Tales From Yore

ajeet #34 In Pakistan the director was also a colonel, and in fact my father also ended his military career as director. When he was promoted to director, the post was at the same time upgraded to that of a brigadier. And many education corps officers said this upgrade reflected the excellent reputation my father enjoyed - not just as writer, but in the surprising variety of other assignments he undertook - and saw this as recognition of the value of the entire education corps. The post was further upgraded to major general later on in the Pakistan Army, and I guess the same is true for the Indian Army as well.

Tahmed#33

The army education corp in the Indian army was probably the smallest corp and initially was headed by a lieut col. As such it was very much like a family. As it grew so did my dads business. The last I heard it was headed by major gen. A lot of corp officers were the authors of the books published by my father.

Ajeet #32 I realized after sending the note that your dad was in fact a publisher. So they probably did not meet before partition. Although they both did have an interesting parallel in terms of providing map reading books (as author or as publisher) to their respective armies. The education corps in pakistan, incidentally, has always been a close knit corps, almost like a family. When my father died, although we buried him (per his wishes) within a few hours after he died - a large number of fellow officers made it to the funeral. Including some who were told over the phone by other officers, and who drove in from other towns in time.
I wonder if there is similar ``family feeling`` among education corps officers in the indian army.

Tahmed # 29
Did you get the impression that my dad was in the army? He did not serve in the army nor was he a hindu. He was a publisher, also he was a Sikh. I there fore doubt if he is in the picure in your album. However I am sure there were some officers of Indian Army that our business catered to, who were in the same class as your father.

Tipu # 31

Thanks again.

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ajeet #29 In fact, I think your father and mine probably did serve together. My father received his commission in 1946 in the British Indian Army Education Corps, and it appears your father was also serving at the time. I think our family album has pictures of my father in the British Indian Army uniform along with a couple of fellow officers who were hindus (I dont have the album in front of me, since my sister was entrusted with it after my father died last year, but I am pretty sure the picture is still there) so who knows - we may have a picture of your father in our family album from those times!!

Tahmed #28.

Apologies accepted.

As a matter of fact, when I was writing the story, I remembered the reference you made to your father and the fact that he was in the army education corp. I was therefore certain that you would respond in the manner you did now. Interestingly my father published quite a few books about mapreading and one version of it was in Roman hindustani.

The Indian armies education corp was one of our major customers, and if India and Pakistan had not split, it is possible your father and mine would have good friendship, as my dad had with many other corp officers.

ajeet #27 my apologies for ignoring your article and getting into a discussion on the east asia crisis (NOT india bashing I may add, although you may have led to think so when seeing my exchange with ssdhillon, where I was foolishly wasting my time trying to explain to him why I was not interested starting an india-pakistan bashing match here).
Anyway...I read your article now and it made me think the parallels between your father`s story and that of my late father (who passed away last september), who wrote books and thus had close dealings with publishers in Lahore, and whose family (like yours) also crossed the border in 1947 (from east to west panjab). Like your father, mine provided books to the army (the Pakistan Army in his case), but as a writer (his book on map reading was the main text for almost three decades on the subject at the Pakistan Military Academy).
Interesting parallels. Here is one story he often told of the partition that he often told: of a hindu professor in Lahore who told the mob that had come to attack him that they could kill him, but suggested that they should not burn the library of books he maintained since they would be useful to them. The mob, like mobs anywhere, of course took no notice of this. My father often related this story with great sadness.

PS: Sorry again for hijacking the discussion on your fine article. But hey - this post adds one more to the count, if nothing else. :-)

ManojUS, Temporal, Veeresh, Urstruly,Hisexcellency, Nazarhayatkhan, Tipu, Stuka, Sameer and any body else if I missed someone.

Thanks for words of encouragement and praise. The story was submitted a while back and I was thinking it went into the proverbial editorial dust basket. Then lo and behold I open the Chowk and it was right there.

Thanks chowk staff for publishing it.

Tipu, sorry you guessed wrong I am not Dostmiter, but still I will take this as praise, that you thought he penned the story. As far as the bad deal, my grandparents were the only one who suffered the loss of their village and way of life. The next generation was too busy to worry about the past.

Stuka, Yes we eventually did settle in Delhi in Karol Bagh on Ramjas road.

Ras, `Go forth and make money` I am sure you will agree, it is better than `Go forth and kill`.

Sameer, surprisingly the people from west Punjab who immigrated to India are not prone to lament their loss, for the most part. Only the older people who had lived most of their life there, were nostalgic, and for them, everything they left behind was better than here. My grandmother often talked about her `navari palangs`, `baags` and other stuff that she had locked in her house and left the keys with their Muslim neighbors.

Tahmed, SSdhillon, What can I say, you guys hijacked the responses to the usual Indo-pak bashing. Hey, but it is OK, you helped the response count to cross the land mark of twentyfive.

#25 by tahmed32 on March 15, 2003 1:29pm PT
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ssdhillon #24 If you wish to engage in a serious discussion of any kind, I think you need to apologize for your rude remarks towards me. Otherwise, I am happy to ignore your posts, or (if I feel like it) have a bit of fun at your expense. But I dont wish to have serious discussions with people who use their anonymity on chowk to post insults about other people`s nationalities and/or religions.
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Nice try. I do not think you could have defended your ``much wealthier`` comment anyway.

I am very sorry that I called the Al-Qaida types in Indonesia Islamist thugs.

ssdhillon #24 If you wish to engage in a serious discussion of any kind, I think you need to apologize for your rude remarks towards me. Otherwise, I am happy to ignore your posts, or (if I feel like it) have a bit of fun at your expense. But I dont wish to have serious discussions with people who use their anonymity on chowk to post insults about other people`s nationalities and/or religions.

21 by tahmed32 on March 14, 2003 10:05am PT
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ssdhillon #16 you write ``Nonsense. Indonesia has a per capita income of 570. India 450. Pakistan 440. Considering that they have 1/4 the population of India that is hardly an acheivement. ``
You either dont understand the meaning of per capita income (i.e. income per person) OR you think irrationally and think that population size has something to do with per capita income. Either way, what you write in these first three sentences is nonsense, and I am correct in saying that Indonesia is better off than either of these two countries.
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Ya you are the only person who understands per capita income. In poor third world countries where a majority of the population is engaged in agriculture population is the biggest factor.

You ofer no statistics, no argument apart from ``I am right``. Again how is Indonesia ``a much weathier`` nation than India and Pak.

ssdhillon #16 you write ``Nonsense. Indonesia has a per capita income of 570. India 450. Pakistan 440. Considering that they have 1/4 the population of India that is hardly an acheivement. ``
You either dont understand the meaning of per capita income (i.e. income per person) OR you think irrationally and think that population size has something to do with per capita income. Either way, what you write in these first three sentences is nonsense, and I am correct in saying that Indonesia is better off than either of these two countries.

The rest of your post is the usual mumbo jumbo about madrassahs and cheap insults that I have found 5 out of 6 Indians on chowk nowadays seem to practice. I wont respond to that.

faisaluno #17 Glad to see at the end that the first line (about me bad mouthing muslims) was in jest. :-)
Mahatir certainly has done a good job of making malaysia a prosperous nation. I have had a soft heart for Soros ever since I learnt that he (a Hungarian jew) contributed $60 million to the welfare of the Balkan muslims when they were being ethnically cleansed by the Serbs. So maybe I am a bit biased, but.... I do think that the East Asia miracle followed by the East Asia crisis followed by the East Asia re-birth can be attributed (both the upside and the downside) to BOTH the national leaders of these countries and of global investors like Soros. The national leaders followed some wise policies (for example, Mahatir encouraged foreign direct investment at a time when that was not fashionable in the socialist-nationalist minded third world countries; Park and his successors in Korea successfully implemented an export-led policy; Suharto encouraged foreign investments in oil) and some bad ones (cronyism in the Banking system). The global investor, guided no doubt by profit-making motives, but clearly this is a virtue and not a vice when it means transformation of societies (even the US grew to be the world economic powerhouse that it is in the late 19th century due to similar massive flows of capital from Europe), and on the downside, the global investors went overboard and did not see where their money was going. And then things were fixed - Korea has totally revamped its banking system e.g.
I dont think all this has anything to do with religion. It does have something to do with the Chinese culture, I think however. While I am not familiar with Malaysia (although I suspect it has been inspired by the Singapore`s lead in this area) , I have been to Indonesia many times and travelled around a bit there and am convinced that aside from oil their other major asset is the Indonesia Chinese - who are as hard working and enterprising a lot as you will find anywhere else. Their other major asset I think is the fact that unlike Pakistan, these areas are geopolitically in the background. Pakistan on the other hand has been a frontline state throughout the cold war, and continues to be in an area of political instability - to which our own generals have contributed no doubt, but which was always there.
Long post. Hope it makes some sense.

It is a good idea to not copy the holocaust syndrome when writing stories in the historical background of partition. That makes this story good readable without trying to win sympathy by portraying miseries of 50+ years ago due to crazy and high anxiety atmosphere.