KARACHI, March 17: Karim Bakhsh Khalid, a noted man of letters of Sindh, died of a heart failure here on Monday evening. He was 74.
He is survived by his wife, four sons and six daughters.
Karim Bakhsh Khalid began his career with the food department and then briefly worked in Al-Waheed newspaper. He joined the Sindh information department in the mid-1950s, where he worked in various positions till his retirement as director-general.
He wrote profusely in Sindhi, Urdu and English and contributed to various journals and newspapers. As editor of the official organs of the Sindh information department, he worked hard to give a flair of his own to the official publications.
He authored and edited many books on various subjects.
In the death of Karim Bakhsh Khalid, Sindhi literature has lost a prolific writer and literary critic. Although he served in the government for his entire life, his literary pursuit continued till the last.
Born in Garhi Yasin in the early 1930s, he had his early schooling at his native town, then at Shikarpur and Karachi. It was during his education when he also worked in Al-Waheed newspaper, the only voice of Muslims of Sindh at that time, under the editorship of Qazi Abdur Rahman. Here he learnt the skill of writing to which he had already developed a liking.
Later he got a job in the food department but that was not his choice and he joined the Sindh information department during the ministry of Abdus Sattar Pirzada.
After the One-Unit was abolished, he was sent back to his parent province where he served as director of publications, director of information and in the closing years as director-general of the information department, a position he retained till his retirement.
His affiliation with government did not prevent him from writing. His interest in history and literature was immense, especially in working on manuscripts. This led him to frequent visits to old personal libraries of Sindh such as Kutubkhana-i-Alavia, Kutubkhana-i-Rashdia and the government-administered Sindh Provincial Library, etc. He did not only study rare books and manuscripts there but also wrote explanatory notes on them.
As a human being Karim Bakhsh Khalid was a humane person. His love for writing and reading took him close to almost all writers of note. A book collector, he worked very hard to maintain a rich reference library, a quality lacking in the present generation. — Shaikh Aziz
KARACHI, March 17: Karim Bakhsh Khalid, a noted man of letters of Sindh, died of a heart failure here on Monday evening. He was 74.
