PART TWO

Personalities

Down Memory Lane with Kardar

 These are cricketing days and everybody is speculating who will win the World Cup . Let us leave the issue to the experts. I certainly don't know who will be the winners but if you do not question my credentials as an honest Pakistani , I would love to see Vivian Richards  score eight hundreds in the tournament and take the cup home. The cup, if you don't mind, must belong to the king.

          As I began this piece, I saw Pakistan  complete their innings against Sri Lanka  at Hyderabad , where Miandad  made a marvellous hundred in extremely trying conditions. But you will read a lot about that elsewhere in this paper.

          However, since these are cricketing days, let's talk about the game. Progressive Publishers , who have done some wonderful work lately, have published A. H. Kardar 's book The Memoirs of an All-Rounder . It is largely a collection of articles by the former Pakistan  Captain. The book makes excellent bedside reading, especially when it takes you down the memory lane.

          I started reading the Memoirs backwards because its Part II is political, in which Kardar  recalls his days in what once was East Pakistan . It makes nostalgic reading. In thirty-odd pages, Kardar makes you angry at the stupidity of the policy-makers of his days, and at times he makes you cry.

          He thinks that the arrogance and the indifference of the early bureaucrats sent from West Pakistan  to serve in Dhaka  and elsewhere really sowed the seeds of separation. The emergence of Sheikh  Majbur Rehman  was, in his opinion, inherent in the nature of events as they unfolded in the early years of Pakistan .

          All that the East Pakistanis  needed was a measure of love and affection, a sense of belonging and a legitimate share in the affairs of state. They were denied all this and more.

          Kardar  recalls a lovable man, A. T. M. Mustafa , and how President  Ayub Khan  gave him the boot. He gives a poignant account of how the President showed him the door, but why should I spoil the day for you?

          Let me talk; therefore, of Kardar  and his cricketing days. He begins by talking of the Lahore  that was in his childhood and youth. He was born in Bhati  Gate , which was once described by the late Mr . Mohammed Tufail as the "Chelsea  of Lahore."

          Kardar 's Bhati  Gate  produced poets, men of letters, artists, sportsmen, and men about town. That, alas, is no longer true.

          Of Arain stock, Kardar  is proud of his pedigree. He talks of his father who, by all accounts, was the pioneer of the cooperative movement in the Punjab . He recalls the days of the Baithak , the Zenana , and of the Akharas  (wrestling arenas), where such great grapplers as Gama and Imam Bux used to reign supreme.

          All this is gone now, and it saddens Kardar  a great deal. And when people tell him that the walled city is being developed with foreign aid, he is reminded of these lines from T.S. Eliot:

My house is a decayed house.
And the Jew squats on the windowsill, the owner
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp ,
Blistered in Brussels , patched and peeled in London .

The former skipper then talks of the giants of club cricket, and of those who promoted the game in the city. Quoting from Sir Neville Cardus  that "the style and the man grow together in it (cricket)." He says that for building up the traditions of the game, one Hanif, one Imtiaz won't do. "We shall need many more of their like."

          The heroes of his youth were, quite naturally, Bradman  and Humond , Woodful  and Ponsford , Ranji  and Pataudi , Dulip Singhji  and Nisar , Amarnath , Wazir Ali  and Larwood , Jardine  and Grimmer , Leyland  and Musthaq Ali . Lucky man destined to be born in the romantic age of cricket, when the thing to do was to play the game as it was meant to be played.               

          Among his senior contemporaries was Khawaja Saeed Ahmad , whose swing bowling Kardar  remembers to this day, but his account of the club and college cricket of his youth is bit perfunctory. Crescent and Mamdot  Clubs, he recalls, but he is too impatient to go into details.

          He does drop a name or two, like that of the late Shahabuddin  who led Crescent in his day. Very fast he was, but later he turned to bowling off-breaks at medium pace. His account of the All-India  Inter-University Championship for the Rohinton-Baria trophy could also have been a little more detailed.

          All we are told about club cricket is that all you needed in those days was a hundred rupees to run it well for a month. Among the sahibs at the Lahore  Gymkhana, he remembers, among others, George Abel , a double Oxford  blue (rugby and cricket).

          Kardar  begins to get more interesting and readable as he recounts, how he overcame paternal opposition to his love for the game. He remembers the 1942 Punjab University vs. the Punjab Governor 's XI match quite well. He remembers Amarnath 's drives through the covers: "Never before or after have I had the pleasure of watching such magnificent cover driving." Great praise, indeed. He remembers how the elder Nawab of Pataudi  tackled the quick off-spin of Chuni Lal  on a difficult wicket.

          Then, there are the pentangulars and the inter-provincial matches, his stay at Oxford  and his days at Warwick , his stint as Pakistan 's captain, his struggle against apartheid in sport, plus many other things. But why should I summarise the whole book for you? My job was to whet your appetite and to place on record my appreciation of Messes Progressive Publishers  for having brought out such an attractive book. They could have employed a more efficient proofreader, but that's a minor irritant, really. You will not want to put down the book until you have read it from cover to cover. Thank you, skipper. Keep writing.

          And now for a letter I received the other day. The writer wishes to remain anonymous. So be it. But here's what he says:

I wish you could do a little in-depth research on the systemic inroads made by some people in our policy-making hierarchy, especially in Islamabad . Quite a number of very intelligent bureaucrats have successfully been operating to ensure nothing happens here, which might be of some benefit to the country.

The modus operandi  of these people is to cause so many delays in even ordinary matters that the whole idea gets frustrated and nothing moves. On Sept. 25, you mentioned what happened to the Pakistan  Fiscal Association. Such tactics are deliberately adopted to fail all worthwhile projects.

If you can somehow investigate into what I am trying to convey, you will be flabbergasted at the number of schemes, etc., offered by so many international agencies, like WHO , FAO , UNIDA , USAID , etc., have been transferred to India  by clever manoeuvring of bureaucrats occupying important seats in government . I know a number of such development programs offered by international agencies to Pakistan , but after years of deliberate delays caused in their "clearance" by Islamabad , the donors got fed up and transferred them to India, where they did not take long to get "cleared."

I can smell, you do not want to believe this, but my dear sir, I am telling the truth because I have directly dealt with such negotiations with international donor agencies, and ultimately found the project shifted to India , since the donors got the message that we do not want it.

The story about international scholarships is also very intriguing. An Indian , for example, born in Lahore  (Pakistan ) before 1947 gets the scholarship or employment in WHO , FAO , etc., on the Pakistan quota, but a Pakistani , born in Delhi  (India ) before 1947, is not eligible on the Pakistan quota because he is Indian and the Indian quota is oversubscribed. I hope I have put it right.

My friend, as you will also agree, has a point. The sahibs will be sahibs but when their Sahibiat begins to border on subversion, someone in political authority should stand up and take notice. I think it is time we evolve a system to monitor not only the professional ability, but also the loyalty of people in bureaucratic authority. There are times when a bureaucrat sits over a file, he is not only being incompetent, or corrupt, or both but downright unpatriotic.

          When the education authorities transferred the Kinnaird College  principal and her deputy, the alumni there immediately took to arms. (Please don't take me literally.) The "authorities concerned" immediately beat a hasty retreat, and the transfer orders were withdrawn.

          Mira Phailbus is the best principal in town, and she is running the best girls' college. You don't play ducks and drakes with a woman like that, unless you have sold your soul to the devil.

          When the girls demonstrated on the morrow of the transfer order, one of the placards they were carrying read: "Mira Phailbus is Kinnaird ." A Mira is not born every day. So let us be grateful for the only one we have in Lahore . She is not only a great teacher, a great principal, a great administrator, but also a great communicator.

          This, so help me God , is not a P.R. piece. I have no daughter and if I ever get a granddaughter, she would want to join the Kinnaird  in the 21 st century. I am only voicing the sentiments of the people of my city, and the people of my city love Mira as much as Mira loves their daughters, if not more.

Friday, October 9, 1987