Once upon a time when East Pakistan was part of us, not matter how much we try and chase away the past, there was a young man named Muhammad Usman Ghani. He belonged to Pak Hill, Dinajpur district. He was fond of hitchhiking and, apart from touring the whole Middle East, had travelled both western and eastern parts of the country on foot, covering a distance of 2,600 miles. On Nov 23, 1964 it was reported that Ghani would leave from Karachi for the Far East on a similar adventure. He did.

The adventurism of antagonising our East Pakistani brethren didn’t work well though. It was evident that the seeds of the Dhaka Fall had been sown much before it actually happened. There was unrest in the eastern wing, and justifiably so, from the very beginning. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was the general secretary of the Awami League in 1964. On Nov 24, he addressed a public meeting in Karachi. He made it very clear in his speech that people wanted unadulterated democracy in the country and any other form of government created in the name of democracy would not be acceptable. Can’t take issue with that!

Perhaps those days having a free spirit, with reference to Usman Ghani and Sheikh Mujeeb to a certain extent, was deemed a quality worth appreciating. Speaking of which, here’s a little nugget of information that might be interesting for the younger generation of artists and art buffs.

Pakistan’s greatest painter, Sadequain, lived and worked in Paris for a few years in the ‘60s. In September 1964 he came back to Pakistan for a couple of months and visited different parts of the country with a certain Mr Schweitzer, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Sadequain had befriended Mr Schweitzer not because of his social position, but due to the fact that he belonged to a literary family. The artist himself was a poet and avid reader of literature. On Nov 24, Sadequain headed back to Paris from Karachi.

Another man of letters, G. Allana, touched upon a different subject on Nov 27. He was at the Home Economics College that day where he, according to one estimate, addressed one thousand students (that’s a big number, which goes to show the popularity of the scholar).

The topic of his lecture was modern man at the crossroads of history. The gist of his talk was that the modern man appeared to be in a state of utter spiritual exhaustion as the world of the spirit and the soul had been ‘contemptuously’ set aside. It would be hard to dispute his view. However, what’s sadder is that had he been alive today, he wouldn’t have found any improvement in the post-modern man.

When the city was abuzz with literary, artistic and adventurous activities, something very weirdly interesting happened in a garments’ shop managed by a woman and her son in PECHS. At 1pm, two burqa-clad women entered the store, bought dresses worth Rs400 and gave the money to the lady manager. When she opened the drawer in which she kept the money, the two women pushed the manager aside, grabbed all the cash there was in the drawer and ran away.

The police believed that they were part of a criminal gang involved in robberies of this kind.

Hmm… springs to mind one of comedian Saad Haroon’s songs.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2014