THERE are two indicators of the level a society operates in. One is how they bury their dead and the other is how they remember their heroes.

If you adopt these measures to our cricket team, it is painful to surmise that they do not know how to do either. At least their leadership doesn't. Call it ignorance or arrogance. The line is hard to define. More than that, it is hard to stomach.

The statement by Pakistan team captain Inzamam-ul-Haq after the Multan Test match, that Yousuf is a better batsman than Hanif Mohammad and Javed Miandad, irks and infuriates. It is a sign of how arrogant and uncaring this generation of cricketers has become. How much their fame and fortune has wiped their sense of history and respect for their heroes.

Inzamam reportedly aired his view again at the presentation ceremony of the Karachi Test. Included among the dignitaries at the ground was our legendary Hanif Mohammad, honoured as The Little Master by the Englishmen. They called Zaheer Abbas the Asian Bradman. I can't recall a title given to Yousuf or Inzamam by the media.

It is of credit to Mohammad Yousuf that he has brushed off comparisons with Javed Miandad and said he was his boyhood idol and he can't hope to be better than him or Hanif or even Inzamam. Yousuf is a personification of humility. He speaks with a balance and with respect for the past generations. It is not his fault that he is being compared with past legends.

But the needless comparison by Inzamam, and in a way quite an insulting one, has rankled more than angered, embarrassed more than hurt.

Inzamam was born in 1970. Hanif Mohammad played his last Test in 1969. He never saw the great man bat. There are no tapes of his batting aired today and I can say with confidence that no Pakistani batsman of the current era has ever bothered to access the BBC or ABC libraries when they are touring England or Australia or playing county or league cricket, and view his innings in the video archives section.

Forget everything. To compare is a hazardous job. To compare when you have no knowledge of the whole of one part is the highest form of bigotry. In our religion it is a form of sin.

For Inzamam's and Pakistan's sake, and I really mean that for he is our captain and he is responsible for projecting our image (the wag will say he is projecting exactly who and what we are), I would like to apprise him of just who he is passing judgment on.

Hanif Mohammad batted in an era of fearsome fast bowlers. There were no fancy laboratories at Perth to decipher how much the fast bowler's elbow was bending on delivery. When you toured in placed like West Indies, there were home umpires who smiled at you when you were hit on the chest. Remember, there were no chest guards, wrist protectors and, would you believe it, no helmet; just a cotton cap that helped to shade the searing heat from burning your skin.

The pads had no backside padding; the nylon adhesive was years away from being invented and you had to tie your pads with tin buckles that would rub against your flesh as you ran.

There was no match referee to prepare a charge sheet so if the bowler crossed to your side in mid over and told you with a mixture of expletives where he would imbed the next ball, he would be clapped all the way back by the mob on the boundary line. You evaded one bouncer, there would be three more in a row. No ICC pinkies to make rules about two bouncers per over and statutory warning for intimidatory bowling.

And holding the bat with gloves that were thinly made and rubber stubs on the finger parts, you could perspire profusely from not just the unbearable heat but the thought of a ball being flung at you from the same 22 yards at speeds touching the same 95 miles an hour. Proof of performance for these 6 foot 6 inch, 140lb fast bowlers was not through the speed gun but the number of bruises on the batsman's upper body and neck.

These were the conditions at bridgeown when Hanif Mohammad, the full five feet four inches of him, batted for more than three days (16 hours 10 minutes to be exact) to score a mammoth 337. It is said by his colleagues that he did not even come even close to an lbw or edge, which was enough for home umpire dismissal in those days. I urge Inzamam to go and talk to those who were on that tour and he would be humbled by how Hanif was vomiting from the effort but refused to leave the pitch.

Pakistan had been bowled out for 106 in their first innings and was following on 473 behind. By the time he returned, Pakistan was 153 ahead with just over an hour left in the match. 241 of his runs had come from running between wickets.

Ten years later he still had the stamina and the skill to maneuver his way to 187 not out at Lord's to add 255 with the last four batsmen. Those were the days of uncovered pitches in England and equally biased umpiring but Hanif was damned if he were to edge anything or allow a ball to hit his pad.

Earlier to that in the 1950s, he had to bat on uncovered pitches or matting, where the ball could cut into and away from you at breakneck speed testing your reflexes to the limit. Hanif was at that time one of the most prized wickets for any fast bowler. The objective here is not to overstate Hanif Mohammad's case or dilute Yousuf's. It will fall on deaf ears for a set of people who have no sense of the sacrifices a past generation has given for them to play in comparable luxury.

The objective is for this generation to be aware of the endeavors of our heroes who triumphed over innumerable biases and alien conditions to give their blood, sweat and tears for their country and their countrymen for a fee of ten rupees per Test match. To have the decency to at least respect them by silence if not by words in front of visiting teams who have their photographs framed proudly in the halls of their grounds is all that is asked.

It is sad that Inzamam gave such a heartless statement like that in front of Hanif Mohammad and in the presence of a global audience, some of those who may have been at the ground in Barbados fifty years ago. Perhaps he was not listening, reading about it is out of the question, when Mark Taylor gave the reasons for declaring the team's innings closed first thing in the morning in the Peshawar Test in 1998, with himself unbeaten on his overnight score of 334. He was then equal with the highest score by an Australian, standing since the last 68 years. The record was held by Sir Don Bradman.

When a stupefied media asked him why he had stopped himself short of the 42 runs he needed to break Brian Lara's world record score of 375, Taylor replied that he had thought about it overnight and decided what bigger honour could there be that whenever the highest score by an Australian was mentioned his name would be next to Sir Don Bradman.

"It will be nice to be bracketed with Sir Donald. It will be my only chance to be compared with him", he said. That is where he felt he wanted to be. Not above him but beside him.

Inzamam was playing that Test. I doubt if he remembers it.

THE death of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko in London some three weeks ago in mysterious circumstances seems to have brought the Cold War back into business in Britain.

Officially his death has not yet been acknowledged as murder. Even the possibility of an accident has not been completely ruled out. There is a lot of confusion about the motive as well. His death-bed statement accused Russian President Vladimir Putin directly of having ordered his (Litvinenko’s) elimination, but other evidence shows him as a blackmailer in the making. And some analysts have even surmised that perhaps Mr Putin’s enemies, living in exile, had done the job to malign him and his rule in the West.

And a rare radioactive material, called polonium-210 and worth $20 million, has been identified as the murder weapon. But so far no one seems to have come up with a firm scientific explanation about how it was used, by whom and where. The idea that it was ingested with the food he took at the Sushi bar still needs to be reconfirmed scientifically.

Nevertheless, there is enough material here already for the present-day Ian Flemings and John Le Carres to churn out eye-popping spy thrillers and movie scripts. That perhaps partly explains why the British media has gone to town with the story. But what is the story?

Of course, it is fascinating to see how relentlessly and single-mindedly the British media pursues the follow-ups of major stories, day after day, in fact hour after hour. But it is also a maddening experience for one who is trying to find out some concrete clues from the sea of verbiage full of innuendos, lots of names and lots of ready analyses wrapped around quotes from police and hospitals.

One is certainly not dismissing the media’s interest in this matter as some kind of avoidable fad. If deadly radioactive material could be so easily smuggled into Britain, it should be a matter of serious concern for the British authorities. They should be spending more time looking for concrete evidence in this respect and plugging the holes rather than making it look as if either the Kremlin or Mr Putin or his intelligence set-up or all of them together were conspiring to create problems for Britain.

And if some 40-50 Russian spies are roaming around Britain, collecting commercial, industrial and other strategic information without let or hindrance, then the government of Her Majesty should be seriously worried about it and taking care of the matter at the earliest rather than letting fingers point to a seemingly pre-arranged perpetrator.

The direction the police investigation has taken and the media’s cold war-style coverage of the case has certainly put relations between Britain and Russia under severe strain. This has happened despite the fact that from day one, the Russian authorities have been denying any hand, direct or indirect, in the death of the former KGB spy and also this is happening despite the fact that Moscow has offered full cooperation to the Metropolitan Police and its anti-terrorist wing in the investigations.

So, the media trail of Russia and its leadership continues unabated. The media even went to the extent of revealing a highly classified cabinet meeting in which, government officials and the police were reported to have briefed that Russia was being ruled by a ‘brutal regime’ that regarded dissidents such as Mr Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch living in exile in Britain, as terrorists. The Russian state is also being accused of having ordered the murder of five people in the past two decades.

There is an attempt by the media to establish that Russia continues to spy on Britain because of its ‘insatiable’ appetite for other countries’ state secrets and the main areas of its interest in Britain is supposed to include finance, the energy industry, defence, and electronics. The threat of Russian espionage is supposed to be so severe that senior businessmen in companies such as BP and Centrica, had been reportedly warned by MI5 that they may be targeted.

The media has also attempted to establish that in a ‘throwback’ to the Cold War, the Russian agents were communicating via ‘live letter boxes’ where secret material is carried by one spy to another or via ‘dead letter boxes’ where the material is left in a covert location.

Clearly, in the case of Mr Litvinenko’s death, it is not only the truth that is being sought, but the case itself is also being used as an excuse to fuel a growing anti-Russia campaign across the UK and Europe. But why and what is the purpose of this campaign? Some say, it is because of Russia’s stance on the Iranian nuclear issue. The neo-cons of the West perhaps want to teach Mr Putin a lesson for not lining up along with them against Iran. Others, however, believe that the British and US neo-cons see Russia as the most important hurdle in their way of achieving global hegemony. Many of these neo-cons are said to view Moscow as the biggest threat to US geo-strategic ambitions and they have also projected a US-Russian confrontation over Nato expansion.

For some this exaggerated attention of the British media in the death of Mr Litvinenko has, however, proved to be a blessing in disguise. From the day he was hospitalised with suspected poisoning, the British media has stopped focusing on the threat of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and non-issues such as the veil and the burqa. And not only ‘Islamic terrorism’, but even the bloody wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine seem to have been relegated to second and third positions both in the electronic and print media as the dead Russian spy continues to dominate television time and newspaper space.

MANTO’S Toba Tek Singh is a fairly straight narrative. But since it questions the wisdom of Partition through the perception of the inmates of a mental asylum the story lends itself to liberal manipulation by interpreters specially those for whom 1947 is a closed issue as far as its historical logic is concerned. They hold that only the mentally deranged will not have the rational faculty to understand the historical process which went into the making of Pakistan. On the other end are those who believe Manto is simply saying that the logic of division is beyond even mad men. Sarmad Sehbai’s dramatisation of this controversial story skirts around the politics to interpret Partition in its human dimension. But this human dimension is peculiar in the sense it is divested of the biases that shape the world of normal people and present a vision of reality that snapping ties with the accepted norms and beliefs gives to the so-called insane. Sehbai has no quarrel with this vision. He not only empathises with it but gives it the respect that is its due as an alternative narrative that disconnect with societal brainwashing produces.

The play opens with the grotesque absurdity of the Wagah border flag ceremony which the two nations stage twice daily to proclaim the hysteric madness of their asinine bellicosity. Enacted, conceived and directed by normal bipeds the border drama symbolises the pathological nature of our national neurosis which Sehbai juxtaposes against the inmates of the mental asylum who are all engaged in a genuine struggle to resolve the crisis of their understanding created by their refusal to play the roles society has assigned to them. They do not know how what was India has become Pakistan; how Sialkot has shifted its location from one country to another and where is each of these countries now situated. If one of them now climbs a tree and insists on living up there than in one of the two countries, what is so strange about it! Consider the Hindu lawyer who has been separated from his beloved because of Amritsar’s going over to India from an India of which Lahore was also a part? Some of the inmates who cannot accept the upheavals of their lives caused by Partition question the logic of the change that without changing the physical geography of the land has uprooted them from their natural habitats. They doubt if the two political entities will survive the division that to their mind is irrational. Š Sehbai introduces a third act in this scenario which Manto in his story leaves as a haunting question. What to make of this madness, how to resolve this historical conundrum that the leadership of the divide insist on making a mess of. This is the people to people mutually responsive accommodation and understanding that exists in spite of hate campaigns of communalists and which politicians and diplomats can but do not exploit to smooth over the rough tides created by the chasm of 1947. This resolution of the conflict is seen in the bonhomie that exists between the guards at the border between the two countries. They continue to take tea together. The border does not separate them. They are two at one level and yet one at another, more real level. This is how normal countries co-exist even in the presence of conflicts and disputes. The bonhomie between the border guards stands in sharp contrast to the Wagah flag ceremony which is played up to accentuate the differences. What Sehbai establishes in this scene is the quite simple and practical possibility that if permitted there’s still a way for people to live sensibly, peacefully despite the divide.

Central to both Manto and Sehbai in the thematic movement of the story is the solitary figure of Bishan Singh whose quest to find Toba Tek Singh, whether it is on this side of the divide or that consumes his being so totally he cannot rest or sleep. All he utters repeatedly is a senseless twaddle of words nobody understands. For him the world would acquire meaning only when he finds his identity, when he discovers Toba Tek Singh. Mental asylums have generally been portrayed in cinema and fiction as comic places where the antics of the mentally deranged are used to excite laughter. Manto assembles coherence in the discordant scenes by giving the asylum the shape of a parallel world that questions the sanity of the normal world outside. Sehbai’s visuals that present a moving collage of this world give it the same integration. One remains aware of the direction as the drama emerging from the thumbnail sketches builds into a kind of sensate moving picture. You have to have a Sehbai’s feel for the image to achieve progression in the random scenery of Toba Tek Singh.

Seen in its plain political topography Toba Tek Singh is disturbing to many. We don’t want a great and now much admired writer whom we want to own without any reservation to be questioning the vital statistics of an established reality. If it were madness, madmen should have understood it. It is a rational thing therefore that does not fit into their deranged cerebrums. Whatever, it is the human aspect on which Sehbai gathers his focus in his interpretation. Manto too couldn’t care less which is why ideologues have such a hard time placing him. His humanism though is the compass if one cares. Bishan Singh’s search for Toba Tek Singh is not a political quest but a man’s search for sanity and meaning in a world that is too divided and fragmented to allow him any peace and time to patch up the tatters of his identity. His search therefore ends on the remains of an acre of untitled land.

PTV’s telecast of this enigmatic dramatisation on Sunday evening was on its part a bold effort in a long time to pull itself out of the sloppy morass of soaps and shampoos into which it has allowed itself to be sucked up in order to compete with the muck-churning private channels.