This volume of Mr Aijazuddin's memoirs covers the story of his personal and professional life after his marriage to Shahnaz in December 1971 until his departire for the Gulf in 1979.

He narrates as an insider the nationalisation of industries, banks and insurance companies by Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's PPP government in the 1970s, the reorganisation of the public sector with the creation of holding corporations, and the role of the Board of IndustrialManagement and later the Ministry of Production.

His account recalls the abortive elections in 1977, the take-over by General Ziaul Haq,  Mr Bhutto's trial for murder and his subsequent hanging in 1979.

This volume is a sequel to the earlier volume of his memoirs - The Counterfoils of My Years, 1942-1971.

EARLY REVIEWS: 

‘In troubled times like these when Pakistan and Pakistanis are being pilloried, it comes as a relief when the most civilized Pakistani of them all, the scholar, Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, presents one with his latest book, The Fickle 70s, an autobiographical account of the Bhutto decade that saw Pakistan trying to rise Phoenix-like from the disaster of the 1971 war […] The book, witty, whimsical, penetrating in its insights, exquisitely crafted, is based on the diaries he wrote contemporaneously.’

[Mani Shankar Aiyar, Consul-General of India in Karachi (1978-82) & former Indian Union Minister (2004-9). Author of Pakistan Papers.]  

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Commenting on this book on the Z.A. Bhutto years, Khaled Ahmed (Consulting Editor, Newsweek Pakistan) writes that ‘Aijaz’s cutting wit and brazen defiance of the dull’ make his story ‘riveting.’  ‘Bhutto was dangerous, “enigmatic, charismatic, complex, paradoxical, eventually suicidal”, and carried away by the miasma of populism that could kill most economies today.’

He adds: Aijazuddin’s ‘latest book, The Fickle 70s: Memoirs 1972-79, updates me on what happened to him and Pakistan after the country’s breakup in 1971…it is a sequel to his moving account, The Counterfoils of my Years 1942-1971.’

                                                                                    [Khaled Ahmed, Indian Express.]