Dr. Husain Ahmad Piracha’s travelogue “Kinaray Kinaray” or “From Coast to Coast” continues the best traditions of a favorite Urdu genre. He combines a poetic, literary style that captures the reader’s imagination and spices it with precisely observed vignettes from his extensive travels.
Dr. Piracha, who works with the Ministry of Education in Taif, is no armchair explorer. He used his considerable journalistic experience to comment on the countries and culture he visited. On the principle that “one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of learning,” he tried to absorb and understand the cultures he writes about by living in them. The result, as the Urdu poet Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi says, is that in the travelogue “human emotions and fine feelings are expressed in a unique literary manner.” The literary grace and style in which the book is written makes it eminently readable.
In writing about others, Dr. Piracha reveals a great deal about himself. In his depiction of the ancient university city of Cambridge, while sensitively describing the geography and life of the surroundings he reveals his own deep love of knowledge. Then, in his description of the funeral at Westminster Abbey of Princess Diana, he involves the reader in the event simply by the intensity that he felt as he participated with millions of others in an emotional national occasion.
Dr. Piracha’s powers of description and “ability to pierce into the very soul of these lands,” as Lala Sahree puts it, reach a peak in his description of the English Lake District. Here his powerful love of nature involves the reader in the subtle whisper of wind over grass and the undulating yellow waves of daffodils that inspired Wordsworth.
In complete contrast, Dr. Paracha casts his eye over the considerably less romantic but socially impressive work in progress by the municipality of Ankara in Turkey. Here Dr. Piracha displays his analytical skills in describing the competence of the local authorities at addressing the needs of their citizens and relieving the central government of pressure.
He concludes his reflections by admitting that he longs to see his own people and Pakistan as a country develop into a prosperous and developed country. “The bird,” he writes while traveling, “kept beholding its abode while flying.”
