MOHSIN Bhopali was a renowned post-independence poet and one of the first versifiers to write haiku in the Urdu language. After partition of the subcontinent, his family migrated to Pakistan. On Nov 24, 1975 a collection of Bhopali’s Urdu poems titled Nazmaney was launched at the Karachi Press Club (KPC). Social thinker Sibte Hasan was the chief guest at the launch. Speaking on the occasion, Hasan exhorted writers and poets to utilise their literary talent in highlighting social and cultural conflicts and contradictions existing in society, because ‘very few were attempting it’. He liked the way Bhopali exposed ‘vice’ in Nazmaney,arguing that the poet had tried to bring out those contrasts pretty sharply. Poet Rais Amrohvi described the book as a poetic and dramatic expression of events, pointing out that Bhopali had explored a new way of narrating short stories in verse. Critic Anjum Azmi said Nazmaney was a collection of satirical poems in which the poet had delineated day-to-day events successfully. Poet Himayat Ali Sha’ir was of the view that Bhopali through his latest work had achieved more success compared to his previous books.

The importance of the written word grabbed the headlines at the end of the month as well. On Nov 29, two helicopters of the United States Naval Ship ‘Sacramento’ airlifted 90,000 books donated by an American firm to Clifton helipad where they were received by Federal Education Minister Abdul Hafeez Pirzada. The helicopters made 35 flights in five hours from the ship anchored about 12 miles off Karachi shore to the helipad where a large crowd had gathered to watch the ceremony. Addressing them, the minister said books were a vital link to the success of educational programmes of developing countries, and that the donation by the US publishers — Harper and Row, now HarperCollins — would greatly benefit the students in Pakistan. He assured them that they would be distributed in libraries at educational institutions of the country in the shortest possible time for the students’ benefit. The US Consul-General, Robert W Moore, who was with Mr Pirzada, hoped that the books, which were of a high school level, would be of great help as supplementary reading. He said it gave him pleasure to note that “this precious gift has been made available to Pakistan through the good offices of Pakistani and American Rotarians, the US Navy and American publishers”.

Another prominent US citizen was in Karachi that week. On Nov 25, David Bell, a former economic adviser to the government of Pakistan in the 1950s, former head of USAID and (currently) Executive Vice-President of the Ford Foundation, visited the Applied Economic Research Centre at the Department of Economics, University of Karachi (KU). He was received by the director of the research centre Prof Ehsan Rashid and his colleagues. The foundation had instituted a special assistance programme at the university for the development of teaching and research in economics. The centre was being developed jointly by the government of Sindh, the University of Karachi and the Ford Foundation.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2025