Amazing Pakistanis excel in their respective fields

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Ustad Allah Bukhsh

Ustad Allah Bukhsh is considered as the celebrated pioneer artist of modern landscape and figurative painting.

Ustad Allah Bakhsh is one such genius who established himself as a marvellous self-taught master and a true exponent of expressing folklore and pastoral life of the fertile plains of Punjab. Nowadays he is considered as the legendary pioneer painter regarding modern landscape and figurative painting in Pakistan.

Ustad Allah Bakhsh did not attend any art institution. He learnt the basic skills of painting from Ustad Abdullah — an established name in the traditional Mughal style miniature painting at Lahore. He developed keen interest in the Western-style painting with more precise perspective and proportion; suggesting deep consideration of realism and worked in oils and on large-scale canvases, a technique that travelled to the sub-continent from Europe.

Allah Bakhsh was born in Wazirabad but he always lived in Lahore and owned this city as his original abode. His birth year is usually mentioned as 1895; however, according to a radio interview in 1964, he recalled it as 1892, when his father went to Africa. Allah Bakhsh’s father sent him to a Madressah to study Arabic and Urdu which he could never understand as his memory was designed specifically for visuals and images and not for alphabets. As early as the age of five, Allah Bakhsh started apprenticeship with Master Abdullah, who was a known artist (Naqash) in the Mughal Style miniature painting.

At his shop-cum-studio “Abdullah and Sons” at the Regal Chowk Lahore, he was assigned to practice letter ‘A’, on a wooden slate (Takhti), for almost three years before proceeding to write ‘B’ and ‘C’, making the ABC of art a tedious job for the young boy. There, he learnt to grind colours and acquired the skills of making replicas of the Mughal miniatures by tracing and copying the original image.

His father was a colour-maker (Rangsaz) at the Mughalpura Railway Workshop Lahore, and that should be the one reason that he wanted his son to be adept in this field. In 1913-14, Allah Bakhsh started working for the theatrical company of Agha Hashar Kashmiri at the Bhati Gate Lahore, and was exposed to scene-painting for the first time and practised figurative, portraiture, landscape and cityscape patterns.

Agha Hashar Kashmiri was himself deeply inspired and influenced by the Shakespearean plays and Persion theatre. Therefore, he introduced many Urdu adaptations of those plays. These circumstances inclined Allah Bakhsh towards theatrical and dramatic visuals based on imagination and memory. Other than Western plays, the famous folktales and mythical anecdotes were also among the popular melodramatic subjects for which he had to create scenes for the backdrops and publicity.
In the last years of his life, the maestro suffered from cataract in eyes and lost most of his eyesight. He wanted it to be cured so that he could see the colours and shapes around him to capture them on the canvas. This icon of Pakistani art died on October 18, 1978.


Ustad Allah Bukhsh with another legend and his friend A R Chughtai


Photo Courtesy : Arif R. Chughtai

 

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A Living Legend Haseena Moin


Haseena Moin is a Pakistani dramatist, playwright and scriptwriter. She has written several plays for stage, radio and television, some of which have even gained international repute. She is the recipient of the Pride of Performance award for her services to the performing arts in Pakistan. She wrote Pakistan's first original script 'Kiran Kahani' aired in the early-1970s. Before this PTV relied on novel-based scripts for dramas. She is considered to be the best playwright and dramatist Pakistan has ever witnessed.

A native of Kanpur, the most populous city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Haseena Moin received her early education in her ancestral region and, after the independence of Pakistan in 1947, migrated with her family to Pakistan. She lived for a number of years in Rawalpindi, then moved to Lahore and,

In 1950s, settled in Karachi, where she graduated from the Government College for Women in 1960 and earned Master of Arts in History from Karachi University in 1963. Her yearn for writing was visible right from the time she was in final years of her schooling, as from 7th standard, beside other school activities she got selected to write weekly column by the title of BHAI JAN for a local journal.

Her fame started laying its foundation when she regularly wrote some memorable plays for Radio Pakistan Karachi's all-time popular "Studio Number 9. Professionally, she took up the educational pursuits and start teaching. She rose to the level of Principal. It was in 1969 that Iftikhar Arif, Head of the Script Dept. at PTV-Karachi Centre, called Hasina and offered her to write a play for the then-forthcoming EID.

Initially Hasina was nervous, but took courage to pen down a play. The cast was also decided by her with Kunwar Aftab Ahmed as the director. Hence came Eid Ka Jorra with Neelofer Aleem and Talat Hussain in lead, supported by Khalid Nizami and Ishrat Hashmi.

 

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N. M. Rashid

ن۔م۔ راشد ن۔م۔ راشد کا اصل نام نذر محمد تھا اور وہ یکم اگست 1910ء کواکال گڑھ ضلع گوجرانوالہ میں پیدا ہوئے تھے۔ علامہ اقبال کی وفات کے بعد اردو شاعری جن شعرا کی بدولت عہد آفرین تبدیلیوں سے دوچار ہوئی ان میں ن م راشد کا نام بلاشبہ سرفہرست ہے۔ اس میں شک نہیں کہ حالی اور آزاد سے لے کر اقبال تک اور اقبال سے لے کر جوش‘ حفیظ جالندھری اور اختر شیرانی تک اردو نظم نے بڑا تیز سفر کیا لیکن یہ سفر نظم نگاری کی دیرینہ روایات کے دائرے ہی میں ہوا۔ لیکن ن م راشد اور ان کے ایک اور ممتاز ہم عصر میرا جی کے یہاں اس نظم نے ہیئت و اسلوب میں ایک ایسی تبدیلی کی بنیاد ڈالی جس نے نظم کا سانچہ ہی بدل ڈالا۔ ن۔م راشد کا پہلا مجموعہ ’’ماورا‘‘ 1941ء میں شائع ہوا تو گویا یہ ٹھہرے ہوئے تالاب میں ایک پتھر کی مثال ثابت ہوا۔ راشد نے اپنی نظموں میں نہ صرف یہ کہ نظم آزاد کا کامیاب تجربہ کیا بلکہ مغرب کے شعرا بالخصوص انگلستان اور فرانس کے جدید شعرأ سے متاثر ہو کر نظم نگاری کے فن کو نئے طریقوں سے برتنے کی کوشش کی۔ یہ نظم سادہ اور بیانیہ شاعری سے خاصی مختلف تھی اور اس نظم میں افسانوی اور ڈرامائی انداز کے جدید اسالیب بدرجۂ اتم موجود تھے۔ ابتدا میں ن۔م راشد اور میرا جی‘ دونوں ہی شدید تنقید کا نشانہ بنے لیکن انہوں نے جو بیج بویا وہ بہت جلد تناور درخت کی شکل اختیار کرگیا۔ خود راشد نے ماورا کے بعد اردو شاعری کو کئی یادگار مجموعے عطا کیے جن میں ایران میں اجنبی‘لا= انسان اور گمان کا ممکن شامل ہیں۔ ان کے علاوہ دوسرے شعرأ نے بھی غیر محسوس طریقے سے ان کا اتباع کیا اور یوں اردو شاعری کے صحن میں نئے دریچے کھلتے چلے گئے۔ ن۔م راشد نے اپنی زندگی مختلف ممالک میں بسر کی۔ زندگی کے آخری ایام میں وہ لندن میں مقیم تھے۔جہاں وہ 9 اکتوبر 1975ء کو وفات پاگئے ان کی وفات کے بعد ان کی وصیت کے مطابق ان کی لاش کو نذر آتش کردیا گیا۔وہ زندگی بھر دنیا کو چونکاتے رہے تھے اور موت کے بعدبھی اپنی یہ عادت ترک نہ کرسکے۔

تحریر و تحقیق:
عقیل عباس جعفری

 

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Munir Ahmad Khan

Munir Ahmad Khan (1926-1999) was a Pakistani physicist.

Khan was born on May 20, 1926 in Islamabad, then a part of British India. In his early years, Khan studied at Government College in Lahore.

In 1951, Khan was awarded a U.S. government Fulbright Scholarship to study electrical engineering at North Carolina State University. He pursued further studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering. During this time, Khan also trained as a reactor engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory. In 1958, Khan began a career at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria.

In 1972, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto recruited Khan to work on the Pakistani nuclear program as the head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). During the next few years, Khan led a plutonium production program and secured international support from France, Belgium, Canada, and West Germany. Although Pakistan’s nuclear program was initially under IAEA safeguards, international support for the program dried up after India’s first nuclear test in 1974.

After his return to Pakistan in 1976, physicist A. Q. Khan started a uranium enrichment program which supplanted Munir Ahmad Khan’s plutonium production as the primary path to the bomb. Khan remained in charge of PAEC until 1992, but had little control over the nuclear weapons program. During his tenure, Khan was instrumental in the creation of the National Development Complex (NDC), which developed Pakistan’s missile program.

Munir Ahmad Khan died on April 22, 1999 in Vienna.


Munir Ahmad Khan's Timeline

• 1926 May 20th Born in Islamabad.
• 1951 Went to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship.
• 1957 Earned a master's degree in nuclear engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
• 1958 Went to work for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
• 1972 to 1991 Served as head of the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC).
• 1999 Apr 22nd Died in Vienna, Austria.

From 1972 to 1991, Khan served as the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) who directed and oversaw the completion of the clandestine bomb program from its earliest efforts to develop the atomic weapons to their ultimate nuclear testings in May 1998. His early career was mostly spent in the International Atomic Energy Agency and he used his position to help establish the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy and an annual conference on physics in Pakistan.

As chair of PAEC, Khan was a proponent of the nuclear arms race with India whose efforts were directed towards concentrated production of reactor-grade to weapon-grade plutonium while remained associated with nation's key national security programs.

After retiring from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1991, Khan provided the public advocacy for nuclear power generation as a substitute for hydroelectricity consumption in Pakistan and briefly tenured as the visiting professor of physics at the Institute of Applied Sciences in Islamabad.

 

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Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi

Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi, Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, Pride of Performance, Sitara-e-Imtiaz, also often referred to as Sadequain Naqqash, was a Pakistani artist, best known for his skills as a calligrapher and a painter. He is considered as one of the finest painters and calligraphers Pakistan has ever produced. He was also a poet, writing hundreds of rubāʿiyāt in the style of Omar Khayyam and Sarmad Kashani.

Sadequain was born on June 30, 1923 in Amroha, into a family of calligraphers. In late 1940s he joined the Progressive Writers and Artists Movement. His true talent was discovered by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy who brought Sadequain into the limelight. He also spent some time in Paris augmenting his skills.

His monumental murals, in excess of thirty-five, adorn the halls of State Bank, Frere Hall Karachi; Lahore Museum; Punjab University; Mangla Dam; Aligarh Muslim University; Banaras Hindu University; Indian Institute of Geological Sciences; Islamic Institute in Delhi, and Abu Dhabi Power House, among others. His paintings and calligraphies in the building of Islamic Institute in Delhi alone cover more than seven thousand square feet. Sadequain painted his earliest murals at Jinnah Hospital and PIA headquarters in 1950s. These murals have disappeared and their fate is unknown.

In 1961 he painted the huge mural (62'X10') in the Head Office of the State Bank of Pakistan at Karachi, titled "Treasures of Time," in which he showed the intellectual advance of man from the times of Socrates to that of Iqbal and Einstein. It is a linear creation that shows a pageant of intellectuals and thinkers of the Greek era, mathematicians and chemists of the Middle East, the scholars of the European Renaissance, and the 20th-century laureates. This large mural has endured transportation from the State Bank to Mohatta Palace (for the exhibition The Holy Sinner), and back to State Bank and has deep scars to prove the ordeal.

Sadequain painted the ceiling of the Lahore museum entrance hall, depicting Evolution of Mankind, and additional nine large panels of calligraphies for the Islamic Gallery. The ceiling spans approximately 100 x 35 feet (11 m). The Panjab government has recently allocated money for the restoration of the mural.

Punjab University houses the mural "Quest of Knowledge" in its library. The mural appropriately depicts the academic theme commensurate with the institution of learning where it is housed. Young men and women are shown holding high the key to learning that unleashes riches in their lives. The mural is mounted high up against the ceiling of the main library and appears to be in good condition.

The mural in the Punjab Library (adjacent to Lahore Museum) is mounted in the library hall located on the main floor. All four sections of the mural have been disassembled and dismounted because of the damage to the building due to water seepage.

The ceiling of the Frere Hall, Karachi displays in bold, the words, Arz-o-Samawat (Earth and the Heavens) bears a historical significance, since it represents the last piece of work by Sadequain. He died before he could complete it. Before he started painting the stupendous mural on the ceiling he dedicated it to the citizens of the great city of Karachi. The mural is for the citizens to cherish and it should be treated as a national treasure.

However, because of the security conditions the citizens are deprived of entry in Frere Hall and the impressive historical building along with the Mural lie in desperate need of care. The bright colours Sadequain used in the mural to depict the Earth and the Heavens are fading away because of the environmental conditions. The large mural is painted on dozens of individual panels that are put together like the pieces of a puzzle.

The mural titled "Saga of Labor" by Sadequain at Mangla Dam is a glowing tribute to the working men and women of all times and places who form the backbone of any society. The mural hangs in the powerhouse of Mangla Dam and so far endured the harsh environmental conditions of the huge enclosure that also houses gigantic electric turbines.

Sadeqain died on 10 February 1987 at Karachi at the age of 63.

 

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Abdul Qadeer Khan

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan is a famous Pakistani nuclear scientist and a metallurgical engineer. He is widely regarded as the founder of gas-centrifuge enrichment technology for Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent program. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is a source of extreme national pride.


Early life and Career:

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in 1936 in Bhopal, India. He immigrated with his family to Pakistan in 1947. After studying at St. Anthony’s High School, Khan joined the D. J. Science College of Karachi, where he took physics and mathematics. His teacher at the college was famous solar physicist Dr. Bashir Syed. Khan earned a B.Sc. degree in physical metallurgy at the University of Karachi in 1960.

Khan accepted a job as an inspector of weight and measures in Karachi after graduation. He later resigned and went to work in Netherlands in the 1970’s. Khan gained fame as a talented scientist at the nuclear plant he worked in. He had special access to the most restricted areas of the URENCO facility. He could also read the secret documentation on the gas centrifuge technology.

In December, 1974, he came back to Pakistan and tried to convince the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to adopt his Uranium route rather than Plutonium route in building nuclear weapons. According to media reports, A.Q. Khan had a close and cordial relationship with President General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and the Military of Pakistan. He also maintained a close relationship with the Pakistan Air Force.

After his role in Pakistan’s nuclear program, Khan re-organized the Pakistani’s national space agency, SUPARCO. In the late of 1990s, Khan played an important role in Pakistan’s space program, particularly the Pakistan’s first Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) project and the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV). Khan’s unrestricted publicity of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities brought humiliation to the Pakistan’s government.

The United States began to think that Pakistan was giving nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, to get ballistic missile technology in exchange. Khan also came under renewed scrutiny following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. He allegedly sold nuclear technology to Iran. However, he was pardoned in 2004, but placed under house arrest.

On the 22nd of August 2006, the Pakistani government declared that Khan had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was undergoing treatment. He was released from house arrest in February 2009.

Other Contributions:

Khan was also a key figure in the establishment of several engineering universities in Pakistan. He set up a metallurgy and material science institute in Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology. The place, where Khan served as both executive member and director, has been named as Dr. A. Q. Khan Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Material Sciences. Another school, Dr. A. Q. Khan Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering at Karachi University, has also been named in his honor. Khan thus played a vital role in bringing metallurgical engineering courses to various universities of Pakistan.

 

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Hakim Muhammad Saeed

A true scholar, writer, intellectual, innovator, entrepreneur and a philanthropist, Hakeem Muhammad Saeed is alive as an amazing person of diverse abilities in memories of Pakistan even years after his tragic murder in 1998.

Hakim Saeed, as he was popularly known established Hamdard Dawakhana, from the institution his father created in India before partition. His organization which was mainly focused on traditional medicine later went on to diversify in fields of higher education, publishing and social work. Hamdard is one of the largest production facilities of traditional or herbal medicines in Pakistan. Hakim Saeed's work in reviving traditional medicine is considered to be pioneering in contemporary times because he established on modern footings and got it recognized by established bodies like World Health Organization (WHO).

Hakim Saeed was always optimistic and enthusiastic about Pakistan and what all this country has to offer. He established 'Madina-tul-Hikmat' (city of wisdom) in outskirts of Karachi which today houses different institutions of higher education including Hamdard university. Hakim Saeed was always very fond of interacting with children and was a popular figure among them through his writing from a children magazine, Naunehal. Hakim Saeed also served as Governor of Sindh.



Hakeem Muhammad Said was born in Delhi, British Indian in 1920 to an educated and religious Urdu-speaking class family. His forefathers and family had been associated with the herbal medicine business, and had established the Hamdard Waqf Laboratories in India before 1947, which today has emerged as one of the largest manufacturers of Unani medicines in the world.

Saeed attended the local school where he learned Arabic, Persian, Urdu, English and studied the Quran.[1] At age 18, Hakeem went on to attend the University of Delhi in 1938. There, Saeed obtained a B.Pharmacy degree and a Bachelor of Science degree in medicinal chemistry in 1942.

After his undergraduate education, Saeed joined Hamdard Waqf Laboratories as a junior researcher and participated in herbal quality control while formulating medicines. In 1945, Saeed attended the post-graduate course, and obtained a master's degree in pharmacy from the same institution. Before 1947, Hakeem Saeed was also involved in the Pakistan Movement activities.

After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, Saeed left his hometown with his wife and only daughter. The family settled in Karachi, Sindh Province of West Pakistan. He established Hamdard Laboratories and served as its first director until his death in 1998. In 1952, Saeed travelled to Turkey where he attended the Ankara University and was awarded a PhD degree in Pharmacy, then returned to Pakistan to devote his life to medicine research.

Having established the Hamdard Laboratories in 1948, Saeed was one of the driving forces in Pakistan for engaging in the research in medical biology and medicine. In 1953, after his doctorate degree, Saeed joined the Sindh University as the associate professor of pharmacy and taught courses in organic chemistry. In 1963,

In 1985, Hakeem Mohammed Saeed founded Hamdard University, where he served as its first Vice-Chancellor and as a professor.