What I told the Girls at LCWU
11 April 2016
Moneeza Hashmi is a very dear friend who values my work. It was in her tenure as General Manager PTV Lahore Centre that we did the 19-part, 30-minutes each, travel/history series titled Nagri Nagri Ghoom Musafir. It was also under her stewardship that I made the 13-part documentary Sindhia main Sikander on Alexander’s Indian Campaigns, once again each episode of 30 minutes.
The first series was executed in 1998-99 and the second in 2001. This was more than a quarter century after the now vaguely remembered masterpiece travel show titled Selani kay Saath had enthralled PTV viewers. That was the work of the one and only, the great doyen of documentary makers in Pakistan: Obaidullah Baig. OB, as we who had the great good fortune of being his friends, called him, was the master story-teller. The raconteur par excellence who leapt straight out of the pages of some thick medieval tome of fairy tales. When he spoke, his gravelly voice and the turn of phrase held so many of us rapt for he easily matched (if not outdid) Scherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.
Read more »Labels: Documentary, Geography, Guest Speaker, LCWU, Obaidullah Baig, Pakistan, Pakistan Railways, Sindhia mein Sikander
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Documentary makers who refuse to learn
13 July 2013
When the great and peerless Obaidullah Baig (OB) passed away last year, I wrote a piece in Express Tribune. In my praise for that unmatched human, I lamented how we had not learned a thing from him. Among other things I vented my spleen on this current crop of so-called documentary makers that plague the worthless private TV channels: they are ignorant as ignorant can be and they speak an atrocious language which is neither English nor Urdu. Yet, with no knowledge of anything, they claim to be making documentaries.
Among the readers’ comments to this, one Tariq Ahsan wrote to say he was appalled at the language I had used in my criticism of TV presenters who say, ‘We have reached so and so place, let’s ask the chowkidar about its history!’ For crying out loud, the moron has not read anything himself and is relying on a semi-literate chowkidar to be familiar with history.
Read more »Labels: Documentary, History, Obaidullah Baig
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Who else wants to emulate OB
24 June 2013
There is one great role model for the kind of travels I undertake. I have known him since the late 1960s, if I am not wrong. He was the late great, unbeatable, unmatchable, inimitable Obaidullah Baig. There can never be another person like him.
I am not certain about the year he started his TV documentary series titled Sailani kay Sath, but I think it was about 1969. We had only PTV and what a high standard it maintained. And there was OB (years later, he became OB to all of us his admirers and friends), very handsome square-cut jaw, thick-rimmed glasses and grey safari suit – grey because it was, remember, black and white TV.
Read more »Labels: Obaidullah Baig, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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