Aqeel Abbas Jaferi in his new book ' Pakistan ka qaumi tarana: kya hai haqeeqat kya hai fasana ' (Pakistan's national anthem: what is fact, what is fiction) has candidly listed all these facts ignored by Puri and his Pakistani counterparts while debating the issue. Well, this is indeed something one should be quite proud of.Д«ut there was a little problem: there were a few odd pieces that did not quite fit into the puzzle because the overjoyed writers did not bother to crosscheck the historical facts. Titled 'A Hindu wrote Pakistan's first national anthem', the report somehow struck chords among some Pakistani media persons and intellectuals and they began spreading the report, some of them feeling quite overjoyed over Quaid's gesture of asking 'an Urdu-knowing Hindu' (to borrow the words from Puri) to write the national anthem of the nascent Muslim country. The interview did not have much impact at that time but Luv Puri got a report based on the same interview published in the Jissue of ' The Hindu ', one of the leading newspapers of India. Later, due to the worsening law and order situation, his friends advised Azad to migrate to India and he took their advice. He also claimed that it was Pakistan's first national anthem and was broadcast (the interviewer has used the word 'sung') from Radio Pakistan's Karachi station (the interviewer has used the words 'Pakistan radio, Karachi') since Karachi was then the capital of the newborn nation. Jagan Nath Azad claimed in the interview that he wrote the anthem within five days and the Quaid approved it within a few hours.

On August 9, 1947, a 'friend' (not named in the interview) working at Radio Pakistan's Lahore station brought him a message from Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, saying that the Quaid wanted Azad to write Pakistan's national anthem.

They also took the responsibility for his safety and security. Some of his Muslim friends asked him not to migrate to India and stay on, instead. According to the interview, published in The Milli Gazette 's issue of 16-31 August, 2004, at the time of Independence Jagan Nath Azad was in Lahore, his beloved city, and did not want to leave it. But what gave him renewed fame a year after his death was the controversy that raged in the Indian and Pakistani media for quite some time and Azad was at the centre of the controversy.ДЄ few days before his death in 2004, Jagan Nath Azad gave an interview to Luv Puri, an Indian journalist, in which he claimed to have written Pakistan's first national anthem. His contribution to Iqbal Studies was equally important. Should the national anthem be rewritten in the Urdu language? Would that have a positive impact on the society? Would people accept that? It is the people of Pakistan who have to decide if the issue is insignificant or an imperative one.Jagan Nath Azad (1918-2004) was known for his fascinating Urdu poetry. This is a dilemma that entails extensive discourse to discover the solution to the problem. Read more: Gautam Gambhir jumps in on the national anthem debate! Hence in this context should the leaders be blamed for the dilemmas Pakistan is confronting today? A recent video of the oath taking day has been surfacing on social media, where elected members of the National Assembly were asked to sing the Qaumi Tarana and several of them couldnвЂ™t even remember it. Maybe our wise patriotic adults could, but how many of the younger lot understands the essence of their Qaumi Tarana? How can one decipher and internalize those values if the national anthem is written in a вЂforeign languageвЂ™? A language hardly anyone understands in Pakistan?ДЄlthoughВ nearly half of the Urdu vocabulary is from Persian (the remainder being from Hindi), and a third of it is Arabic loanwords (that typically came via Persian), yet hardly anyone would still be able to grasp the meaning of the anthem. The national anthem encompasses the values a country stands for. How many years in school have we religiously sung the anthem? Yet very few would know what it actually means.В LetвЂ™s talk about what the values the national anthem discuses they are simple and otherwise known to all of us: brotherhood, unity and faith.

Read more: Ali Zafar composes PSL anthem for third consecutive year ItВ was created by the use of twenty-one musical instruments and thirty-eight different tones. Chagla and penned by Hafez Jullundhri, is three stanzas long, with no repetition of lines anywhere and takes about 80 seconds to sing. How can one relate to its country without knowing what it stands for? How many of us know the meaning of our Qaumi Tarana? How can we connect to it if we donвЂ™t know what it stands for?

Pakistan qaumi tarana history