YESTERDAY (Sept 29) was the ninth death anniversary of Syed Mohammad Yunus Wasti, who served the BBC, Voice of America and Radio Pakistan with distinction and dedication.

Many listeners regarded him as a broadcasting icon because he wrote, directed, produced and gave his voice to such well-received programmes as Sairbeen, Vatan se Door, Shaheen Club and Jahannuma.

His programme, Vatan se Door, was appreciated because it showed how Pakistanis living abroad loved their country and also described the various problems faced by them. The Shaheen Club was the programme that continued for full three decades after he had launched it. He interviewed various personalities with aplomb, including N.M. Rashid, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Z. A. Bukhari.

It was due to his great abilities that David Page, the chief of the BBC’s Eastern Services, wrote about him in 2006: “Yunus Wasti, during his 17 years in London with his team, proved a finest broadcaster and achieved a remarkable impact for South Asia and the Gulf. Yunus is still remembered as someone who made his own distinctive contribution to the BBC in those years, and the VOA’s gain was the BBC’s loss, when he moved to the US in 1983.”

Qudsia Nisar & others

Karachi

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2017