Owais Mughal and Aqil Sajjad

In the age of big news and bigger opinions, a small news about the National Cricket title of Pakistan seems trivial. But following Pakistan’s domestic cricket has remained ATP’s tradition (See here, here, here and here). The 2010-11 National Cricket Champions title of Pakistan goes to Habib Bank today. History was made in this year’s finals as this was the first ever Flood-lit First Class Cricket Match played in Pakistan. It was also the first time that orange cricket balls with black seam were used in a first class match in Pakistan – See more on Orange Cricket Balls towards the end of this post.

Flood lights and Orange balls made this even so significant that ICC’s General Manager Operations, former South African Cricketer Dave Richardson along with Director General of PCB Javed Miandad, former Cricketers Hanif Muhammad, Wasim Akram, Moin Kan, Shoaib Mohammad and former PIA Managing Director Arif Ali Khan Abbasi watched some portions of this final in the National Stadium. Dave Richardson will later furnish his official report to ICC on the prospects of using orange balls in day/night test matches.

Adil Najam

I have been forwarded a link to this video over a dozen times since yesterday. Like some of those who forwarded this to me, I do not find this video funny. And I certainly do not see any journalistic value in it. In fact, I find it rather disturbing, sometimes disgusting, and entirely disgraceful. I don’t really want you to see the video, but I do want us all – and especially our electronic media managers – to think real hard about what we are doing in our totally laissez-faire (the better phrase would be ‘mader, pidder, aazad’) attitude to what goes out as information, infotainment, and entertainment these days.

Raju Jamil

PTV Karachi center was tense.

There were no value scripts that it would take stakes on. Frustration led to an urgent meeting among stake holders and Hasina Moin was asked or rather ordered to write something up as soon as possible to overcome the gloom and drought prevailing at PTV Karachi. Hasina had made it big with her eid plays and was kind of happily surprised on such immediate orders.

She took the challenge in stride and set her pen to task. Choosing the cast for the drama proved to be both easy and at some times difficult.

The easy part was the story had Shakeel as an obvious choice for the main character. The part that proved a bit difficult was to find a new girl to play the lead role of Bina – but more on that a bit later.

The name Uncle Urfi was chosen by Hasina herself. While Shakeel was chosen for the character, his looks still had something missing from the kind of character which Hasina had in mind for Uncle Urfi. Mohsin Ali – the wizard of PTV dramas then came up with the idea of Van Dyke beard a.k.a French cut and that is how Shakeel got the look he sported in Uncle Urfi.