Kaleemi: a multifaceted personality

Veteran journalist Hassan Kaleemi passed away on Saturday after protected illness.

ISLAMABAD: Veteran journalist Hassan Kaleemi, who passed away on Saturday after protected illness, was a multifaceted personality. He remained in an Islamabad hospital fighting renal failure for nine months and laid to rest in the New Katarian Graveyard. A large number of people from all walks of life, including journalists, politicians and friends attended the funeral.

Mr Kaleemi had a deep knowledge of Islamic theology, history classical Urdu and Persian poetry that won him a big circle of friends and admirers.

After graduating from the Allahabad University, he migrated to Pakistan in the mid-50s. Initially he wrote poetry but in the early 1960s he introduced a weekly religious column in the daily Dawn and later started his own magazine ‘Muslim News’ but had to stop its publication due to financial problems and settled for a regular job in Rawalpindi. In the early 1970s, however, he returned to journalism and became Saudi Press Agency’s correspondent in Pakistan and retired after serving the agency for almost three decades.

But the injustices and political repression that he witnessed and reported in all these years soured all his dreams and he died a disappointed, spiritually broken man. Even his good humour could not help him survive his broken dreams. Before his failing kidneys bound him to bed, Kaleemi used to visit his friends, carrying ‘divans’ (poetry collections) of great Persian and Urdu poets Rumi, Hafiz, Saadi, Ghalib and Mir. That was to lessen the pain inside him. He felt exhilarated reciting classic poetry.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2011