Owais Mughal

aa gayee! chaa gayee ! (came, saw and conquered). I recently came across poet Khalid Irfan‘s latest book titled ‘No Problem’ and thought of Julius Ceaser’s veni, vidi, vici phrase. There are very few books that I have finished in one sitting and No Problem comes very close to it. I read it 75% in first sitting and then I had to go somewhere, otherwise it was too captivating to put down. Khalid Irfan is a Pakistani Origin poet living in New York. Many people say that he is considered as the successor of Dilawar Figar when it comes to humorous Urdu poetry. While that may be true, I think he has carried on his own individual style too.

Deeda-e-Beena

The menace is growing to awesome proportions while efforts for finding solutions are miniscule. How could we ever win this fight? The Nation is at war and needs to act at war footing as a whole. Post-factum izhar-e-muzzamat is all one hears from those who are responsible to deal with it! You and I can do it too!

The Government, the Media and the People themselves – its singular victims, are woefully remiss on what each of them can and should be doing to subvert this mayhem. There is no evidence even of any serious and systematic thinking by all the pundits, the political leadership, the so called thinkers, columnists and even the self-proclaimed “Think Tanks”. All of them are defaulting.

(A) The Government is firstly responsible for the safety of all its citizens and has miserably failed. Granted, terrorists and suicide bombers act in secrecy. Also granted, that it is extremely difficult to prevent a determined terrorist. But, by now there must have been enough knowledge and experience available about their profiles, backgrounds, origins, modus-operandi, gadgetry, materials and equipment used, to greatly minimise their activities. In reality, both the geographical spread and intensity of their attacks has increased.

Owais Mughal

I never met Gul Hameed Bhatti. But when the news of his sad demise came on February 4, 2010 it made me sad. He was 63 years old.

While I never met him, I knew him from my childhood and always regarded him as the one who was a walking encyclopaedia on Pakistani Cricket. He was a statistician par excellence and wrote for ‘The Cricketer’ magazine whose editor-in-chief was Hanif Mohammad and which was run by Riaz Mansuri.

The mid-1980s was my own ‘alam-e-junooN’. I had got myself into this hobby of collecting scorecards of all the One Day Internationals played by Pakistan. It meant collecting scorecards of matches since February 11, 1973 (when Pakistan played its first ODI) to date. I bought myself a thick register (large size notebook) and from cricket magazines I used to hand copy the scorecards. Most of these score cards and their related statisitics used to come from Gul Hameed Bhatti. Therefore I regarded him as my ‘maseeha’ and was very impressed by his work.