DAWN Tuesday Review, April 10-16, 1997

Hamid Mian Kay Haan

When you think of those fine Sunday mornings of the long bygone era, one thing that naturally comes to mind is Hamid Mian Key Haan, the longest running programme of the Radio Station, Karachi. (It started in the mid-fifties and had a continuous run up till 1989-only to be revived as Hamid Manzil in 1994). 

The play was originally written by Intizar Husain with occasional input from Afzal Siddiqui and Syed Ahmed Riffat, while Agha Nasir was its first producer. (The present writers are Sultan Jameel Naseem and Meesaq Husain).

The central character of the play was Hamid Mian (Ameer Khan), a retired government servant who never took bribes. Consequently, he was not very well-off and it took 15 years of broadcasting to get him a fridge! Other stock characters included his wife ‘Begum’ (Safia Mueeni), son Safdar (Jamshed Ansari), daughter Rehana (Nargis Sabzwari) as well as two other relatives: Ehsan (Mehmood Ali) and Anjum (Afzal Siddiqui), a negative role. The central idea was to make comments on contemporary social life with a bit of sermonizing here and there.

Out of the original cast Ameer Khan and Afzal Siddiqui are no longer alive while others have grown old with time. All these changes are incorporated into the play – its characters grown old with time.