HOW is nostalgia different from remembering things that happened a long time ago? Nostalgia, according to one thesis, is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return, whereas to remember is to jog your memory without the yearning to go back in time.

It’s up to scholars and historians to put the recalling of all things associated with East Pakistan as part of our collective nostalgia or a simple act of restoring a thought that doesn’t hold any significance in the current scheme of things. The fact remains, East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, was as important a geographical entity against the backdrop of the 1947 Indian landscape as contemporary Pakistan. But post-Partition there were things that proved a bone of contention between the two wings, one of which was the mellifluous Bengali language.

On April 16, 1965, the chairman of the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in Karachi, Prof Q. H. K. Bakhtiari, inaugurated the East Pakistan Students Association at the historic Theosophical Hall. Speaking to the students, he said that to help Bengali students the board had decided to adopt the Bengali language as one of the media for answering questions (while taking exams) for classes IX and X from the current academic year (1965). Alas, not much importance can be attached to his statement now.

What may be a thing of the past and still worth taking pride in is the news item about a young journalist which got published on April 17 in Dawn Karachi’s city page. According to it, an assistant editor of the Pakistan Times, Tahir Mirza, was declared the winner of the Reader’s Digest scholarship for Pakistani media persons. He was selected out of 18 working journalists from all over Pakistan by a panel of judges. The scholarship was for a year-long study at the Macalester College of Minnesota. He was the first Pakistani to win the scholarship. Yes, he is the same Tahir Mirza (or Mirza sahib, as he was fondly called) who went on to become editor of Dawn.

Perhaps it was the week of good news. Even in the field of sport (surprise, surprise). On April 13, the Pakistan cricket team won the third Test match against New Zealand at the National Stadium Karachi, winning the three-match series 2-0. A lot of people harbour the notion that in those days there wasn’t much fanfare involved with the game. Not true. If media reports are anything to go by, “school girls chanted victory slogans in their stands” as M. Ilyas hit a century. Talk about cheerleaders as being a modern-day phenomenon! By the way, isn’t it sad that these days we don’t have international cricket in this country?

Unrelated to the cricket series celebrations, on April 15, young Turkish pianist Yuksel Koptagel gave a delightful exhibition of classical music at Hotel Intercontinental. A critic who liked the performance wrote: “Her finest moment came while playing Beethoven’s variations.” Koptagel’s grandfather, Abdul Karim Khan Tareen, was born and brought up in Multan and later on migrated to Turkey. The pianist was born in 1931 in Istanbul.

But with the good comes the bad. Miscreants have always been a significant part of Karachi’s social fabric. Such as those who make crank calls. On April 16 it was announced that the telephone department had launched a drive against those who indulged in obnoxious phone calls. The decision was taken after the department received a growing number of complaints. As a result, over a dozen callers were put under observation. It wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that even today such a drive won’t be irrelevant.

Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2015

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