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An icon of the left: Part – II We will remember Saeeda Gazdar as a potent voice of courage and bravery Saeeda Gazdar’s short stories are not all about politics and repression; some are full of nostalgia and recall the pre-partition days. Her story ‘Hindustani, Pakistani’ is one such story that begins in London where a Pakistani man Ahmed and an Indian woman Najma meet after a long time. They had studied together decades ago and now they recall their good old days as students in London when they were all Indians; Pakistan had just come into being. Ahmed had come from India to London but now his family had migrated to Pakistan. He had offers from Karachi University to teach but Najma wants him to go back to India with her and start a career there. They hear on the radio that the political situation in Pakistan is volatile with agitation all around. Ahmed wants Najma to move with him to Pakistan. In flashback, Ahmed recalls his landing at Karachi port. Four years ago, he had left Bombay for London as an Indian citizen and now he was approaching Karachi in the newly created Pakistan. After joining the University of Karachi, the first objection that he receives from one of his colleagues is why he says Adaab rather than Salaam. This conversation displays an early divergence of ideas in Pakistan that ultimately led to the Khuda Haafiz discussion. The university colleague insists that Adaab was used to address Hindus but now we have a Muslim-majority country of our own where we should not use Adaab as a form of greeting. Ahmed turned out to be an enlightened and progressive teacher who always cherished the company of his bright young students. He wants more books in the university library but the vice-chancellor objects to them as ‘communist propaganda’. The VC accuses him of referring to Karl Marx too often and citing examples of the French and Russian revolutions to students in classes. Ahmed feels that the university is more of a spy network than a teaching institution; the atmosphere is suffocating and there are no alternative ideas or voices he can convey to his students who are fairly fond of him. The VC is only interested in propagating Islamic and Pakistan ideologies so that a certain mindset prevails. The VC insists that the university professors will teach history only through a religious and nationalist lens. Ahmed retorts by saying that the VC will turn the university into a seminary and that will greatly harm education in the country. The VC insists that all universities must resemble mosques as religious centres of learning and teaching. In the VC’s office there is a large photo of General Ayub Khan receiving an honorary degree from the VC. Finally, Ahmed decides to leave the country and join an international organisation. Mind you, this story about the Pakistan of the 1950s shows how closely it resembles the Pakistan of today. Now we lament increasing extremism in the country and play naïve as if we did not know the root cause of this malaise. Writers such as Saeeda Gazdar were consistently highlighting the perils of extremism in the country but the powers that be did not listen to them neither are they doing so now. Another of her marvellous stories is ‘Aakhri manzil’ (Last destination) dealing with the labour force in cities that comes from villages and has no name or address. The story begins with a news item announcing that an under-construction building caved in killing five labourers. The death certificate of an 18-year-old reads as follows: “Name: unknown; Father’s name: unknown; address: unknown.” The story unfolds in flashback when a family of villagers visiting Karachi finds a small boy crying in the streets. They take the boy to their village and raise him as their own son. When the foster father dies in the village, the foster mother reveals to the boy that he is not their real son and sends him to the city to locate his real father. ‘Aag Gulistaan na bani’ is also a very good short story that takes its cue from the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh which narrates the struggle of Enkidu against the brutalities of Gilgamesh. Saeeda Gazdar unfolds the story of a female student whose class fellow yearns for democracy in his country. The girl faces investigative officers who press her to reveal the whereabouts of the boy who is at the forefront of the democratic struggle. They want to know the plans of the agitators against the dictatorship, but she refuses to reveal anything. The girl recalls how they met in the library and then nurtured a friendship that brought them closer. He influenced her to change her apolitical personality into a socially conscious person who becomes concerned about the plight of her country. There is a section in the story about an overloaded donkey cart that is hard to pull by the beast of burden. The poor animal gets a thorough flogging and blood oozes out of its skin. Saeeda uses that as a metaphor for a nation being flogged under the yoke of a dictatorship. Another story ‘Charhawey ki chadar’ (wreath of gratitude) is about a girl who is married to a much older man. When she is unable to conceive, the in-laws take her to one shrine after another and she has to bear the burden of taunts for being barren. As she constantly shuttles from one spiritual healer to another, she finally breaks down and shouts at her husband for being impotent. In a society where men are beyond reproach and women are nearly always on the receiving end of injustices, this story reflects a common problem in society. Other stories such as ‘Dhara’ (Flow), ‘Neelam’, ‘Laali’, and ‘Tamgha’ (medal) are all worth reading. ‘Aag Gulsitaan na bani’ is a collection of stories that must be included in the compulsory reading list of students but unfortunately, you will hardly find it in any school or college library in Pakistan which are replete with volumes by Naseem Hijazi, Qudratullah Shahab, Bano Qudsia, and Ashfaq Ahmed. That shows the preference of our authorities in educational matters. The more conservative and obscurantist writer you are, the more your books are likely to find a place in libraries. In 1982, Saeeda Gazdar brought out her collection of poetry ‘Tauq o daar ka mausam’ (Season of shackles and gallows). It contains politically charged poetry such as ‘Qaidi gatey hain’ (prisoners sing), ‘Tumhari salgirah par’ (On your birthday), ‘Kaisey ho’ (how are you), and ‘Faisla’ (decision). Two of her best poems that I like the most are ‘Theek do bajey (Exactly at 2) and Aik Khabar (a news item). ‘Theek do bajey’ later appeared in her second poetry collection ‘Zanjeer-e-roz o shab’ as ‘Subh honey wali thee’ (dawn was about to break). It recalls the hours that Z A Bhutto was hanged in the dead of the night. “It is nearly 2am; But the night is till dark; Extremely suffocating and traumatizing; They have come to take the prisoner to the gallows; Wake him up from deep slumber; ‘get up and take a bath’; Say whatever you want to utter; God is the witness; It is not punishment but murder.” Saeeda was equally conscious of struggling peasants and workers around the world. Her poem ‘Aik Khabar’ which appeared in her second collection as ‘Dehshat gardi’ (terrorism) talks about the struggle of peasants in El Salvador. “Millions gather; and chant in unison; we are hungry, we are naked, and have no jobs for years. Why is slavery our destiny? Generals thunder with loaded guns; ‘Move back and yield’; go back to your homes and write gentle applications; this is terrorism and violation of law” We will remember Saeeda Gazdar as a potent voice of courage and bravery. She lived a full life, but dementia marred her last decades. There are not many left like her. Concluded... The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: mnazir1964@yahoo.co.ukNonepanalo999 。

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The much-hyped Mike Tyson fight against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul showed the potential power of Netflix to create live, global sports events on streaming video. For many people though, it also demonstrated the limitations of the technology. Thousands of Netflix users reported technical difficulties while trying to watch the fight. Frustrated viewers contended with buffering and blurry video, a result of tens of millions of households trying to watch the bout at once. It’s the kind of thing that, if the event were aired on a traditional network, would have provoked angry calls to cable companies. Live sports is considered one of the great opportunities for streamers, including Netflix, which need mass audiences tuning in to please advertisers. Companies including Amazon and Apple are spending big, driving up the price of live sports rights and encroaching further on the turf of legacy network rivals. But sports are also a challenge for tech firms. Even without buffering or grainy feeds, live streams are typically delayed compared with cable and satellite broadcasts, which means streaming audiences risk seeing spoilers on social media if the events are simulcast. For Netflix, the stakes are high. The company will host its first live NFL games on Christmas, including one featuring a halftime show from Beyoncé. Netflix is also preparing to air WWE’s “Raw” pro-wrestling franchise starting next year. Brandon Riegg, Netflix’s vice president of nonfiction series and sports, said he has “full faith” in the company’s engineering team, which learned much from the Paul vs. Tyson live match and will adjust before the NFL games. Netflix said it worked quickly to stabilize the viewing for a majority of its subscribers during the boxing event, in which the 27-year-old Paul defeated the 58-year-old Tyson. “We were overwhelmed in the sense of the expectation — it far exceeded our expectations in terms of how many people came to the fight,” Riegg told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s as simple as that. As much as we forecast how many people would come, many, many more people came. It’s impossible for our engineering team to test that magnitude of traffic and viewership unless they have a real, live thing, which is what happened.” On the bright side, Netflix showed that it can be a big draw for sports fans, with an average audience of 108 million live viewers globally tuning in for the fight. Netflix said there were 65 million live concurrent streams, calling it the “most-streamed global sporting event ever.” Industry observers say the day is coming when streamers could place their own bid to host the Super Bowl on their platforms, as long as they can handle the traffic. “Once they prove that they’re capable of delivering a consistent, robust, top-of-the-line, premium experience for these events that consumers have grown to expect, then I have no doubt that we’re going to get there,” said Rob Rosenberg, a former Showtime Networks executive and founder of New York-based Telluride Legal Strategies. The technological challenges aren’t unique to Netflix. Glitches have arisen during other live events streamed on competitors’ platforms, including on YouTube during an NFL game last year and on Amazon’s Prime Video during a Thursday Night Football game in 2022. There are various reasons why buffering occurs, particularly with a highly-anticipated program. When a sporting event is being live streamed, the captured video is released in smaller segments of a few seconds in length that are then transmitted to streaming subscribers and decoded by the users’ devices. If too many devices are seeking those video segments at the same time, it can cause a backlog. Streamers can try to solve the problem by rerouting traffic, but even that sometimes isn’t enough. Streaming services can try to prepare ahead of time by buying more bandwidth capacity from the internet service providers, but it can be difficult to guess how many people will watch, especially if the streamer is new to a particular type of content. There may be limits on how much bandwidth companies can buy. For example, Australia has much less available bandwidth compared with the United States, said Simon Wistow, a co-founder and vice president of strategic initiatives at cloud computing company Fastly. Wistow added that if streamers buy too much capacity and it isn’t used, that’s wasted money. “There’s a lot of complexities, a lot of things go on,” Wistow said. “The scale of internet traffic just gets bigger and bigger every year.” Netflix said it will improve its systems to better handle live events at unprecedented scale and work with ISPS to continue increasing its capacity. The company has been steadily putting on more live events, such as a hot dog eating competition, Screen Actors Guild Awards and a tennis exhibition match. The company’s first live event was a Chris Rock comedy special last year, which has drawn 23.5 million views. An early effort at live streaming, a “Love Is Blind” reunion special, encountered technical trouble due to a bug that went unnoticed until people tried to watch the program. The Paul vs. Tyson event was a new milestone for Netflix’s live streaming efforts. For some viewers, like Florida resident Malcolm Scott, the streamer’s issues were unacceptable. Scott even sued Netflix for breach of contract last week, alleging that Netflix viewers missed large portions of the fight. Netflix declined to comment on the lawsuit. Brian Comiskey, a futurist at the trade group Consumer Technology Assn., chalked Netflix’s problems up to technological growing pains. “At the end of the day this is content being delivered from thousands of miles away via files,” said Comiskey, calling himself a millennial who remembers what it was like pre-smartphone. “This is a tremendous step in technology, but it only gets better from there.” Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s chief media and business officer said he believes Netflix will be ready to stream its games. “I think it shows the power of their global platform, their international reach, which is one reason why we did this deal,” Rolapp said during the Sports Business Journal Media Innovators Conference. “So, I think what they did was pretty extraordinary.” Get local news delivered to your inbox!JOSH BERMAN JOINS ASSEMBLY AS EVP, ASSEMBLY LEAD IN NORTH AMERICA

NORWALK, Conn., Dec. 20, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MSquash Academy , led by U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee Squash Coach of the Year, has announced the launch of the Sono Sharks , one of four inaugural teams in the first-ever Women’s Professional Squash League. This groundbreaking initiative represents a bold new chapter for women’s squash, offering a fresh and dynamic approach to the sport while cementing MSquash’s position as a leader in the squash community. The SONO Sharks will join the Connecticut Sun of the WNBA as one of only two full-time professional women’s sports teams in Connecticut. “This is an extraordinary moment for the sport of squash,” said Katline Cauwels, whose innovative coaching methods and leadership have earned her recognition as one of the top squash coaches in the U.S. “The Sono Sharks will embody the spirit of resilience, determination, and intelligence that we instill in our players every day. Our goal is to inspire the next generation, especially the young women in our academy, to dream big and achieve greatness.” The Sono Sharks will debut in the spring of 2025, with a roster featuring some of the sport’s top women players, set to be drafted in March 2025. Based at the MSquash SONO facility in Norwalk, the team will bring elite-level squash to the local community, creating a one-of-a-kind experience for fans and players alike. Key Highlights: Since its founding, MSquash has been at the forefront of innovation in squash, utilizing cutting-edge training techniques like interactive courts and video analysis. The academy has become a hub for developing top-ranked players while fostering a supportive, inclusive community for all athletes. More than a dozen MSquash student-athletes have earned squash scholarships to prestigious universities, including seven recipients this year. “Women’s squash has a bright future, and we are thrilled to play a part in shaping it,” Cauwels added. “The Sono Sharks will not only elevate the profile of squash but also provide an aspirational pathway for all players at MSquash. This is just the beginning.” Stay tuned for the release of the Sono Sharks match schedule and additional updates as we approach this exciting new era for squash. For more information about MSquash and the Sono Sharks , visit MSquash.com or NSL . About MSquash Located in Norwalk, CT, MSquash Academy is a premier squash training facility led by Katline Cauwels, the 2024 U.S.O.P.C. Coach of the Year. The academy is renowned for its innovative coaching methods, focus on player development, and commitment to fostering a love for squash in athletes of all levels. Media Contact Tim Gray Strategic Communications tim.g@intelligentrelations.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/fe71ad76-1668-4861-bf23-b02b3f0368af

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