A journalist and trade unionist

Another stalwart of journalism passed away quietly last week.

Aslam Sheikh had not been well for sometime but one hardly expected him to go away so soon. Only the other day he was chirping away in a group of friends reminiscing of the good old days. Death could not be associated with his, somewhat thinner, smelling face and cheerful demeanour.

Quietness was the hallmark of Aslam Sheikh who spent all his life as a journalist of high merit. There was no fanfare about what he did as a true professional, an excellent reporter, an eminent columnist, an even harder administrator, a committed trade unionist, it was quite efficiency all the way.

Aslam Sheikh did not enter journalism by chance. He was fascinated with the profession while still a student. He thought it suited his progressive leanings, acquired at a young age.

In early fifties he joined the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) then the only news agency, without demurring at the meagre remunerations. Few heard him complain about low wages. He was content with his inexpensive cigarettes and an occasional ride in a cycle Racks.

I was taken by his simple charm when I first met him early in our career and always cherished his friendship of a lifetime.

Aslam, however, did have an ambition: he wanted to learn as much and as quickly as possible all about the profession he had chosen for himself.

There was a time in the APP when transfer to Dhaka was considered a punishment and the management used it as such.

Aslam was an exception. He wanted to be posted to East Pakistan to see that part of the country and live with the Bengalis. Though he was tossed around to various stations in West Pakistan his desire to stay in East Pakistan was not fulfilled. Surely, he would have been a great success there. He could get along famously with everybody, friends and foes, a habit which sometimes annoyed me.

Books were another passion with Aslam. A voracious reader he was into serious stuff. Classics from the 18th or 19th century. Dostoevsky, Tergenev, Tolstoy or the likes of Dickens were the kind of books he was deeply engrossed in at home. In addition, he could go through a host of magazines and newspapers.

Once in a passing phase he was regular at the weekly lectures of the religious scholar Ghulam Mohammad Pervez in Karachi.

Gradually, Aslam eased into writing on economic matters and in no time acquired proficiency in reporting the subject and then in column writing. Few will challenge that he ended up being one of the best in the genre.

Aslam did not write a book on the subject, but what he produced over the years, had enough material for a few.

His managerial acumen was recognized as Director General of APP, a difficult role at any given time. He went through the stint breezingly. Few eyebrows were raised by his superiors or the people who worked under him.

Memories of Aslam are many. One I recall with fondness is about his stay in Delhi during the 1965 war. It was related to me by a colleague that an Indian journalist taunted him about the Indian attack on Lahore. Aslam turned around to snap at him “You will be sorry for that. Lahore or any city in Pakistan will be a Leningrad to you”.

The journalist community knows that the late lamented - what a cruel expression to use for him - Aslam Sheikh was a very active member of their trade union. Be it in Karachi, Peshawar, Rawalpindi or Islamabad. One with unwavering loyalty who never changed colour and went through hardship on that count. In the process he went to jail and also lost his job once.

Aslam Sheikh had an excellent extensive tour of newspapers at home and abroad. Nowhere could he be accused of not delivering.

Perhaps, few outside the family know that Sheikh sahib, as friends called him, was an excellent house keeper.

When we shared a house before he got married, he did wonders with the small salary the two of us pooled. Left to me, that amount, we would be fasting for half a month. Aslam provided us two square meals and a healthy breakfast to boot. Enough was left over (money) to entertain friends.

Aslam Sheikh has passed away quietly. May his soul rest in peace.

(The writer is former director-general of APP and former president of PFUJ)

Previewing a preface

I HAVE been giving you some information on Sir Ganga Ram over the past few weeks. I have also given you portions from BPL Bedi’s biography of the great man, Harvest from the Desert, first published in 1940. The book is being reprinted by the Research and Publication Centre of the National College of Arts (NCA). It will have a new preface, jointly written by Dr Mubarak Ali, Editor Tarikh and Mr Nadeem Omar Tarar, Assistant Professor, NCA.

I am reproducing the piece by permission. It begins:

“You Sir, talk of Culture, Culture. I know only of one Culture, and that is agriculture” Sir Ganga Ram (1851-1927)

The Historical Re-print Series of the NCA Research and Publication Centre is a pedagogic effort by the National College of Arts to re-visit and re-think our past, and its relationship to the present. The books in this series, which date back to the British colonial period —- a period that coincides with the onset of modernity in our region —- have been selected on the basis of their importance in informing and determining our contemporary thought and understanding. These texts are thus part of the archives that we need to consult if we are to understand the genealogy of our post-colonial present. Part of the biography of empire, these books helped provide the ideological and political justification for British colonialism in South Asia.

The Historical Re-print Series, therefore, is not intended to offer authoritative accounts. In the present market in Pakistan, texts from the colonial period are reprinted as if they constitute eternal knowledge: indeed, as if the colonial seal lends greater epistemic legitimacy to the text. This is why we have chosen to thematize the hyphen in the title of our series: re-printing is not the same as printing. The hyphen marks historical distance and difference, and gestures towards a re-thinking. Our series aims to highlight the discursive and disciplinary apparatus through which the British Indian government created an objectified image of Indian society, a process that was co-extensive with the will to govern and control. The authority of British colonialism in India did not rest on the iron frame of the imperial bureaucracy alone, but was strengthened and sustained through cultural technologies of control. Colonialism imagined and controlled Indian ‘reality’ through a complex system of knowledge production, whose objectivity and legitimacy is still uncontested. The fresh introduction to each book in the series if offered to unravel some of these complexities for the reader, and help locate the book in the broader historical and epistemological map of the British Empire. The Raj’s discursive and institutional machine was not uncontested, however, in the period of colonial rule. The National College of Arts takes special pleasure in this regard in re-printing the biography of Sir Gang Ram, who represented so fully the first generation of Punjabis responding to the new set of conditions created through western educational and economic infrastructure put in place by the Ferangi Raj.

However, it is an ironic testament to the imperial and national history of the Punjab that Ganga Ram is only remembered as an Executive Engineer, ‘the builder of Lahore’, that is, for his career in imperial service, which he gave up prematurely in 1903 at the age of 42. In the popular imagination, he surfaces as a messiah, who invested his personal fortune earned through imperial service, business and industry in the education, health and welfare of the common people of the Punjab. However, what he really strove to achieve in the next 24 odd years, goes much beyond his contribution as a builder or philanthropist. It is all but forgotten that, being an agriculturalist at heart, he struggled to revolutionize the economic conditions of Indian agriculture and to bring home the fruits of European science against a bureaucracy instituted to yoke Indian economic growth to the demands of the metropolitan economy. His distinctly anti-colonial perspective on poverty, and pragmatic solutions to India’s under-development under the British Raj earned him a notoriety amongst both Indian nationalist elite, as well as the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy of his time, a notoriety which continues to cast its shadow on him, even today.

Ganga Ram’s tirade against MK Gandhi’s gospel of re-building Indian economy and agriculture through hand-spinning with the charkha —- which “he thought was fit only to be burnt as firewood” —- as Gandhi warmly remembered in a tribute to Ganga Ram on his sudden death in England in 1927, merits no place in the annals of Indian economic history. His practical critique of swadeshi politics, and his scientific solutions to the question of Indian poverty, demonstrates a grasp of details, which when counterposed to the emancipatory narratives of Hindu and Muslim nationalism, reveals the hollowness of nationalist politics in colonial Punjab and elsewhere in India. His radical proposal to the Indian Industrial Commission in 1920 to abolish land revenue and settlement in the Punjab, the central apparatus of bureaucratic control and domination, strictly on the basis of his scrupulous calculations of enhanced economic efficiency and higher revenues through increased productivity in agriculture goes unnoticed in the class analysis of the Marxist historians of the Punjab.

His various shrewdly drafted representations on policy commissions of the British Indian government, and frequent pleadings to the Anglo-Indian political community reveal that his philanthropy was inspired by a radical politics of reform, which was deeply immersed in a faith in the potential of modern science to transform human societies. His numerous visits to England to observe the latest techniques in industrial agriculture, and his several technical innovations in agricultural technology underpin his politics of reforming Indian society by modernizing agriculture and industry. Rather than seeing the Indian peasantry as an anachronistic and inert mass, symptomatic of India’s historical inertia, Ganga Ram dreamed of transforming the Indian peasantry into “a new generation of men, who would understand a machine as they now understood a bullock”.

The biography is written in compelling literary prose and reads almost like a novel. The Editors of the NCA Historical Re-print Series would like to thank Mr. Ahmad Saleem, an ex-officio keeper of public records, for providing the copy of this book which has long gone out of print, and his keen interest in introducing it to the reader.

* * * * *

TONY BLAIR the British prime minister is the least deserving man ever to have lived in No. 10 Downing Street. When the Americans got hold of Saddam Hussein, he came on television to express his satisfaction at the great ‘achievement’ by the minions of Mr George Bush, the man who has more black deeds to his ‘credit’ than anyone who ever lived in the White House. Now, this man Blair is quite without flair. He used all the stupid cliches on democracy, freedom and similar other things. He was even worse than John Major, who is, like Mian Nawaz Sharif at least fond of cricket. Brainless but harmless. Blair is equally brainless but infinitely more dangerous than Mr Major or even Maggie Thatcher. The old darling was only a milk snatcher. But look at Tony Blair. He has helped George Bush deprive the Iraqi people of their sovereignty. So he is an accessory before and after the fact. May God punish both Bush and Blair and May God knock some sense into American and British heads.

Story of a ‘hibakusha’

It was a thoughtful audience that walked out of the PACC auditorium last Thursday. Outside, it was a typical winter night in Karachi — chilly but bracing. Many were relieved to find that the world had not turned upside down while they had been inside. As the people drove off, many must have turned to look at the Frere Hall just across the road. Beautifully illuminated at night, it is one of the fine specimens of colonial architecture in the city. But on Thursday, it was not with this thought in mind that they gazed at the building. They were glad that it was still intact, not blown to bits or charred beyond recognition.

Earlier that evening, Films d’Art had screened its latest production “Roz-e-qaza: Hibakusha ki aapbeti”. The half-hour docu-drama contained an apocalyptic vision of what would follow if a nuclear bomb hit Karachi. One of the images in the movie was that of the Frere Hall, its grandeur reduced to rubble.

Producer Aisha Gazdar, daughter of the late filmmaker Mushtaq Gazdar, has used an interesting technique to drive home the point that peace in the subcontinent must be achieved at all cost. Using a Pakistani cast for greater effect, she has brought to screen the tragic story of a hibakusha, or survivor of the atomic bomb in Japan, on the day that America destroyed Hiroshima and a huge chunk of its population. She has used footage from the attack on Hiroshima, alternating it with scenes of Pakistani political leaders Nawaz Sharif and Qazi Hussain Ahmed making speeches in favour of the bomb.

Foremost among the questions that spring to mind are: do the people of this country actually know the kind of destruction a nuclear attack can cause? And if they do, is the possession of the bomb something to gloat over?

From India, with love

A Karachi-based guest at the Sixth Joint Convention of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy was a little puzzled when another guest, a young man seated two rows ahead of her, turned around, and on noticing her, seemed to recognize her with jubilation. Making soundless movements with his hands and head, he asked the lady how she was. He informed her about his well-being using the same technique. Thereafter whenever he found anything amusing happening on stage, he would turn around to exchange a smile with her. The lady, who smiled back politely, could not recall where she had met him.

The moment of truth arrived when afterwards the young man approached the lady, who was about to leave the place, and asked her if she had recognized him. Sheepishly, she apologized for not recognizing him at all. She said he must have mistaken her for someone else. “Of course not!” said the man. He said he could make out that she was Pakistani and told her that he was Indian, looking forward to making lots and lots of friends in Karachi. He had only been turning and smiling at her because he had recognized her as a friend in the crowd. “So hello friend!” he said, extending his hand to the lady.

Good manners

It appears that chivalry is not altogether dead. A lady, who previously worked for this paper, related how she came to realize this. She and her husband had recently gone to Nadra’s Swift ID Card Centre near Nisar Shaheed Park in Defence. (She describes her experience at Nadra as pleasant but not very swift!). As they found that they had to wait for some time, the couple decided to take a leisurely walk in the park.

They were about to complete one round when they espied a pair of teenage boys sitting on a bench and chatting away. One of the boys was in the process of throwing an empty juice carton into the air when he caught sight of the couple approaching the spot where he was sitting with his friend. He stopped himself midway and put the juice carton by his side on the bench. As an afterthought, he proceeded to pick up other litter scattered around the bench. This included a soda bottle, an empty packet of chips and similar junk. He collected these offending items and got up to throw them in the garbage bin a few feet away.

The lady passed by him and then retraced her steps. She walked up to where he was and asked him whether his actions were for her benefit. He smiled sheepishly and replied in the affirmative. The lady felt good, not because it had finally paid off to wear a severe expression on her face — she says she usually does at the sight of car windows being rolled down nonchalantly and trash being thrown on the road — but because all was not lost. There was still hope for young Karachiites, who after all, know the difference between right and wrong and many of whom have not become callous in their behaviours.

Dignity of labour

Waiting for the red signal to turn green at a traffic-light one evening, a colleague heard a man cry “telephone, telephone”. The man was riding a bicycle with a wireless telephone set strapped to the carrier. An inquisitive soul, the colleague motioned the man to join him on the service road of Khyaban-i-Shamsheer where he parked his car and asked the man how he hit upon the idea of setting up a mobile public call office.

The 45-year-old Mohammed Akram, who works for a semi-government organization on a fixed-term contract, initially toyed with the idea of opening a shop in his locality to augment his income. But he realized that the shop would not be able to do much business because he would open it only after office hours. He had a brainwave one day and decided to purchase a wireless telephone set which works on a pre-paid card. He used the gratuity he had received upon his retirement from the armed forces. Now he comes from work, freshens himself up, mounts his bicycle and rides to the beach.

He parks his bicycle in front of Seaview Apartments on Beach Avenue and offers telephone facilities to picnickers, who can make a three-minute-long call for Rs4 only. Those wishing to make calls to cellular phones have to pay more. A pre-paid telephone card costs him Rs1,650 and he makes a profit of Rs350 on each card. Naturally, he gets more customers on holidays and on weekends.

Mr Akram sends his additional income to his family in Abbotabad. He says that though he is not highly educated, he wants his only child, a son, to acquire the best possible education he can afford to pay for. “Anyone living in Karachi can make an honest living if he wants to. There is no dearth of opportunities in this city,” he said, mounted the bicycle and rode away. Who can disagree with him?

Fly-blown food

The other day a colleague saw a passing bus belch a large cloud of smoke into the air which slowly settled on a nearby cart laden with gur. Naturally, the huge smoke-emitting vehicle had spoilt it all. But the owner of the cart was unmindful of the damage done to the gur.

The colleague, on her way to Mirpurkhas from Hyderabad, was surprised to notice that sugarcane vendors (mind you, only the sugarcane walas) had kept little pieces of gunderi in lidded glass boxes placed on wooden carts. The fruit-sellers had put large slabs of ice in the glass boxes to keep the gunderi cold and fresh. (The bottom of the glass boxes probably had a few holes to drain away the melted water.) Nobody knew who had set the trend, but it was certainly the best way of keeping the flies at bay.

The city government and the police can start an awareness campaign aimed at educating the public about the hazards of eating food lying uncovered in the open. The city government could actually make it mandatory for food-sellers to cover their wares with a diaphanous piece of cloth if they cannot afford glass boxes. But even if it starts such a campaign, will the police join in, when they themselves are eating from the food stalls, and that too for free — dust, flies and all?

— By Karachian

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