May 25, 2003

“EVERYONE is ignorant but on different subjects.” I came cross this one-liner in the Reader’s Digest. I must clarify that I didn’t read the Reader’s Digest but since I travelled so much, it was impossible to avoid it. It was to the travelling public what the Gideon’s Bible was to a hotel guest.

I was ignorant on more than one subject but particularly so in the matter of art as it pertained to paintings. I belonged to the school that frankly admitted that I liked or did not like what I saw on a canvas and did not try to commune with the artist’s soul. I was not altogether a Philistine. I had gone to the Louvre in Paris and seen the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, I knew who Picasso was and even Salvador Dali and an arty-crafty friend of mine had taken to me to art gallery in London and he had made buy a Turner print. I was more comfortable with books and music.

But I had a lot of friends who were artists. There was Nagi and Ajmal Hussain, and when I went to Dhaka, I would invariably spend some time with Zainul Abedin whose sketches on the Bengal famine in the forties had been considered subversive by the British. The angry artist outraged by the obscenity of starvation on such a massive scale had mellowed. Zain Bhai, as all his friends called him, had become a teacher. Guljee was a good friend as was Sadequain and it was to Sadequain that PIA turned to create a mural for the new office we had acquired on the Champs Elysee in Paris.

Patronizing art was not entirely new to PIA. The artist Jehangir had been commissioned by PIA to do some watercolours and these had been put up in the offices of senior management. Many might have preferred pin-ups but watercolours is what they got. It was Asghar Khan’s idea and he had felt that a PIA office in Paris needed to show off Pakistan’s greatest painter. He had mentioned it to me and I had thought that it was a big idea.

There used to be weekly Management Board meeting attended by the departmental heads. Asghar Khan believed in getting an input from his management team. A meeting was convened and Sadequain had roughed up a sketch of his mural. This had been passed around. The impression was that the mural had been my idea and before Asghar Khan arrived at the meeting, there were some ‘informal’ remarks about the idea and some comments on the rough sketch itself, all addressed in varying tones of sneering jocularity in my direction.

“Which side is up?” one of them asked me. Another was of the opinion that his 11-year old daughter could do better. “I take it that will come out of your budget,” the finance man observed. I am not a great believer in management by consensus. I don’t think that a non-expert should be asked to render a judgment on someone else’s expertise. I could hardly tell a pilot how to fly a plane or an engineer how to fix a technical fault. But, I suppose, everybody is entitled to an opinion on a mural.

Asghar Khan arrived at the meeting and it became clear that the Sadequain mural was his idea and the whole atmosphere of the meeting changed. The doubters and the mockers and the nay-sayers saw more virtue in the project than it deserved.

“Sadequain is a national treasure,” said the one who wanted to know which side was up and the finance man said that a painting was an investment safer than blue-chip bonds. Had Asghar Khan expressed any misgivings and doubts, it would have been a different story.

The same thing had happened but with a different outcome when we had met to determine the fate of our advertising slogan ‘Great People to Fly With’. A board meeting had been held and Asghar Khan had announced at the start of the meeting that the slogan had outlived its utility but he would go round the table to get the views of others. When it came to my turn, he said he would get to me last. PIA had lived with the slogan for many years but now no one could be found to say a word in its favour. When my turn came, I said with some sarcasm that since PIA’s own management did not believe in the slogan how was the public expected to believe it. I added for good measure that this was the first time anyone had expressed his disapproval.

Sadequain, who was in Paris, was informed that his mural had been approved and he should start work on it.

Asghar Khan called me in one morning and told me that Ayub Khan had mentioned a man called Paul Augier who owned the Negresco Hotel in Nice. He was a high-powered PR man and was a personal friend of the likes of the Shah of Iran and Nikita Khrushchev, two birds of altogether different feathers. The New Yorker had also done a profile of him. PIA might want to consider hiring him to handle our European public relations.

I felt that would be an overkill and we didn’t need someone like him. In any case, Asghar Khan felt that there was no harm in my meeting with him. I flew to Paris and met him. “Why don’t you come to Nice as my guest and we can talk about it,” he said. I did some quick mental calculations. I may be his guest at the Negresco but I would not even able to tip the doorman of such a hotel. I declined the invitation saying that I had to get back to Karachi. I told him that we needed bread and butter public relations but if something grand was being planned, we would get back to him. It was all very amicable and he told me that his invitation stood.

The Pakistan cricket team was due to tour England in the summer of 1967. I was hoping that the BBC would invite me once again to be the guest commentator and hoping too that Asghar Khan would release me. I got in touch with my friend Max Mueller who was the head of BBC’s Outside Broadcast. I wrote to him that since I was going to be in London, we could have lunch. We had made some changes in our PR set-up in London. Salahuddin Siddiqui had been transferred to London and to back him up, we had appointed Nasim Ahmed who was Dawn’s correspondent as a part-time PR consultant.

Max Mueller promptly got back to me, saying he would be delighted to meet me. I went to London and took along Nasim Ahmed with me. Nasim Ahmed had been an old friend and Kardar had introduced him to me. Nasim had just returned from a trip to China and was quite enthusiastic about his visit. It did not take long for Max Mueller to ask me to be the guest commentator and the rest of the lunch was given over to listening to Nasim’s views on China and his meeting with Marsal Chen Yi. He repeatedly informed us what he had said to Chen Yi. After Nasim left Max Mueller observed: “What an interesting man”. I wonder what Chen Yi said to him.”

After I got back, I sent a formal note to Asghar Khan asking for leave to do the cricket commentary. His response was: “Since the team is not likely to do well, your association with the team would be unfortunate. However, I am prepared to discuss.”

He hadn’t turned me down and had left a window open. I went to see him and told him that I had been associated with teams far worse than the one that was going to England. I couldn’t help feeling that he was having me on. It did not take long for him to agree. It would be great getting back to cricket. I had been very busy and had given a couple of home domestic tours a miss. Hanif Mohammad was going to be the captain and there were two young players that I was keen to see perform at that level — Majid Khan and an exciting new wicket-keeper, Wasim Bari.

Whatever I may think of the English as a people, an English summer was like no other summer and central to it was the game of cricket. No matter how well or poorly our team performed, the sun came out or it rained and as the writer Andrew Lang waxed eloquent: “There is no talk that is as good as cricket talk. When memory sharpens... and the old happy days of burned Junes revive.”

I was a lucky man. An entire summer watching and talking cricket and getting paid for it. Who said that life was unfair?

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