Majid Lahori: the people’s columnist - Khalid Hasan

It has been 40 years since Majid Lahori died, but neither before nor since has there been another newspaper columnist who could rival him. He was truly a people’s columnist, and what he wrote remains as delightful today as it was then. In 1971, 14 years after his death, his friend and fellow journalist, Shafi Aqeel, put together a collection of the columns he wrote for Jang . The book, published in Lahore, with a second edition in 1989, is now out of print. Today’s newspaper readers are not likely to be aware of Majid Lahori, and the fault is not theirs but that of a system which shows little interest in the past, and even less interest in those who have departed. Let me, therefore, invoke the memory of this most entertaining of Pakistan’s columnists by rendering bits of his versatile output in one short column dedicated to his memory. All translation is limited by what can be transmitted from one language another, but one hopes what follows will encourage some to seek the original.