Javed Miandad and Malala Yousafzai

I am good in remembering dates of various events and also have a habit since childhood of recalling any important event of the day when I get up in the morning. Today, on 9^th October, I woke up and instantly recalled two important events of this date which are important for a Pakistani. Two persons involved in these events are two of Pakistan’s most important living beings – Javed Miandad and Malala Yousafzai.

On 9^th October, exactly one year ago, 15 years old school girl Malala Yousafzai  from Mingora, Swat in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan was shot in head and neck by Taliban terrorists. A masked Taliban gunman boarded the school bus and identified Malala Yousafzai on gun-point. She was the only girl in the bus whose face was not covered and attacker shot her in the head. Two other girls in the bus also had gunshot wounds. 

After the attack, Malala Yousafzai was airlifted to the provincial capital Peshawar, where surgeons carried out an emergency three hours operation called decompressive craniectomy and also removed the bullet. On the second post-op day she was again airlifted to Rawalpindi and three days later, still in critical condition, was flown in air ambulance to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, United Kingdom. She remained in coma for few days and then her clinical condition gradually improved and after a month she was fully conscious and showed remarkable recovery. She was discharged from the hospital after nearly three months.

Malala Yousufzai luckily survived and later resumed her activism against illiteracy and extremism. She has received many international prestigious prizes and now heads the list of favorites among 259 nominees for the Peace Nobel Prize for her dedicated work for girls’ education in a country like Pakistan where Taliban have bombed hundreds of girls schools to prevent girls education. Nobel Peace Prize is scheduled to be announced on Friday, only two days from now.

I was 13 year old school boy and was studying in grade 8 when New Zealand cricket team toured Pakistan to play a series of three Test matches. Our family had relocated from Karachi to Lahore only few weeks ago and we resided in an area close to Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium. On the morning of 9^th October I rode on my bicycle to the cricket stadium instead of going to school with my school bag. It was early morning and gates of the stadium were wide open. Terrorism was unheard in Pakistan in those days.  I bunked from school, remained there and got seated in a stand. I waited for nearly three hours for the start of the Test match and by that time all the stands were full of a capacity crowd.

Pakistan batted first and I was anxious to see batting heroes like Majid Khan, Zaheer Abbas, Mushtaq Mohammad and Asif Iqbal. Pakistani batting line also had an uncapped player named Javed Miandad. Full capacity crowd was very vocal and there was lot of noise. Suddenly wickets started crumbling as Richard Hadlee (later Sir Richard Hadlee) removed openers Majid Khan and Sadiq Mohammad and captain Mushtaq Mohammad in quick succession. These three wickets by Richard Hadlee were followed by dismissal of Zaheer Abbas. Wickets fell almost in a fashion of table of 11. After first wicket fell at 23, other three wickets fell at scores of 33, 44 and 55. A noisy stadium went silent like a graveyard. 

The Test debutant, still a teenager Javed Miandad and Asif Iqbal started a fifth wicket partnership. Crowd hooted the new batsman in despair as he was beaten on few occasions by Richard Hadlee, but he survived and gradually took command of the game. I remember at his personal score of 88, he cracked three consecutive boundaries to left-arm slow bowler David O’Sullivan to become only second Pakistani batsman after Khalid Ibadulla to hit a century on Test debut. 

Javed Miandad scored 163 and had 281 runs partnership with Asif Iqbal before getting out, trying to sweep another debutant on the other side off spinner Peter Patherick, had a top edge and was caught at fine leg by Richard Hadlee. Patherick dismissed Wasim Raja and Intikhab Alam with next two balls to earn a hat-trick on his Test debut. 

Malala Yousafzai and Javed Miandad are two different persons in different spheres of life but two things are common. First both are Pakistan’s top heroes and second, both started their journey to glory on 9^th October. Javed Miandad has scored more runs than anyone else in Test cricket for Pakistan and Malala Yousufzai is the most famous teenage girl of modern time – a global figurehead. If she wins Nobel Prize at the age of 16, she would be the youngest Nobel Prize winner of its 112 years of history. Yemen’s Tawakkol Karman holds this record who won Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 at the age of 32 years.