A belated Happy Eid to everyone. Must be really belated, for even the last stragglers have come in, ready to attend office this morning, after so many days away, probably back in The Village, to which they must have disappeared on the evening of Friday before last. The government had given holidays for Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, and had said very firmly that government employees were to appear in the office on Monday, but with the heads of departments having rushed off on Friday afternoon, who was watching? It wasn’t until Wednesday that the children of those government servants started bawling because they had nothing to do in The Village, and by Thursday, the government servants realised they were right.
By Saturday, even those relatives and friends who had looked forward to the visit of the local boy who had made good in the Big, Bad City, felt he and his family had worn out their welcome, and their complaints of boredom were now sounding tedious. So on Sunday, the visitors left, having sworn they’d never go back to The Village. But there’s always a kicker. The government servant had put down the money for a goat, who would be cared for till Eidul Azha (which Mufti Fawad has already announced will be on July 15, as per his app), when the government servant will be back with his family to slaughter it.
That government servant will wait till Eidul Azha to slaughter the goat, but Fawad Chaudhry will be avoiding many who want to slaughter him because he failed, or rather his app failed, to deliver the nation one Eid. It was perhaps worse than ever, because KP had to announce a kaffara for a missed fast. Well, Saudi Arabia has done the same thing. Perhaps we should have followed the Muslims of Mali, who looked for the moon on Sunday, found it, and celebrated Eid on Monday.
The Holy Grail of one Eid for Pakistan has been something we haven’t found, and we had laid great faith in the ability of science to solve the problem. It seems that even Mufti Fawad’s app doesn’t do the needful. There is an ambitious movement for one Eid for all Muslims, but that would only be possible if we all accepted the testimony of any Muslim anywhere. But since there are separate nations, we must have our own separate Eids.
The moonsighting didn’t have anything to do with the protests in Sudan, which left 30 dead when the military fired on a crowd protesting military rule. The Ethiopian PM tried to sort out the problem, but couldn’t make any progress. Imran Khan probably holds that the Sudanese protesters have got it all wrong. Where is the corruption? Where was the sit-in? And they shouldn’t have protested against direct military rule, should they? And has the Sudanese Supreme Court been purified, like ours is going to be?
A lesson that the USA and Europe should learn from the 75th D-Day anniversary: the only heroes are military ones. The Allied commander for D-Day, US Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, was later elected President. What a wishy-washy way of doing things! Over here, there’s just a takeover, showing that our people know the importance of having the choice of timing.
Here, they don’t. Timing is not just a military virtue, but also a cricketing one. After setting up a higher run-chase than any yet achieved in a World Cup, our boys blew it, thereby proving that Sarfraz is a corrupt element, and has got the whole team in his pocket. Look at the Aussies. They beat the West Indies, to whom Sarfraz had thrown the match. It’s all in the timing.
Dr Anwar Sajjad died just after Eid, but the tradition he represented, of the doctor-dramatist, did not die with him. Of course, the greatest exponent was probably Anton Chekhov, but the UK as a very worthy representative in W. Somerset Maugham. His novels and short stories have worn better, but he was also a dab hand at plays.
I suppose the most famous literary doctor is still Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who more or less invented the modern detective story, but apart from Dr Anwar Sajjad, we have had Colonel Shafiqur Rehman (the rank was because he was in the Army Medical Corps), and nowadays we have Dr Younas Butt. It is symptomatic that Dr Anwar Sajjad wrote first and then was a TV playwright, while Dr Butt is essentially a TV dramatist.
One reason is perhaps that doctors see so much of life. In this part of the world, they’ve probably been obliged by family pressure to take up the vocation. But think about it, they get to see life in the raw, to see human beings at their most vulnerable, when they face pain, even death. They’re usually bright, and if they have a bent for storytelling, they have a lot of material. So while we mourn the passing of one great doctor-dramatist, we can be pretty sure that more will come along.
