THE main title is misleading: Dear Mr Jinnah. It implies a familiarity between the book’s author Salman Faruqui and the Quaid. In fact, Faruqui was only eight years old in 1947, when he and his family migrated from Patiala state to settle in Sukkur and then in Karachi. He had a forceful academic career and as a student leader in Hyderabad, he interacted with H.S. Suhrawardy and Z.A. Bhutto (then a minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet).

Faruqui sat for the CSS exam in 1961 and after an initial hiccup (he was too outspoken during his viva voce interview, preferring democracy to dictatorship), he was offered the ‘lesser’ Pakistan Customs & Excise Service. He joined it in 1964, then spent his career in sight of those in power — from Ayub Khan’s time until Asif Ali Zardari.

One is reminded of the Teflon durability of another public figure — the Russian Ana­stas Mikoyan. He remained a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, surviving at that height for 53 years (from 1923 to 1976). Mikoyan served Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. A contemporary wit suggested once that if one wanted to know who ruled in the Kremlin, look on either side of Mikoyan.

Like Mikoyan, Faruqui learned early the principle of survival: “to be politically correct and........

© Dawn