ANNIVERSARIES come handy when there is little else to do. The dead are ever there to be remembered. They never fail to oblige. Sobs and lamentations for the dear departed — Hafeez, Daman and Josh — rose high to intersect the gaudy kites flying in celebration of a bawdy Basant. Three meetings in tandem at the Academy of Letters, oddly, in the vernal season of Nature’s rebirth, resurrected the dead from their eternal sleep. Their blessed memory, or shall we say faizan, provided needed work to literary busy bodies who without living friends to promote, new books to launch or some controversy to raise were feeling adrift like proverbial lost cows.

It sort of started with Faiz. But that was a celebration in keeping with his upper class status, as some like to say, with cautious official involvement and a musical show on the side, his handsome son-in-law cracking jokes with a Kashmiri shawl hanging jauntily from his shoulder. The functions held later in memory of Hafeez and Ustad Daman were gatherings of a different kind, listless with the heart elsewhere, perfunctory.

The languages issue is a perennial favourite with literary people who also dabble in politics. One could discuss Ustad Daman, the peoples poet, without bringing in this hackneyed topic that Dr Tariq Rahman has pulverized to irreducible proportions. The poor acoustics of the hall of the academy of letters reverberated with the fresh emotion that Mr Fakhar Zaman brought to advance the cause of regional languages. He seemed to aver that Punjabi like other languages of the soil was being subjected to neglect in a deliberate fashion. This view cannot be taken to be absolutely correct, since deliberation in any matter refers to policy directions that one fails to find clearly stated on paper.

The non-implementation of stated objectives with regard to Urdu has been a regular subject of discussion at policy-making levels but the upshot has always been the same. It is not the suppression of Urdu or Punjabi that is intended but the perpetuation of the elevated status that English enjoys in society. In compensation for this there have been sops galore for writers and poets in terms of national awards and cash handouts. The literary community by and large has remained acquiesced with such recognition as a price for subordination of national and regional languages. This is