Y’ know. There was a lot of bad news coming out of India last week. First, we were told that the Lahore blast, the botched attempt to do in Hafiz Saeed, was let off by India. Then there was news of the passing of Dilip Kumar, who was actually Yusuf Khan from Peshawar.
Well, Hafiz Saeed lived, and Dilip Kumar did not. Of course, Hafiz Saeed, while no spring chicken, was nowhere near the 98 attained by Dilip Kumar. Another big difference is that he got to do two of what can only be described as archetypal roles: he was Devdas in the eponymous film in 1955, and he was Shehzada Salim in Mughal-e-Azam in 1960.
Devdas was originally a Bengali novel and depicted Bengali Brahmins at the turn of the 20th century. While Devdas has been made repeatedly, no one attempted Mughal-e-Azam again. Devdas has been a vehicle for the great actor of a given generation: Kundan Lal Sehgal played Devdas before Dilip Kumar, and Shah Rukh Khan did so afterwards. Devdas was symbolic of the Indian lover, Shahzada Salim of the Mughal prince.
Dilip Kumar may have played these two defining roles within five years of each other, but he did have a long career. He did avoid playing fathers and the like, which was the usual fate of heroes grown old, which would have been a way of extending his career. His death must have saddened Imran. Dilip Kumar had been one of those who had helped raise funds for his cancer hospital. But I suppose Imran might be too concerned about the youth vote to admit he knew someone of that age. There’s a photo of Imran and Dilip Kumar, as part of a group that included Manoj Kumar and Dev Anand, and Muhammad Ali the sole representative of Lollywood. Now all but Imran have passed on.
Still, I think the vicious person sending it around on social media didn’t have to point it out. I mean, there must now be a number of pictures where Imran is the only survivor. When he raised funds for the cancer hospital, he had to hang out with a lot of people older than him. Still, he should realise that he is increasingly something of an anomaly, and a lot of the people he knew are no more. Still, he’s got about 30 years ahead of him if he lives to Dilip Kumar’s age, and you can bet that he plans on going well past 100.
And getting the youth vote all along. Even if anyone wins a World Cup again, it’s unlikely he’ll ever build a cancer hospital. And anyway, Imran has no intention of losing the approval of the selectors. Those who selected Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are not known for fickleness, so their support is his to lose. Imran thinks that Gladstone, who retired as British PM in 1894 at 85, and Churchill, who retired in 1955 at the age of80, both lacked guts, otherwise they would have carried on.
Of course, the recent assassination of the President of Haiti, Jovenel Moise, is not something that could happen here. It seems the killers just invaded the presidential palace, and offed him. The tragedy of that poor nation is that there was no move by the patriots to take over the country.
I mean, look at Myanmar. Their true patriots have shot 800 protesters dead since the coup on February 1, when the military carried out a coup after the fraudulent election in December, in which the patriotic parties did not win. The police showed some efficiency, and three of the suspects have been taken into custody or killed. Because the killers include a lot of Colombians, the cocaine cartels are suspected. As anyone in Islamabad can tell you, cocaine cartels have a lot of good people.
Of course, three suspects were killed by the police. Not during the assassination, but afterwards. Now that is something we know about. The only time one of our PMs was assassinated, Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951, the assassin, Aziz Khan, was killed on the spot. In 1962, when JFK was killed, his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot dead by Jack Ruby, who died of lung cancer in 1967, after his death sentence had just been overturned. Ruby had connections to the drug business. I don’t think Aziz Khan did, and anyway, back then I don’t think drugs were very big over here. But we should all remember that drugs are not just what you can sniff or smoke, they can be dangerous too.
