Book Review: Poetry and Biography

Poetry and Biography

Syed Afsar Sajid

1. ‘Kulliyat-e-Wasi Shah’
2. ‘Jo Beet Gya Hai Woh’ by Muhammad Daud Tahir

‘Kulliyat-e-Wasi Shah’

Wasi Shah is a popular Urdu poet, play-wright, and an anchor with a wide fan-following. He has recently brought out an anthology of his verse titled ‘Kulliyat-e-Wasi Shah’ comprising three of his earlier published verse collections viz. ‘AnkhaiN bheeg jati haiN’, ‘Mujhay sandal kar do’, and ‘Meray ho kay raho’.

Wasi Shah is basically a poet of romance: youthful and exuberant. His diction is simple yet immersed in a passionate rhythmic assonance. Style-wise too, Wasi Shah’s verse, whether in ghazal or nazm, has a distinctive tone and tenor. He speaks for the chastity of love —- far from the madding mundanity of the human instincts. He anticipates the empathic sentiments of his readers in his verse. Some critics are inclined to equate him, though in a lesser degree, with Ahmad Faraz and Parveen Shakir, due to his capability to express in poetry the feelings of sincerity, love, and loyalty in a modern way.

Literary luminaries like Abbas Tabish, Hassan Nisar, Iftikhar Arif, Ataul Haq Qasmi, Ahmad Aqeel Rubi, Orya Maqbool Jan, Dr. Pirzada Qasim, and Tariq Kaleem have greatly appreciated Wasi Shah for his creative virtuosity, in their respective prefaces to the  afore-said three books. Their consensual verdict on his poetry can be summed up in three quadrisyllabic words ‘life’, ‘love’, and ‘glow’ —- meaning that it is a poetry of life in its romantic splendour, that it is a poetry of love —- deep and passionate but sans sensuality, and that it is a poetry of feelings emitting a glow of sublimity.

Wasi Shah’s verse cannot be passed off as a puerile expression of a volley of youthful sentiments born of idle day-dreaming or utopia. In fact, as Pirzada Qasim would insist, Wasi Shah’s temperamental tilt toward realism lends a unique vista to his poetic outpourings, broadening their textual expanse and enriching their meaning. The evolution of Wasi Shah’s poetic thought finds its acme in his poem ‘Third World’, as Ahmad Aqeel Rubi has pointed out in his prefatory remarks on the former’s art.

This poem is reflective of the poet’s swing from a status quo-esque emotional stance to a palpable realistic scape envisioning the unsavoury existentialistic truths of life. Over the passage of time, the poet seems to have readjusted his focus on life from introversion to extroversion, as observed by Tariq Kaleem in his concise but compact overview of Wasi Shah’s third collection viz. ‘Meray ho kay raho’.

‘Jo Beet Gya Hai Woh’

Muhammma Daud Tahir is a retired (FBR) bureaucrat and a noted travelogue writer with ten prestigious publications (comprising one but nine travelogues) to his credit. The instant book is a voluminous biography stretched over some 1000 pages (condensed in 249 chapters), written in a lucid, racy but anecdotal style. It is a mix of the author’s learning as a voracious reader; his career and experience in the Central Board of Revenue (latterly re-designated as FBR) and his post-retirement contractual employment as member PPSC; his literary, cultural, and intellectual pursuits; his official and non-official travel history; his interaction with a wide circle of distinguished personages including civil and military bureaucrats, political and cultural elite, litterateurs, diplomats, clerics, journalists, anchors, film actors, sportsmen et al.

The author possesses a graphic memory. One wonders how he has managed to delineate so vividly and minutely his multifarious observations and experiences (both savoury and bitter) of a lifetime with precise but accurate recollection of places, events, and men and matters! As a narrator, he has a special knack of engaging the attention of the reader by his rhetorical skills. The book is thus a potpourri of interesting anecdotes, live character portraits, events of national magnitude, exposure of criminality, and the modernistic ‘duality’ of truth.

A list of the important personages mentioned in the book would show the bulk and volume of the author’s social, cultural, and professional connectivity. Some of them are: Rahat Kazmi (Actor), Ch. Zafarullah Khan, Sultan Rashk (Poet), Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani, I. A. Imtiazi (PAS), Gen. Ziaul Haq, Ghulam Ahmad Jhandeer (Jhandeer Library-Vehari), Ahmad Faraz, Shakir Shujaabadi (Poet), Raja Tridev Roy (Pakistani Diplomat), Allama Mazhar Saeed Kazmi, Saeed Mehdi (PAS), Lady Dr. Altaf Bashir (Faisalabad), Ataul Haq Qasmi, Bishop Dr. John Joseph (Faisalabad), Syed Zameer Jafri, Mukhtar Masood (PAS), Sharif Farooq (Journalist-Peshawar), Dr. Faqir Hussain Saga (Academic-Kathak Dancer), Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Shaukat Aziz, Seth Abid Hussain (Kasur), Parveen Shakir, Ch. Sardar Muhammad (IGP), Tariq Aziz (Bureaucrat), Makhdoom Sajjad Hussain Qureshi, Suraiya Multanikar, Rauf Klasra, Irshad Bhatti,  Asghar Saudai (Poet), Malik Meraj Khalid, Gen. ® Pervez Musharraf, Shamim Ara, Justice Ali Nawaz Chauhan, Lt.  Gen. ® Khalid Maqbool, Muhammad Ali, Zeba, Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, Kuldip Nayar (Indian Journalist-Diplomat), Tariq Sultan (PAS), Shahzad Hassan Pervez (PAS), Ahmad Rushdi, S. B. John, Mehdi Hassan, Taqueer Nasir (Actor), Ahmad Hasan Dani (Archaeologist), Javed Hassan Ali (FBR), Ch. Fazal Elahi, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Lt. Gen. ® Moeenuddin Haider, Abdul Qadir Hassan (Journalist) and others.