The Director-General of Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) Naeem Tahir says that most of his time spent reading goes to the plays and manuscripts that are submitted to the PNCA. He loves reading plays and says that he must have read thousands of plays. One of his favourites, apart from Shakespeare, is Eugene O’Neill, an American Nobel-prize winning playwright. He also really enjoys the comedies written by West End playwrights and says, “They may not be great names but they’re great scripts and are brilliant theatrically.” Naeem has also directed and acted in many stage plays during his extensive career in the performing arts and has a long list of entrepreneurial accomplishments to his credit as well.
When it comes to books, history is what he is really interested in. One of his favourite books is The White Sahibs in India by British writer Reginald Reynolds, who was a critic of British Imperialism in South Asia. Naeem says, “You find out about some very interesting things as you go deeper into history.” The White Sahibs in India was first published in 1937 and is a political classic as it documents details of the era of the British Raj in India.
 These days he is reading Ghalib: The Man, the Times by contemporary Indian writer Pavan K. Varma. It is a biography of one of the foremost Indian poets of the nineteenth century. Naeem says, “What makes this book interesting is how it gives a very different perspective of Ghalib to the reader. The writer has tried to look at the times Ghalib lived in and his interaction with all of that which was happening around him. Those were very difficult times as the subcontinent was undergoing a transition with the Mughal era ending and the Imperialist era starting. Masters, loyalties and statuses were changing. It also includes some English poetry by Ghalib which comes as a surprise.” –Mariam Shah |
