Daily Times

As a columnist, you can hang your hat wherever you want to.
There are columns that play off news, commenting on national and international politics, economics and other sundry things; those that tell small stories of everyday living that wouldn’t otherwise make it to the newspapers; the music, food and wine reviews that appeal to a specific readership; and then, the smart-ass column where the writer can just make fun of all the people he doesn’t like and be witty and insightful without doing any real work.
This last category of writing requires some amount of vanity. After all, it takes optimism to imagine that readers are interested in how you walked your dog last Sunday, forgot to take out the trash or are a great cook when you get down to it.
But then a column, by its very definition, is always self-indulgent, the most subjective of genres in newspaper writing.
Consider how Art Buchwald once decided to write a column about the absurd letters he was getting from readers. One Harvey Brodsky was in love with Gloria Segall who claimed to be Picasso’s greatest living fan. The couple visited a Picasso exhibit one day where Harvey told Gloria he could get the legend’s autograph for her. Gloria took Picasso very seriously and wasn’t amused; she refused to see Harvey ever again.
Harvey wrote Buchwald for help who reproduced the letter in his column: “I’m writing to you because I’m not giving up on Gloria. Could you get Picasso’s autograph for me? If you could, I have a feeling Gloria and I could get back together. The futures of two young people depend on it.”
Picasso came across this column and was moved enough to immediately pull out his crayons and sketch a few flowers for Gloria.
The story was picked up by newspapers around the world and they followed through on the delivery of the picture to Gloria in Philadelphia. When it arrived, she was not as moved by Harvey’s gesture as Picasso had been and accepted the gift with these words: “Harvey and I will always be good friends.”
It should be clear that Harvey and Gloria went on to marry different people.
This bit about Picasso reading Buchwald’s column and making Gloria a sketch followed by her public announcements of her feelings (or lack thereof) for Harvey was, of course, the subject of another Buchwald column.
Not too long ago, Ejaz Haider wrote a column that was almost as touching as Harvey’s letter. Now E usually has some great stories to tell. His mastery of the prose form, engagement with the everyday, an eye for the ridiculous, and, most important, a sense of humour combine to give us The Other Column every Sunday — a gentle mix of the bizarre, almost-trivial happenings and the larger problems they point to.
In this particular column, E tells us that after avoiding the likes of Shobha De for 20 years, he had made the mistake of spending Rs485 and subsequently much time on a book — Abha Dawesar’s Babyji — that redefined “for the reader the concept of willing suspension of disbelief” and was as close to a mid-life crisis as E ever would come.
The touching bit was that E had heard that Tarun Tejpal’s new novel was very good but cost Rs840, a price he was simply not willing to pay after his disastrous affair with Babyji. “He [Tejpal] may want to send me a signed copy of his work,” E thus wrote, making it clear that there was no other way he would get to read the book.
E had the same luck in this case as Harvey — or more appropriately, Gloria who drove a hard bargain and exchanged unrequited love for an original Picasso. Tejpal responded to E’s column with much charity and gifted him a signed copy of The Alchemy of Desire (which I, incidentally, had to pay Rs840 for, a bit much I’d say for something that reads like the first draft of an unfinished novel and which should perhaps have been consigned to the depths of a lake just like the second aborted one by Tejpal’s protagonist).
So that’s another happy ending to a column. In this case too, E wrote another piece telling readers that his passing wish had been granted.
Next up, as his farewell column in The Friday Times, Abid Shah appealed to the Honeys and Bunnys of the Lahori elite to be creative in their prodigality and instead of investing in a third BMW, sponsor him instead, a novelist, for US$10,000. This would not only be status-enhancing for the sponsor, it would also make other capitalist piglets view the sponsor as intelligent, a patron of the arts. In the finished product, Abid would devote a chapter to the sponsor’s big bottom and generally make fun of the fact that he/she bore his expenses for a whole year. “That will just mean that you [the sponsor] are above it all,” Abid reasoned. “Your status will be enhanced even further. You will have sacrificed your self-respect for art. There is no greater cause”.
I must ask Abid if anyone has so far agreed to give him his US$10,000; he even put a picture of himself in a forty-year-old coat and fake flowers with the column for good measure. I’m convinced someone will want to put that picture on their mantelpiece and say, when Bunny asks, “Him? Oh he’s my novelist.”
Just yesterday, in TFT, Cyril Almeida invited Tariq Amin to do with his wild mane as he pleases before Cyril’s TV show kicks off later this month. The writer averred that since he is soon-to-be-recognised, Amin must save him from looking like Ali Zafar does now, an “Oriental Hooker” in the words of Amin. Cyril has even threatened to go to Nabila’s if Amin doesn’t summon him to his salon soon.
Considering that rubbing for the genie seems to be the thing to do in a column these days, I too have a wish — and it’s not even for myself.
Friend Bilal Tanweer, currently editing the literati pages of a Sunday paper but destined for bigger things — surely, he’s going to be studying Fiction Writing at Columbia University for the next two years — has his eyes set on a catalogue of 400 paintings by Sadequain, who needs no introduction.
The collection, called “The Holy Sinner: Sadequain”, is lying at Liberty Books in Karachi; it is priced at Rs15,000. Other things being equal, let’s just say that’s how much Bilal earns in a month. Incidentally, Bilal left a decently paying job in Dubai last summer to come back home and write, not the smartest thing to do in this country, to say the least.
Like Gloria-of-Picasso-fame, Bilal too can easily boast of being Sadequain’s greatest fan alive. And while I’m no Buchwald and Sadequain is dead to this column, I hope the publishers of the catalogue or the bookstore where it is kept will read this; if they’re kind enough, Bilal will get his catalogue and I material for another column!

The writer is News Editor, The Friday Times