Zafar Samdani – a versatile writer
June 06 2006: ZAFAR Samdani, the Dawn columnist who died on May 04, and several of us went back a long time –– to the mid-60s and The Pakistan Times of Lahore. Samdani was a reporter on the paper’s staff, and he can best be described as the most laconic journalist around. He had a bemused, healthy skepticism of everyone and was a comfortably laid-back journalist whom you never found unduly worried about anything.
The chief reporter then was Amjad Hussain, who is one of the few survivors of the Pakistan Times old guard although now largely immobilized and unable to drive his lovingly-kept 60s Beetle. There was also Shamim Rizvi till he decided to become the paper’s circulation manager and Safiuruddin, “Nawab Sahib”, who would ring up the chief reporter when he ran out of money and tell him that he wouldn’t be coming to work that day because he was broke. Rizvi is now in Islamabad and also perhaps Safiruddin. There was the late Maqbul Sharif, known as “judge sahib” because he covered the higher courts, and Nasim, who went into public relations and died young. Khalid Hasan joined the team a little later and brought a touch of wit and humour with him.
The whole team gelled well, and despite the fact that the paper was owned by the government’s National Press Trust, there was a good deal of independent reporting. Samdani was not very tall, but he had the loose-limbed gait of a tall man. He never had any inhibitions about reporting on anything or writing about anyone. Where he picked up his penchant for economic reporting is unclear. But he was part of a catholic group of students who had studied at the Government College, Lahore, and was well-connected.
He wasn’t with The Pakistan Times for long, leaving to head the PTV news team when television began from Lahore in 1964. He held various positions with the organization, and those who worked with him remember him as always ready with appreciation where it was merited. PTV after its earlier, creative days soon slid into political infighting and Samdani perhaps fell somewhere on the wayside.
As a free-lancer, he was absolutely versatile, including an informed insight into the cinema industry, and was saved from hack writing only because of his innate good taste. Whenever someone in Dawn wanted a piece from Lahore on short notice, the call went out: Ask Zafar Samdani. Our paths didn’t cross often enough after the PT crowd dispersed, except in Lahore when he would regularly drop in at the Dawn offices for a cup of tea, a smoke and to fax or email his articles to the head office in Karachi. Samdani once came to Dubai and spent most of his time in shopping for his family, for whom he cared so much. One day he had landed up in Washington and there was a small reunion at a bay-front restaurant with Khalid Hasan and Akmal Aleemi of Imroze, the PT’s sister paper, who is now with the Voice of America.
Not many of us knew till later that Samdani was also a poet, and was part of Lahore’s literary circle and the Tea House crowd before he wandered into journalism. He was a civilised, gentlemanly journalist, but will also be remembered as the quintessential Lahori.
Source: Dawn
Date:6/6/2006
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