Anjum Niaz - Sajad Haider’s Flight of the Falcon

Sajad Haider misses the firing squad narrowly. He had faced it before when his own chief framed him, threw him in solitary confinement, in a conspiracy to overthrow ZAB. “I was charged with treason and inciting mutiny,” says the exonerated war hero who lives and love dangerously. Imagine having someone called Mercedes Miranda as his fiancé! He discovers the conduit for kick-backs from Japan paid to the family of holier than thou dictator Zia. At a meeting our decorated hero stands up and castigates Zia for his brutality against the press and PPP. “I tell the dictator on his face that I don’t feel pride in my uniform anymore after being in PAF for 28 years.” Zia has him sacked!

Air Commodore (R) Sajad Haider, 76, has now come out with a book spilling the names of ‘heroes & villains’ of Pakistan. Flight of the Falcon is a racy narrative dripping with events and names we all recognise. “The sequence of events unfolded as I researched deeper into soiled pages of history, darkened by untruth, superimposed by those who wielded power during their epoch.” Refusing to shrink away from the hardest truth, the book paints broad strokes of negativity against Ayub Khan, ZAB, Aziz Ahmad, Gohar Ayub and their collaborators .“Mine is an incisive and no holds barred analysis of the strategic and tactical blunders of 1965 and 1971 military operations. I’ve sifted myths from truth. I have dismantled ‘spectacular successes and acts of valour’ claimed by those who are liars. Because there is no book informing the young generation who the real heroes and the villains are, I have candidly and without fear of contradiction or retribution chronicled the history as I witnessed it unfold.”