Talk about nostalgia. There used to be a Delhi Anglo-Arabic College and School Boys Association in Pakistan. Three key words here: Delhi, Anglo and Arabic. They smell of three different phases of the past — readily relatable past. On Jan 19, 1964, the foundation stone of a school-cum-college to be built by the association was laid in Federal Area, Karachi. The stone was laid by Abdul Ghaffar, the senior most living member of the association at the time.

On Jan 20, another kind of construction was ordered by the Chairman Karachi Development Authority, Roedad Khan, who was also commissioner of the city. He ordered that multi-storey flats be built for residents of Lyari. While the aforementioned school did see the light of day, the construction of flats, to date, remains a mystery.

The cinema business in Karachi in the ‘60s was in full swing. So it was but natural that some of them became ‘news’ for the wrong reasons. For example, Lyric Cinema was allegedly using its parking space as a godown in, what a report suggested was ‘contravention of the traffic and building control regulations’. Apparently the parking lot existed only on paper and the parking area on the ground floor was ‘walled off’ converting it into a ‘full-fledged godown’.

Nowadays people crib about the fast disappearing libraries in Karachi. You can’t take issue with them. There was a time when the city was known for its libraries, well almost. On Jan 22, 1964, MNA Siddique Dawood inaugurated the Quaid-i-Azam Lending Library at the Government College Nazimabad. The good thing about it was that students of the college themselves had donated their caution money (Rs22,000) to the library which enabled the facility to purchase more than 4,000 books to be disturbed free among 700 students for one year.

Those were the days when student unions in Karachi were no pushovers. So when the University of Karachi refused to enroll a little more than 1,000 students for different reasons, a meeting of student leaders and college unions was held on Jan 23 at the NED Engineering College (it was a college back then) to consider grievances of students who had passed intermediate examinations but had not been allowed admission to the next class in local colleges. Did it bear fruit? Not really.

On Jan 24, the University of Karachi was in the news for another reason. Its vice-chancellor, Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, claimed that Urdu may possibly be introduced as medium of instruction at the university and its affiliated institutions by the next academic year as the institution had already been using it for instruction purposes for part I degree classes on an experimental basis. My word, it’s been 50 years since then, and the same song has been playing on a loop.

If you think 50 year ago things were the same on the cultural front alone, you will scratch your head to know that similar was the case in the field of economics. On Jan 25, the Governor of Bank of England, the Earl of Cromer, delivered a talk at the fifth SEANZA central banking course. The gist of his lecture was that (pound) sterling continued to be an important international trading currency and over two-thirds of the total sterling holdings were owned by overseas sterling countries. How far is that from being true in 2014?