PART TWO
Personalities
Of Sadequain and 'Life ' at 50
To celebrate the Faiz birthday or to mourn Sadequain ? That is not the question today. Faiz never died. He just retired. His birthday, therefore, had to be celebrated. And so it was on Friday. Similarly with Sadequain. Those who knew and loved him have simply lost the privilege of seeing him. But he will live in them and for them, for as long as they themselves live.
There is no other couple for which Sadequain will continue to live more intensely in death than in life but Syed Abid Ali Shah (BCCI, Karachi ), and Nazi Apa , his gracious wife. I have known no greater Sadequain devotees than Shah Sahib and Nazi, and their home-wherever they set up home, be it Lahore , Rawalpindi or Karachi-has been a mini-Sadequain museum. You see him everywhere in the Syed house but most of all you see him in their hearts.
I have only a hazy memory of my personal contact with Sadequain for reasons I need not explain in public. I spent many evenings with him at the Lahore Museum , at the Open Air Theater , at the Bagh-i-Jinna h in Lahore (which he renamed Koh-i-Alwan ), at the Galarie Sadequain in Islamabad and above all, at Syed Abid Ali's place when he used to live in Model Town . All I remember of these evenings are the Sadequain face and fingers. There is no sound. My mind did not record what my ears heard. And in retrospect, I think, my mind did the right thing.
To assess Sadequain as an artist and a calligraphist is a task, which must be left to the experts. I will not be drawn into a field of which I know nothing. But I agree with a friend who said only the other day that Sadequain was a one-man school of art, which admitted of no masters and which left no pupils.
The Faiz birthday I celebrated in right royal fashion. I must thank a friend in Islamabad who sent me a photograph, which shows me with the poet in one of his most affectionate moods. The photograph was taken on Faiz's 71st birthday in the capital in 1982. It has already become my most valued possession. Of the public functions held to mark the occasion you will read in plenty elsewhere in this paper and others. So let me talk of other things. On January 14, Qaiser Zai di, a young professional colleague in Peshawar , sent me a copy of the 50th anniversary issue of Life magazine . It is a marvellous gift, spanning as it does the pictorial history of the world (mostly Western ) from1937 to 1986.
It asks you to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud, to see strange things, machines, and shadows in the jungle and on the moon.
It invites you to watch man's work. His paintings, towers and discoveries, to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to. It gives you glimpses of the women that men love, and many children to see, and take pleasure in seeing. To see, and be amazed, to see and be instructed.
And, above all, it chronicles 50 years of big events, winners, things, new famous couples, heroes, styles, and recalls bad news.
Let me give you a selection Life pictorial chronology:
1937: Shirely Temple becomes box office champion. She was a very small girl.
1938: Animation goes full-length, with Walt Disney's Snow White .
1939: World War II-all begins as Hitler invades Poland .
1940: Franklin D. Roosevelt elected U.S. President for a record third term and Churchill makes his blood, toil, tears, and sweet speech.
1941: U.S. enters the World War as Japan Bombs Pearl Harbour .
1942: American troops land in North Africa .
1943: Stalin , Churchill, Roosevelt meet in Tehran .
1944: D-Day, June 6-the allies invade Normandy .
1945: U.S . atom bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
1946: Nazi leaders are convicted for war crimes after Nuremberg trials.
1947: The British Raj ends in Partition India .
1948: Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated. Zionist entity Israel is born.
1949: The People's Republic of China is proclaimed.
1950: The Korean War begins.
1951: Transcontinental television begins.
1952: First Hydrogen bomb obliterates a Pacific Island .
1953: Edmund Hillary, Sherpa Tenzing first to conquer the Everest.
1954: Britain 's Roger Bannister becomes the first man to break the four-minute barrier in running the mile.
1955: Bulganin , Eisenhower , Faure , and Eden meet at first Geneva Summit .
1956: Elvis Presley springs to fame.
1957: USSR launches first earth satellite, Sputnik-1.
1958: Pope Pius XI dies.
1959: Castro 's struggle triumphs in Cuba as Batista is toppled.
1960: Kennedy beats Nixon to the White House .
1961: East Germany builds the Berlin Wall .
Alan Shepard becomes the first American to go into space.
1962: The Cuban missile crisis.
1963: Kennedy is assassinated.
Martin Luther King Jr. makes his famous "I have a dream" speech.
1964: Bob Dylan ushers in a new generation of folk music.
The Beatles conquer America .
1965: Ed White walks in space.
1966: Art goes psychedelic.
1967: The six-day war in the Middle East .
1968: Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. are assassinated.
1969: U.S. massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai .
1970: Love Story is filmed.
1971: Daniel Ellsberg leaks Pentagon papers to press.
1972: Nixon 's China visit opens the way to Sino-U.S. détente.
1973: Watergate hearings begin.
1974: Nixon resigns as U.S. President .
1975: U.S. pulls out of Vietnam and the country is reunified.
1976: U.S. celebrates bicentennial.
1977: Sadat meets Begin.
1978: First test tube baby is born.
1979: Voyager-I discovers volcanoes and cracks in Jupiter's moons.
1980: Voyager-I photographs 1,000 dazzling rings around Saturn.
1981: NASA launches Columbia , the first reusable space shuttle.
1982: Argentinean forces surrender in the Falklands war.
1983: AIDS awareness grows as death toll mounts.
1984: Over one million Ethiopians starve to death in unprecedented famine.
1985: Mr . Gorbachev takes over in the USSR .
1986: Statue of Liberty centenary.
This may or may hot be your choice of events during the last 50 years, but that's how Life looks at life. Anyhow, the magazine 's 50th anniversary issue remains as invaluable document on (selected) life this century.
