| ‘To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune, Lady Bracknell chided a young orphaned suitor in that memorable line from Oscar Wilde’s comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘to lose both looks like carelessness.’ |
| Pakistan’s misfortune in losing both its pre-eminent artists - Abdul Rehman Chughtai and Shakir Ali - with ten days of each other in the same year, 1975, was carelessness verging, according to some contemporaries, on neglect. |
Published in THE NATION 28 Jan. 1993, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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