Ardeshir Cowasjee: Khalid Hasan --A good man, he enjoyed his life, making the most of it — one less friend to laugh with.

“NO one should take journalists too seriously, especially journalists themselves because what they write in the morning is used to wrap fish in the same evening. Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat (who forgot more about journalism than most of us will ever learn about it).”

This is what is inscribed at the head of Khalid Hasan’s website, ‘Khalid Hasan Online’ (khalidhasan.net). And this is typical of the man that was.

Khalid and I were good friends. He was a gifted man with a finely tuned sense of humour, a rare commodity in this land of the pure where laughter is generally regarded as a mortal sin. We had many a laugh, both at ourselves, and at the various members of the ruling cliques that have come and gone, some of them only to disastrously come again. We were firmly convinced that had the majority of those high flying mis-rulers possessed even an iota of a sense of humour, life in this dour country would have been far easier to bear and would have eased our clowning around.

He died of prostate cancer, discovered far too late (most of our writers are terrified of mentioning the word ‘died’ and prefer to coyly have it that so and so ‘passed away’ or ‘breathed his last’) having lived four years beyond the allotted biblical span of three-score years and ten. Now, this is a warning to those men over 40. Had Khalid been in the care of that fine institution we have here in Karachi, SIUT (surgeons Adeeb Rizvi, Anwer Naqvi, Zafar Husain, Altaf Hashmi, Manzur Husain, pathologist Mirza Naqi Zafar) he would have been subjected to a regular PSA test and perhaps would have still been with us, laughing at the world or bringing back to us memories of the old days long gone when life and those living were far more gentle.