Of Fathers’ Day, Dambulla disgrace and Cape Clown!

Celebrated on Sunday, the little-known Fathers' Day occurred in the beloved homeland at a time of the year when one of the poverty-stricken fathers, regardless of whether he was from the rickshaw-driving community of Lahore, somehow realised that unable to end poverty, deprivation and perpetual humiliation, he probably had the choice and power to put an end to the bitter times (remember Iqbal's lines: "To Qadir-i-Mutlaq hai, magar teray jahan main; Hain talkh bohat banda-i-mazdoor k auqat!") by killing himself along with a couple of his children.

Most shocked at the gruesome tragedy of the suicide was the chatty Federal Minister of Information, Qamar Zaman Kaira, though many of his countrymen were not amused by the wise counsel that he offered to the desperately poor and starving parents. Wealthy minister from a land-owning family believed that instead of killing them at will, the helpless parents should hand over their emaciated children to Bait-ul-Maal, the State-run Islamic institution-cum-charity organisation, supposed to take care of the destitute and the needy.

One is not sure whether in his student days Kaira happened to read some of Saghar Siddiqi's poetry but with a flourish of his hairy arm, Neelam Ghar-famed Tariq Aziz would even today close his eyes and roar out the famously moralistic lines: "Jis daur main lut jai faqiron ki kamai; us daur ke sultan se koi bhool huwi hai!"

Apart from the Fathers' Day, the nation also celebrated the World Refugee Day under the title of "Home". According to the report of Global Overview of Trends and Development in 2009, Pakistan was the topmost country to accommodate the maximum number of Afghan refugees and, what is more, the world's sixth nation to provide asylum to its internally displaced persons (IDPs), which by the end of last year numbered 1.2 million.

The report said that about 42 million people in the world had been forced by war or local disputes to seek asylum as refugees or IDPs. Out of these 15.2 million people lived as refugees and 27.1 million as IDPs. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council, this was the largest number after 1994.

If one viewed the breakdown of this number, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) looked after about 4.7 million of refugees from Palestine while the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) took care of more than 10 million of refugees from various countries of the world. According to the report, the nine topmost countries providing asylum to refugees include Syria, Iran, Germany, Jordan, Chad, Tanzania, Kenya, China and Britain. One out of four of the existing refugees happen to be Afghan. The report puts the number of Afghan refugees at 2.8 million out of which 61 percent - on the average two out of three - are said to be living in Pakistan.

Like in other parts of the country, the sporting circles in City felt exasperated at the results that poured in from the Rangiri Stadium, Dambulla in Sri Lanka. The sportsman spirit suddenly evaporates into the air when the countrymen hear of a defeat - and that too in cricket - at the hands of India.

Sports lovers can sit through new Bollywood releases like Prakash Jha's Rajneeti and admire Katrina Kaif's performance in it but they get out of breath when Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni tries to save his side by making a partnership with Gautam Gambhir. One can imagine how the national pride is hurt when India knocks out the Pak side out of the Asia Cup but victory and defeat are parts of the game.

As far as the national pride is concerned, feelings of disappointment in the event of defeat are not restricted to Pakistan alone. When the football team from Britain, for instance, cut a sorry figure against Algeria, one newspaper in England made fun of the British players by putting in its headline the name of the South African city as 'Cape Clown'!

Similarly, after poor performance in Cape Town that ruined World Cup parties across England on Friday evening, the tabloid Sun carried on its back page a picture of the England players shuffling off the pitch and used as headline above the photograph the famous but slightly changed Winston Churchill quotation from World War Two: "Never in the field of World Cup conflict has so little been offered by so few to so many!"

As if this was not enough, another newspaper used the headline: "Roo-boo-zela blows his top" to ridicule striker Wayne Rooney's angry outburst at a pitch-side camera as he trudged off after one of his most ineffective games in an England shirt. So the question of national pride getting hurt when the world stands watching is equally important in Peshawar, Pretoria and Paddington. The exciting victory at Dambulla lifted both India and hosts Sri Lanka into June 24 final with two wins each.

Political circles in City were adequately amused at what Faisal Saleh Hayat, MNA, (PML-Q) said in the National Assembly the other day. Apart from the Rental Power Plants (RPPs), he made an attempt at political guess work and said that the Seraiki-speaking journalist Rauf Klasra could well be the ghost writer of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani's autobiographic book 'Chah-i-Yousuf se sada', which he wrote in Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail and which now had its sixth edition on bookstalls.

Readers might recall that late Altaf Gauhar's son Humayun Gauhar was widely believed to be the ghost writer of General (Retd) Musharraf's book 'In the Line of Fire'. In an explanatory note on Sunday, Klasra said that fact of the matter was that he once just suggested to the feudal lord from Shah Jewna in Jhang that since Gillani was writing his memoirs, he should also try his hand at a book. Klasra added that he and his colleague Arshad Sharif had jointly promised in 2001 to translate Gillani's book into English but somehow or the other the dream never materialised for one or the other reason.