Mehboob Qadir

We resumed our trek again with me ushered in the lead by the guide. In a short while, maybe half an hour, we hit the crest and stopped a few yards below the crest for a final briefing by the guide who was now whispering in every ear individually. As we were running a quiet […]

It was a cold winter night in 1984 at Tilla Artillery Firing Ranges, which lies in the Salt Range foothills near Jhelum, in upper Central Punjab. We had just roughed out our rigorous annual practice firing without a major mishap and were celebrating the occasion in our unit field Mess, ploughing through ample supplies of […]

A family of wild boar broke cover startled by the noise and began to run towards the opening where our lookout was. The horsemen intercepted them almost midway cleanly sticking a few from the flanks. I saw a horse stumble and the rider take a mighty fall. Just as a huge black boar turned around […]

To keep a strict watch up and down the whole Sub-Division of the Canal on one’s charge in Punjab was not altogether a bed of roses in the bygone days as it might appear. There were hazards involved, that too fairly dangerous ones. During lean periods, irrigation water used to be a sought after commodity. […]

Our Eid was preceded by Hindu Diwali and Christian All Souls’ Day. It was a very pleasant thing indeed to see our Hindu fellow citizens celebrating their Diwali in all its colours, happiness and abandon at the 600-year-old Gorakhnath Temple in Peshawar. Imagine a thing like that in the capital city of the Pakistani Taliban […]

Fishing and cattle bathing in the canal were strictly prohibited. Fishing rights would be officially auctioned off and cattle were considered a serious hazard to the banks. The other very tiny but lethal hazard in those days used to be the field rats. These hefty rodents were fond of drilling their breeding burrows into the […]

It was evening time on the day before Eid (1992) when the phone rang. On the other end was our intelligence officer breaking bad news as usual. According to him, a group of 50-60 young officers armed with hockey sticks, tent poles and possibly one or two handguns had “just left a Cavalry Ground Officers […]

I was to come back to serve in Lahore twice again: once as a Major in 1982 to 1984 and the next time as a Colonel in the fabled Corps Headquarters in 1991 to 1993. Both were vastly different and quite challenging tenures. It was 1982 and Major-General ‘George’ Rabbani, a divisional commander in Lahore, […]

High priests of religious dogma and pleaders of sensible humanitarianism have always differed on how to deal with dissent and default in society. This has been an eternal and ongoing tussle between the two. Dogma and its hard crusted practitioners have invariably shown a tendency to apply their largely punitive strictures with a singular lack […]

The needless destruction of Babri Mosque is considered a dark chapter in modern India’s history, lowering its standing amongst civilised countries by quite a few notches. It also naturally inflamed public emotions in Pakistan. Into this fire was poured oil most undesirably by our abysmally shallow political leadership of the time. We rose only to […]