakistan celebrates Allama Iqbal’s birth anniversary with the usual lip-service. The key messages of Iqbal seem to have been lost in the maze of officialdom. This is further exacerbated by the hijacking of Islam and politics by vested interests, not to mention the recent events that have shook us all. Iqbal opposed exploitation, Mullahism, emphasised the principle of movement in Islamic thought; and highlighted “Ijtehad” (re-interpretation) of Islamic teachings through a modern parliamentary framework. Alas, all of that is nearly forgotten.
Abdur-Rehman (1650 – 1715 A.D) widely known as Rehman Baba was a great Pushtu Sufi poet who is regarded as the most read and quoted Pushtu poet of the larger belt of Afghanistan and the North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. There isn’t much known about his life due to the lack of eyewitness accounts yet a few legends portray him to be a reclusive poet, singing his poems near the Bara River while strumming a Rubab.
His poetry shows him to be a poet who had full command on fiqah (jurisprudence) and tasawwuf (Sufism). A powerful Sufi touch in his poetry notwithstanding, he was not inclined to a particular order of Sufism and it is more likely that Rehman Baba was a free soul, with an individualistic practice of Sufism similar to that of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai in Sindh. Thus he says:
“On the path which I travel to see my love, make holy Khizer and Ilyas my guides”
