BUREAUCRATS wed twice — to a natural spouse, and also to an extracurricular distraction.
One was reminded of this intellectual infidelity when reading a volume of modern (ie, post-revolution) Persian poetry — Honeyed Poison — translated by a Pakistani diplomat, Malik M. Danish. A graduate from Lums, Punjab University and Georgetown University, Danish is the latest in a line of officials who will be remembered for their literary contributions.
One could begin with names like the Mughal emperor Akbar’s wazir Abul Fazl. He spent his spare hours chronicling his master’s court and its functions. Closer in time and to home, though, is the 19th-century engineer Kanhaiya Lal. He worked in the Public Works Department for 30 years before retiring as superintendent engineer in 1885.
His legacies to the architectural visage of Lahore have survived time — Government College, Montgomery and Lawrence Halls, the then Mayo School of Arts, to name a few. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’. (If you seek [his] monument, look around you.) Kanhaiya Lal’s equally enduring achievement is his book Tareekh-i-Lahore, first published in 1884 (a year before his retirement), and republished many times.
Not all bureaucrats can disguise ‘their expressive part’.
Since........