WITH reference to the article Strong family ties (December 26), I do agree that strong family relations play a vital role in the upbringing of children. No doubt, parents deal with their children in a loving and caring manner. However, I think that along with restrictions, parents should teach their children about the right and wrong of every matter.
In this way, children get decisive power. I want to add one more thing, along with family members, friends, relatives, neighbours and school plus the college atmosphere is also very important. Parents should keep an eye on the company of their children for an ideal childhood. At the same time, I think every child enjoys his/her childhood. That is the age to enjoy everything and no deep sense to understand things.
SAIRA BANO
Lahore
Strangle the stress stimuli
WITH reference to the letter by Bisma Shahid Loan, Strangle the stress stimuli (January 2), contrary to the letter-author’s observations, the weekly compositions of Anjum Niaz provides a vivid description of the American society and sociological order of a country where the children we have brought up and have decided to make their homes, keeping away from their native land, due to changed circumstances in Pakistan.
Understandably, because through the television lenses, the generation born, educated, now living abroad, sees a troubled Pakistan, torn apart by reckless and intolerant sectarians, diehard, fanatic, organizations, operating through mysterious networks.
Anjum Niaz’s articles are avidly followed by the older, retiring generation that has opted to remain in Pakistan. For the younger generation, however, the taste of freedom and uninhibited lifestyle, opportunities, cars and town houses in the States leaves no desire, inducement whatsoever to return back to the country of their birth, where they become misfits, particularly, young females, with the characteristics of the letter-author who depreciate, despise and look down on male chauvinism.
My younger sister, a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, bemoans the reality of the situation; there are more educated Pakistani young men and women in the land of opportunity than she sees in Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad.
Anjum Niaz is therefore not spreading doom and gloom by writing of an occasional suicide, neither are her compositions disjointed. She fills in the weekend by describing how our young Pakistanis are coping, faring in the melting pot of distant United States.
MOHAMMED AZIZ HAJI DOSSA
Karachi
A critic with a difference
WITH reference to Intizar Hussain’s column A critic with a difference (December 19), in it he has quoted Nisar Aziz Butt to the effect that Samad Shaheen showed callousness to his wife Mumtaz Shireen when she was dying of cancer. This is at variance with my memory of my 25 years long association and friendship with the couple.
My association and friendship with Samad Shaheen began when he joined the Press Information Department in 1948 where I was already employed. Fortunately I was Samad’s roommate.
Samad lived in a flat on Bundar Road near Plaza Cinema. He would often take me to his flat for lunch. It was there that I met Mumtaz Shireen. She was a gracious host and I found the two a loving couple, though they were of opposite nature. Samad was extrovert and gregarious while Mumtaz was recluse and private.
Then Samad left for Holland for his PhD. Mumtaz of course accompanied her husband.
After some years Samad returned to Islamabad and rejoined PID. Again a very pleasant period of companionship started. The couple spent every Sunday invariably with me and my wife as Mumtaz developed very close friendship with my wife. She did not show any indication of sickness. However, she missed her sons who were studying in Cambridge. In April 1972, I was posted in Karachi. However, my wife remained in contact, through telephone with Mumtaz Shireen.
Then one day, Samad informed us that Shireen was very ill and was in hospital where she passed away. When we returned to Islamabad in June 1973, I found Samad a broken man. He lived the next 23 years a lonely man in his flat, in Clifton, Karachi.
WITH reference to the article Strong family ties (December 26), I do agree that strong family relations play a vital role in the upbringing of children. No doubt, parents deal with their children in a loving and caring manner. However, I think that along with restrictions, parents should teach their children about the right and wrong of every matter.
