Adil Najam

Today marks Dr. Abdus Salam’s death anniversary. (See new biography of Dr. Salam here).

It should be a moment of deep reflection for all of us. He would have been as great a man as he was even if he did not won the Nobel Award in physics. But we would have conveniently forgotten him. That he did win the Nobel Award is a source of cosmetic and hollow pride for many Pakistanis. Cosmetic and hollow because it is also a source of visible unease. Even when we acknowledge that he was a great scientist (after all, the Nobel Committee thought so), we are uncomfortable acknowledging that he was a great man whose significance goes beyond his science.

Adil Najam

This installment of excerpts from K.K. Aziz’s The Coffee House of Lahore (read book review by Raza Rumi, here) presents a portion of his profile of Zaheer Kashmiri (photo on right).  The book is organized as a series of these portraits of what Aziz calls the ‘habitués’ of the Lahore Coffee House. Earlier in passage K.K. Aziz describes Zaheer Kashmiri as

“a flamboyant personality, consciously outrageous, bent upon having his say on the subject of his choice, and colourful in his deportment and dress. but all this served as an outer cover (perhaps a disguise) for a heart palpitating on the plight of the oppressed and a soul full of fellowship in sorrow… As an Urdu poet his reputation stands high. Unlike other ‘progressive’ and leftist poets he did not allow his political commitment to make a preacher out of him. The romantic element in his poetry shrugs off the pedantic and the didactic.

… He could be reticent when he was thinking or was uninterested in the subject under discussion. But when he was moved or wanted to make a point his passion rose like a glittering sun emerging out of a grey cloud. Then nothing could stop him. Quoting poets and philosophers he would build his case brick by brick, mortaring every joint, strengthening his argument, and not letting his critics interrupt his foaming flood of words. He spoke often in Punjabi and sometimes in Urdu, but when he wanted to overawe the company he switched to English in which he was unexpectedly fluent and accurate. For a boy who emerged from a lower-middle class background and grew in the lanes of Amritsar in vernacular company and attended a local Muslim college his command of spoken English surprised his friends. He found no difficulty in understanding and digesting obtuse and difficult texts like Hegel and Spengler. I once asked him how he had managed to tackle the Decline of the West. ‘By reading the entire text five times with concentrated attention,’ he replied.”

Adil Najam

The Pakistan womens’ cricket T20 team won the gold medal at the Guangzhou Asian Games after a flawless performance throughout the competition. Let me post some pictures from the finals that can do the talking much better than my words: