A nation’s power and might is not in its Tanks and missiles but in its intellectual capability, knowledge, innovation, creativity and through its respect of human rights and freedom of expression.

The talk of doom and gloom in Pakistan, after a flurry of bad news on economic front and the terrorist attacks, has created doubts in the minds of even the hardest of incorrigible optimists and patriots about the future of Pakistani governance and state.

The Question is, can the Pakistanis abroad show a new way to a nation bitterly divided on Religious, Ethnic and Tribal lines?

The List, I Tried compiling from the Wikipedia, demonstrates “Unity in Diversity”. Pakistani state remains a multi cultural, multiethnic and multi-religious bouquet, despite the efforts of Taliban and the religious extremists. If we do not celebrate this diversity, we will lose it. The list is merely a start of  the Discussion and by no means exhaustive and conclusive.

I have previously talked about Ifti Nasim The Pakistani American Poet and Tariq Mehmood the Pakistani British Novelist on the pak spectator. Contributors will add to this list from time to time.

Shazia Mirza(Comedian)

British-Pakistani comedian from Birmingham, England.

About a year into her stand-up comedy career, she gained UK-wide publicity in the months when the world was coming to terms with the September 11, 2001 attacks. This was because at this time she would perform her act in recognizable hijab dress and begin with the deadpan remark, “My name is Shazia Mirza. At least, that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence.”

In 2003, she was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. In recent years, she has performed stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe and, since 2006, has been writing a fortnightly column in The New Statesman magazine for which she won ‘Columnist of the Year 2008′ at the prestigious PPA Awards.

In April 2007, she presented a documentary on BBC Three called F*** Off, I’m a Hairy Woman.

She was a semi-finalist on Last Comic Standing season 6.

In March 2009, she was listed on the inaugural Muslim Women’s Power List as one of the 20 most successful Muslim women in the UK

Aki Nawaz( Bristish-Pakistani Rock Musician)

(born Haq Nawaz Qureshi) a.k.a. Aki-Stani, Righteous Preacher and Propa-Gandhi is a British singer and musician, part of the band Fun-Da-Mental. He is best known for his controversial lyrics relating to immorality in the west. Nawaz grew up in Bradford, England, his parents were Pakistani immigrants who arrived in England in 1964.

In the 1980s, using his proper name Haq Qureshi, he played drums with the gothic rock band Southern Death Cult, a forerunner to The Cult, featuring Ian Astbury on vocals. When Astbury moved on to found his own band, the remaining musicians stayed together for a time as Getting the Fear, recruiting new singer Bee Hampshire from Futon, but eventually broke up. In 1986, Nawaz moved to London set up a management company and signed artists to major record labels. Two years later, he formed Nation Records as a label primarily focused on creating fusions between different musical forms from all over the world for a more youth-oriented audience.^[1] Changing musical genres, Nawaz went on to found the Islamic rap group Fun-Da-Mental in 1991 which recorded for Nation Records. He was the group’s leader and most visible rapper.

Nawaz advocates a certain Islamic orthopraxy, expressing total opposition to alcohol and drug usage. He believed that there should be a unity between Afro-Caribbeans and Asians because he believed that the struggles that the two groups face are exactly the same. Through his music, Nawaz attempts to “normalize” the Islamic presence in Britain as well as to explain the reasons for fundamentalist tendencies among Muslim youth. ^[2] Nawaz also has collaborated with many traditional musicians not just in studio but also live. Some examples include: Huun Huur Tu, Rizwan Muazzam Qawwal- Mighty, Zulu Nation (a South African hip-hop group), and Gazi Khan (an artist from Rajasthan).

Art Malik( Hollywood Actor)

was born Athar Ul-Haque Malik in Bahawalpur, Punjab, the son of Zaibunisa and Mazhar Ul-Haque Malik, a physician who would soon qualify as an ophthalmic surgeon in England.^[1] Malik was thus brought to London in 1956 with his four older brothers. At age 10 he was sent to school in Quetta, Balochistan for one year, and then Bec Grammar School, a selective state school in Balham, London.

Malik is mildly dyslexic and found academic studies trying; after an unsatisfactory stint of business studies he won a scholarship to Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Before long, he was working with the Old Vic and Royal Shakespeare companies, where he played the role of Othello in the Shakespearean play Othello.

In 1982, five years after leaving the Guildhall, Malik was cast as the doomed young Indian Hari Kumar in the ITV production of The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. During filming, David Lean cast him in his film production of A Passage to India; the two high profile and successful productions assuring his professional future. He also appeared in a television serialisation of M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions. All three were released in 1984.In 1986 he played in the film the harem with Omar Sharif and Nancy Travis.

Malik has been closely associated with Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink, creating the role of Narid in the work’s London premiere, and returning to the role for the 1999 American premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.

He played the role of the son of an Indian mobster in the 1992 film City of Joy. Malik also played the villain Salim Abu Aziz opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies (1994). Additionally, he played the mythical Orpheus in the 25-minutes lasting film of .Orpheus and Eurydice, originally a myth by Ovidius. The director was Jim Henson. He made a move to American television in 1988 playing Dr. Ved Lahari on the ABC series Hothouse. He had a major role as an Afghani mujahadeen ally of James Bond in the Timothy Dalton 007 film The Living Daylights (1987). He also played the role of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in Path to Paradise, a 1997 made-for-TV film about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In 2000, he appeared in the Mystery Theatre series, Second Sight starring Clive Owen as a detective who is losing his vision. Malik appears in the Hide and Seek episode as Dr. Faiz Ahmed, the accused murderer of his lover, a violinist named Vicky Ingham’s (Helen Hathorn).

In 2001, he narrated the television documentary Hajj: The Journey of a Lifetime for British television. He played Dr Zubin Khan in the BBC hospital drama Holby City from 2003-05. Also in 2005 he starred in a television adaptation of the novel, The English Harem as Sam, a West London Muslim who owns a restaurant. Martine McCutcheon plays a young working class girl, Tracy, who - against the wishes of her parents and racist ex-boyfriend - becomes one of his three wives.

Kamal Qureshi(Politician)Member Parliament Denmark

Kamal Hameed Qureshi (born July 29, 1970) is a Danish politician. Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, he moved with his parents to Copenhagen, Denmark at the age of four.

After attending Tårnby High School Qureshi studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen, graduating as a physician in 2000.

Qureshi is a member of the Socialist People’s Party and has been a member of the Danish parliament, the Folketing, since 2001.

Hanif Kureishi(Hollywood Writer ,Novelist)

CBE (born December 5, 1954) is an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. The themes of his work have touched on topics of race, nationalism, immigration, and sexuality.

Biography

Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies and later worked at the Pakistan Embassy. After his father and mother (Audrey Buss) married, the family settled in Bromley where Kureishi was born.

He attended Bromley Technical High School where David Bowie had also been a pupil and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King’s College London and took a degree in philosophy.

Career

Kureishi started his career in the 70’s as a pornography writer.^[1][2]

He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980’s London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. It won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.

His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie.

The next year, 1991, saw the release of the feature film entitled London Kills Me; a film written and directed by Kureishi himself.

His novel, Intimacy (1998) revolved around the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons after feeling physically and emotionally rejected by his wife. This created certain controversy as Kureishi himself had recently left his wife and two young sons. It is assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical. In 2000/2001 the novel was adapted to a movie Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau, which won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival: a Golden Bear for Best Film, and a Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox). It was controversial for its unreserved sex scenes. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005.

His family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references to them in his work and went on record to deny the claims. His sister Yasmin has accused him of selling her family “down the line”. She wrote, in a letter to The Guardian, that if her family’s history had to become public she would not stand by and let it be “fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit”^[3]. She says that his description of her family’s working class roots are fictitious. Their grandfather was not “cloth cap working class”, their mother never worked in a shoe factory, and their father, she says, was not a bitter old man.

Yasmin takes up issues with her brother not merely for his thinly disguised autobiographical references in his first novel, Buddha of Suburbia, but also for the image about his past that he portrays in newspaper interviews. She wrote: “My father was angry when the Buddha of Suburbia came out as he felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity, and he didn’t speak to Hanif for about a year.”

Kureishi’s drama The Mother was adapted to a movie by Roger Michell, which won a joint First Prize in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes Film Festival. It showed a cross-generational relationship with changed roles: a seventy-year-old English lady and grandmother (played by Anne Reid) who seduces her daughter’s boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig), a thirty-year-old craftsman. Explicit sex scenes were shown in realistic drawings only, thus avoiding censorship.

His 2006 screenplay Venus saw Oscar, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, Broadcast Film Critics Association and Golden Globe nominations for Peter O’Toole in the best actor category.

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.

His latest novel, Something to Tell You, was published in 2008.

Kureishi is married and has a pair of twins, a younger son, and a parrot called Amis.

IMRAN KHAN: British Pakistani Human Rights Lawyer	From: BBC Four Archive
	Imran Khan has worked with Stephen Lawrence’s family for nearly a decade, guiding them on their tireless pursuit of justice for their son. Providing ethnic minorities with a legal voice remains a personal crusade for the lawyer, and Stephen’s mother Doreen explains that “what happened to us really affected him too”. Racist institutions As the country’s best-known Asian solicitor, Khan has taken on some of its most intimidating institutions. The police and prison services he cites as racist and reactionary, and the Law Society he calls “pale, stale and male”. In Khan’s hands, the judiciary system is an instrument for social change, and his progressive mission is rooted in his childhood. Upbringing Moving from Pakistan to East London at the age of four, Khan suffered racial taunts and attacks throughout his youth. Determined to take his place in the anti-racist movement, he resisted family calls to become a doctor and turned instead to the law. Khan cut his legal teeth at Birnbergs, a firm famous for correcting such judicial miscarriages as those of the Birmingham Six and Derek Bentley. Eighteen months after Khan qualified as a solicitor, the Lawrence file landed on his desk. In the face of the police’s failure to bring criminal charges, Khan and the murdered teenager’s family brought Britain’s first private prosecution for murder. And when the trial collapsed, they pressed further for a government inquiry. Macpherson Report The ensuing Macpherson Report cited “institutionalised racism in the force”, bringing apologies, procedural changes and vindication for the Lawrences. For Khan, it ensured that Stephen’s death had some meaning, and a profound impact on the law in this country. Now established in his own practice, Khan takes what he calls “impact cases”, ones highlighting inequality and disadvantage. But, despite his high profile, he keeps “one foot on the ground” by spending a couple of evenings a month dishing out free legal advice at a West London centre.

Trackback URL