London to Lahore: Farrah and Abid

Saying Hello! to Pakistan

The good news from Pakistan is that the country is going to have its own edition of Hello! The magazine’s publisher, Zahraa Saifullah, is promising readers lashings of “celebrity” news: “Our expat community is out there doing exciting things, most of which go undocumented.”

Something that would be perfect for her new Hello! is the elegant wedding reception in London last week of Sir Anwar Pervez’s daughter, Farrah.

Sir Anwar is the richest Pakistani in the UK as founder and chairman of the Bestway group that includes Bestway Cash & Carry in the UK, plus its interests in Pakistan — cement and the United Bank of Pakistan.

The Yale-educated bridegroom, Syed Abid Hussain Iman, who is blessed with a self-deprecating sense of humour, is the son of the patrician Abida Hussain, a politician and a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington.

In London, after a registry office wedding, there was a banquet for 450 in the huge flower-decked “dinosaur” room of the Natural History Museum.

A welcome speech by Sir Anwar’s Eton-educated son, Dawood, was followed by dinner organised by exclusive party and event planners, the Admirable Chrichton.

Hello!’s minimum 20-page spread would probably include photographs of the elegant table settings as well as the stylish menu.

For hors d’oeuvre, there was pan-fried fillet of sea bass with lemon grass; for entrée — braised beef with heirloom tomato confit and girolles.

The dessert, which was so good that one was tempted to pinch the portions of other guests, was chocolate four seasons: salted chocolate caramel square, dark chocolate parfait with caramelised pistachio, white chocolate ice cream and marbled chocolate carpaccio — this should be introduced at Flurys on Park Street.

The menu bore Sir Anwar’s coat of arms as a knight of the realm. My table had Lord and Lady Noon as well as the former Bishop of Rochester, Michael James Nazir-Ali who left his native Pakistan to come to Britain and recalled his student days playing cricket at Cambridge (“Majid Khan was there at the same time”).

Among those who “graced the occasion” was Pakistan’s high commissioner in London, Wajid Shamsul Hasan; its former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz; and the late Benazir Bhutto’s younger sister, Sanam.

Farrah is moving from London to live with her husband in Lahore.

 

People’s mag

Almost the first person I bumped into at the Farrah-Abid wedding reception was the author Moni Mohsin who writes “The Diary of a Social Butterfly” from London for the Friday Times newspaper in Karachi owned by her brother-in-law, Najam Sethi.

She had recently attended a literary festival in Calcutta, been featured in The Telegraph and had returned with happy memories.

“My favourite city,” she enthused and appeared to mean it.

When Moni and I last spoke at length she made an important point about the one million-strong Pakistani population in the UK. Though the majority is descended from Mirpuris — who arrived in the 1950s and are now settled in Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, Luton and Blackburn — there is a significant minority of professional Pakistanis whose voices are almost never heard.

“There are doctors, lawyers, quite a few of them now are also in the arts,” Moni pointed out. “I have friends who are artists, interior designers, journalists, urban middle-class professionals.”

“Pakistani art in particular has been very successful recently in auction houses and art galleries, (though) commanding not as high prices as Indians,” she said, mentioning such artists as Rashid Rana, Hamra Abbas, Imran Qureshi and Nusra Latif Qureshi who had “reinvented the miniature form”.

In addition, “a lot of writers have come to the fore”.

All are potential candidates for coverage in Hello! However, not everyone is pleased there will be a Pakistani Hello!

One professor Khursheed Ahmed, said to be “a senior figure in the hardline Jamaat-e-Islami party”, has warned: “I’m a religious man and this does not sound like my cup of tea. If it violates the norms of our society then it could well attract anger.”

In common parlance, the good professor should just “chill”.

 

Home at last: Isa Guha (centre) with her parents, Roma and Barun

Cricket queen

Isa Guha’s parents, Barun and Roma Guha, were kind enough to take me out to dinner last week — my life is generally not such a social whirl — so I could chat to their daughter about her decision to step down as a member of the England women’s cricket team.

Roma reminded me that 10 full years had passed since I had visited their home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, when the Indian women’s cricket team touring England had come to lunch.

Like Sachin, Isa came into the Test side at the age of 16-17. And her retirement coincided with Rahul Dravid’s in India.

It was impossible to do a formal interview with Isa in a noisy restaurant. But she revealed she had spent the winter playing with men in Calcutta and practising in Pune, but felt the time was now right to move on. She will be returning to India next month to work as a presenter on IPL V — “They asked me last year when Mandira Bedi was pregnant.”

At least, we will be spared Mandira’s “Sourav has had a bad day at the office” or “Sourav didn’t come to the party”.

Isa should also avoid Australianese — “How high was that?” (for a six).

 

Jocund company: A host of golden daffodils

English spring

Just thought I would mention this for no other reason than to mention it. Spring is here and tiny green shoots (of economic recovery?) are just visible on trees. The magnolia is in full blossom and everywhere you go you see Wordsworth’s daffodils.

England is challenging Kerala to be “God’s own country”.

Even at my local railway station there are daffodils in flower pots in which no one has dropped cigarette butts.

 

 

 

Fun time: Jaimini Bhagwati

Boris beckons

One of the first tasks facing the new Indian high commissioner, Jaimini Bhagwati, is a fun encounter with Boris Johnson.

Boris, a Tory, is standing to be returned as mayor. His challenger and Labour Party candidate Ken Livingstone has been mayor twice before — and like Vladimir Putin — wishes to stage a comeback.

Some say his compelling manifesto is: “I want to make London more like Calcutta.”

The Bhagwati-Boris meeting will discuss how London can be made even more of a magnet for bright Indians.

All the high commissioner needs to know is that Boris, like our own Mamata, is very charismatic. Unlike Mamata, however, he is very up and down, speaks without thinking and no one knows what he is going to do next. Boris gives his own Prime Minister a hard time. Long suffering David Cameron does not know quite what to do with the mercurial Boris.

All these are excellent qualities which will probably propel Boris back to power in the mayoral elections on May 3.

 

Tittle tattle

Bangladesh broke a million Indian hearts in Britain. Every Indian I know had a BlackBerry out for the last over against Pakistan in the ODI final. There was a collective sense of history being denied when Pakistan, very creditably, held on.

The cricket season will soon start in England with the Indian women due here this summer. They cannot possibly do as badly as the Adams.