The year 1951, which was Saeed’s final year as a master’s student at Government College Lahore, saw the college’s distinguished former student Abdus Salam return from Cambridge. Salam went on to share the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics and became without doubt Pakistan’s most eminent (and famous) scientist. In this part of the memoirs, Saeed describes his early memories of the great man — in fact their paths were to cross several times later in their lives. As for Saeed himself, he was at a crossroads: whether to pursue his love of literature or science, or somehow both. Eventually, he applied for — and won — a scholarship to do a PhD at Cambridge, being recommended by his tutor Rafi Chaudhari to the Cambridge Nobel laureate James Chadwick as “the most brilliant student he had come across in his 25 years of teaching”. The boat for England was due to leave on 14 September 1953 — which gave Saeed just enough time to go on a trek of the Himalayas with his friends.
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All posts for the month September, 2013
Leaving Government College Lahore
Posted by matindurrani on September 27, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/27/leaving-government-college-lahore/
Live at Government College Lahore: part 3
The period Saeed spent at Government College Lahore betwen 1946 and 1953 were, he says, “some of the happiest of my life” and also “very formative”. This section of Saeed’s memoirs looks at some of the close friends he made there, including Arshad Ali Tour, Inamul Haq and Zafar Ismail, who — like Saeed — was to later study physics at Cambridge.
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Posted by matindurrani on September 27, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/27/live-at-government-college-lahore-part-3/
Memories of the Sondhi Translation Society
When Saeed entered Government College Lahore, he took over from his brother Sajjad as secretary of the Sondhi Translation Society, being particularly interested in translating Chekov’s short stories into Urdu. But the experience meant more than enjoying prose and poetry – the organizational skills Saeed picked up also helped him in his later career, for example, as a faculty member at the University of Birmingham.
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Posted by matindurrani on September 27, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/27/memories-of-the-sondhi-translation-society/
Life at Government College Lahore: part 2
Following the difficult time that accompanied the creation of Pakistan in 1947, life settled down somewhat for Saeed Durrani as he continued with his studies at Government College Lahore. This section from his memoirs recalls some of his teachers, including Khwaja Manzoor Hosain — an English teacher who was “a true scholar and a gentleman through and through: always dressed immaculately in a shirwani and tight-fitting Indian legwear” — as well as the physicist Rafi Muhammad Chaudhri. The latter was a “tea-drinking egg-head” who would walk five miles to work every day across Lawrence Gardens in Lahore and via the Mall Road, arriving at 7.30 am, an hour-and-a-half or so before everyone else.
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Posted by matindurrani on September 20, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/20/life-at-government-college-lahore-part-2/
Partition of India
The summer of 1947, shortly before India gained independence from Britain and split into two nations, was one of the worst ever periods in the country’s history, with riots, killing and burning throughout the country on a horrendous scale. In this part of Saeed’s memoirs, he describes the tensions in the city of Lahore at the time — as well as the “moment of great joy, elation and pride when, at the stroke of midnight between 13th and 14th August 1947, we heard in the stately and pure-washed language of the announcer Shakeel Ahmed: This is the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, Assalam-u Alaikum Radio Pakistan, Lahore, Shakeel Ahmed at your service. Pakistan Zindabad.”
“I can still”, writes my father, “vividly remember the thrill that went through my body on hearing that historic announcement.”
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Posted by matindurrani on September 20, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/20/partition-of-india/
Life at Government College Lahore: part 1
Saeed Durrani was educated between the ages of 15 and 22 at Government College Lahore — a premier educational institution that had been founded in 1865. He came fifth out of about 55,000 candidates in a province-wide matriculation exam to gain entry to the College in 1946 and was the top candidate from outside Lahore and the highest-placed Muslim student. This section from the memoirs includes Saeed’s early experiences at the college and his involvement in protest movements against the British for the freedom of India and the creation of a new country — Pakistan. Those protests culminated in him getting arrested and spending 12 days in prison. Rich curries provided by his Auntie Shafqat, however, led to him gaining 12kg in weight while in jail.
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Posted by matindurrani on September 20, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/20/life-at-government-college-lahore-part-1/
Early Days at Cambridge
This next selection from Saeed Durrani’s memoirs describes how he settled in at the University of Cambridge as a new PhD student in 1953. The transition from Pakistan to 1950s England was something of a culture shock, not least because it meant having to learn how to eat peas off the back of a fork, taking cold showers and getting his own clothes washed for the first time. He did manage, though, to “save a few pennies” by never giving his socks for washing…though this had some rather unfortunate (and malodorous ) consequences.
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Posted by matindurrani on September 15, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/15/early-days-in-cambridge/
Arrival in England
This part of Saeed Durrani’s memoirs describes his first experiences as a 23-year-old arriving in England from Pakistan in the autumn of 1953. He had left his homeland to begin a PhD in nuclear physics at the University of Cambridge, taking up residence at Gonville and Caius College.
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Posted by matindurrani on September 15, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/15/arrival-in-england/
Welcome to Saeed Durrani’s memoirs
Hello. My name is Matin Durrani and welcome to a new blog that contains selected parts of the memoirs of my father, Professor Saeed Durrani.
He wrote the memoirs beteween 2008 and 2009 and, after I had them typed up, proofread, and printed out, I presented them to him in December 2012 on the occasion of his 50th wedding anniversary.
The memoirs are almost 240,000 words long — over half the length of War and Peace — and over the next few months I intend to add interesting chunks of the memoirs to this blog.
I won’t include everything that’s in the memoirs, but will post selected highlights that will be of most interest to readers.
So let’s get going…
Posted by matindurrani on September 15, 2013
https://saeed-durrani-memoirs.net/2013/09/15/welcome-to-saeed-durranis-memoirs/
Saeed Durrani (1929-2018) 