LAHORE: Meezu, as Muneeza Hashmi’s parents, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Alys Faiz, would call her, depicted Faiz Sahib as a father, which almost all households have in our part of the world. He would ask her about her hostel routines, pocket money and studies. She shared her childhood memories, penned in the correspondence, just like the girl next door.

“No money means no money,” she explained about the insufficient pocket money. “There were moments when in college, I would be short of money.”

She said about the great poet as her father in her book ‘Conversations with My Father’ that has her correspondence with her father.

The panelists – Navid Shahzad and Dr Osama Siddique – sat with Muneeza in a session at the Faiz Festival to discuss the book.

Muneeza looked up to her father for bucks. Once he got late to send her money but later sent extra money as ‘mark-up’ but with the advice not to tell her mom about it.

The conversation noted that being the daughter of a great poet and the sister of a great painter (Salima Hashmi) might have put enormous pressure on Muneeza but she still managed to have her own accomplishments.

The audience learned what most of them already knew about her like being a pioneer in Pakistan’s public broadcasting sector – the first women programmes director for PTV. She was voted three times the chairperson of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association.

Muneeza kept herself from poetry writing as her mother used to say that one poet in a family was enough. She chose her own course.

Muneeza said she took prompt decisions, without thinking about the consequences. Once she grabbed the PTV union leader, who was trying to intimidate her, from his collar.

Navid said she had read the book and she pinpointed a lot of grievances in the letters. She said the problem with us in Pakistan was that we ‘sanitise’ great men and women.

“Faiz was a great poet but he was not infallible. And this I think is Muneeza’s greatest accomplishment because her book shows him as a human.”

Dr Siddique said Faiz’s letters had wit, affection and emotions for the family. He narrated the Faiz family’s ordeals when the poet was in the Hyderabad jail.

SALMAN RASHID: “The Ertugruls were not a Muslim tribe. The Kalash people of the Chitral valley are not descendants of the Greeks. Don’t believe in the stories of Lahore Fort guides, who say that the Lahore Fort’s tunnels are connected to Sri Nagar and Delhi,” this was stated by travel writer Salman Rashid who shocked the audience with historical references at a Faiz Festival session.

He sat with Sumera Khalil to unveil the many facets of his life, work and ability to bust myths.

Salman said he was attracted to the mountains since his childhood when school atlas became his favorite bedside book. His early travels were on a bicycle on the Lahore roads during his school days and he would often visit places like Tezab Ahata and the Walled City where the groups of elderly people sitting along the road would consider him an ‘outsider’.

Once he grew up, he took up travel adventures to far-places like Balochistan, Sindh and so on. With times, he learned many hard lessons. In 1980, he travelled to the Ranikot Fort in Jamshoro on foot. Relying on a book, that the fort is not too far, he along with a friend, tried to visit the fort on foot. In the age when there were no google maps, every track was bumpy and treacherous and they never ended up to the fort. Next week, they returned again, this time, armed with relevant information and completed the journey.

Besides reading history and geography, Salman also mastered the art of photography.

“Photography slows down your journey, but it doesn’t create any distraction from the travel task,” he said.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2022