Games we do & do not play

IT is about this time of the year that we would arrive in Karachi to spend our summer vacations. There we would meet our cousins from Multan; only no one would call them Multani just as no one greeted us as guests from Lahore. We would be lumped together to go under the generic title of people from Punjab or Punjabis.

It was not dissimilar to how some voices today categorise the current Pakistani cricket team as a bunch of players from Lahore benefiting from the benevolent dictatorship of a certain Ijaz Butt. All these players are deemed to be hailing from Lahore, while actually many of them are followers of the Lahore tradition and in many cases Lahore’s rivals.

This is a taboo subject — this competition between players from two regions. This is how it should not be. Failure to discuss will allow tensions to brew, and missed will be an opportunity to develop a tradition that can later be used for a dialogue between two distinct parts of Pakistan on issues bigger than a place or two in the national cricket team.

The absence of discussion on a sporting matter is actually reflective of a reluctance to shake off convention and talk in an idiom as interested parties in sync with the times. There is nothing parochial about a region that flaunts its talent to question the wisdom of the national chief selector or the chairman of the cricket board; the region is only doing its job.

Alternately, the danger is that if those who can speak fair and with reason are going to stay away from the debate, their places will be taken up by the emotionally charged, more prone to throwing punches than punch lines. This is what is already happening if some importance is given to what has filtered through a rather tight-lipped media.

Everyone knows that the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has been working under a formula that envisages some kind of sharing between the two old nurseries of the game, Karachi and Lahore. That is if a Lahorite is holding an important office in the PCB, balance is sought to be achieved by giving another important post on the board to someone with a Karachi domicile.

This is how it generally appears, even though there are complaints that Lahore ends up bagging more than its rightful share of the coveted positions on the board because the PCB is headquartered here.

The complaints against the Lahore-based board have been plenty, and some of the most vicious of these seek to disqualify Ijaz Butt as too old to be allowed to run the PCB. In times of extreme strife at the national level, these grievances have been aired from a forum as auspicious as the National Assembly and these have sometimes been labelled as a stand-off between two cities. Yet, a true recognition of stakeholders is shunned, and as angry whispering continues to be resorted to, new and emerging suppliers of talent remain unrecognised.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this is not a Lahore team. It no more can be because the mantle of promoting the classic and downright old has since been transferred to the smaller cities that have long lived in awe of or at variance with Lahore. Apart from cricket that has seen the coming of age of players from `smaller` towns such as Sialkot, Multan, Faisalabad and Rawalpindi, similar trends are available in all other fields be it politics, culture, etc. pharakoo

Beginning early, take contributions to a newspaper as an ideal for a (studious or plainly ‘different’) child. Pick up the children’s pages that the Urdu newspapers in Lahore take out every week. Here, youngsters from smaller towns in Punjab now hog the space that was once obsessively owned by Lahore’s children.

The papers still carry the pictures of children that are sent to them by proud parents, but the pony-tailed Kinzas and publicity-seeking Osamas smiling out at you from these pages are more likely to today belong to a smaller town. The old Punjab capital that is in search of a true city status has so much else to do than be making an effort to secure small pleasures of life such as this.

Just like that, Lahore may no more be an ‘automatic choice’ for the connoisseurs to discover the most exciting of talents, cricketers included. The exclusive zone has been broken into by all players of all definitions, cricketers included, from all over Punjab even if it has taken these `distant` areas time to win their current image and privileges.

Persisting with the popular example on the ground, Skipper Misbah ul Haq and ‘doosra’ specialist Saeed Ajmal had to wait until they were in their 30s to regularly perform at the international level. Both of them are from Faisalabad as also is 30-something all-rounder Muhammad Hafeez who may himself find it difficult to keep a track of his numerous entries and exits from the national side.

Faisalabad district has done extremely well at the national level in recent years, but its showing is still not as good as Sialkot`s. Under former Pakistan skipper Shoaib Malik, Sialkot, has proved its dominance in the T-20 version that happens to be the most popular of all formats the game is currently played under.

Malik’s squad is an alliance made up of men from towns such as Kamoke and Sheikhupura which exist outside the immediate interest of Lahore. They have in recent years given the Lahore boys a run for their money as have, on their days, the tear-away destroyers nudgers from Rawalpindi and other parts of the province.

This then is the face of Punjab not many are keen to notice. The practice of lumping together distinct parts has far exceeded the urgency of the national call. Even Lahore can be accused of being slow to recognise the potential and too caught up in its fads and its own developments as an aspiring modern metropolitan.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.