December 21, 2008	Sunday	Zilhaj 22, 1429

KARACHI, Dec 20: The increasingly disillusioned nation can, perhaps, find solace in just one thing today: the cherished memories of yesteryear. Memories which rekindle a sense of pride in them; of success, of glory and of happiness. And in the years gone by, few things have impacted the people’s psyche more than cricket, the game of glorious uncertainties.

This week the cricket-starved people have been provided a rare opportunity to relive the game’s glory days by Iqbal Munir, a widely-travelled cricket photographer and enthusiast, who has displayed his impressive work at the Expo Centre as part of the ‘All About Lifestyles’ exhibition.

The strength of the game and the intense pleasure it has always generated among the masses shine brightly through his earnest effort behind the lens. In short, Iqbal makes good use of his lens to capture the conundrum that is Pakistani cricket.

With life-size, gleaming pictures of Imran Khan’s ‘killer leap’, Javed Miandad’s Sharjah blitz, Wasim Akram’s sizzling swingers and Inzamam-ul-Haq’s cool destruction of the opposition and the four World Cups, there is much here to rivet the attention and one can literally feel the mercury rising, adrenalin flowing full blast.

A majority of the pictures essentially remind the enthusiasts of times when more reliance was put on the game than the gimmick. The action then was pure and magical, with no terrorism threat or stage-fright for on-field actors and an array of surreal frames amply capture the aura surrounding the game in the ’70s and the ’80s.Besides capturing a series of enduring images from Pakistan cricket history, Iqbal has managed to take a peek in private, off-the-field activities of the superstars. His extensive repertoire with the lens includes Rameez Raja’s wedding day pictures, Imran sulking after a fight with then girlfriend Emma Seargent, Qasim Omer and Ejaz Ahmed riding a buggy on the streets of Hyderabad, Wasim and Waqar’s awkward photo-shoot in the early days of their careers, long-haired Mohsin Khan among a bevy of Indian beauties and Imran’s bare-chested bhangra with team-mates inside the Melbourne dressing room after the 1992 World Cup triumph, and many more.

“The camera should be used for rendering the very substance of the thing because the strongest way of believing in something is seeing it”, says Iqbal Munir, rather philosophically. “Only a few of these could be categorized as mere photographs. Otherwise, each one of them has a definite theme to it and I have endeavoured to portray it to the fullest”.

He is ruefully wise about what he calls an Imran fixation. “Imran has been a huge ideal for me. He was the best player I ever saw in action and the camera just seemed to love him too”, confesses Iqbal.

There are many surreal images on display too, of Wasim and Rameez in holiday mood near a pool, of a typically aristocratic but appreciative crowd at Lord’s offering a standing ovation to Imran in his last test in England, of Zaheer Abbas’ delectable leg glance off Chandrashekar in Lahore and many more.

“I wanted to play top level cricket but have no regret for not making the grade”, says Iqbal. “There’s hardly a place in the world where I have not accompanied the national team”.

The photographs triumphantly demonstrate the genuine emotional involvement of both – the photographer as well as the subject.

Savouring the moments of excitement, competition, the bloody-mindedness of the game, the calm, even cynicism, the massive panorama by Iqbal Munir recreates a whole world of memories for the aficionados as well as the fans of cricket.