The people of his era were tough and hard. That is why they lived long lives like he did. I am writing about I Hassan (Inayetullah Hassan), a blood relation, a freelance columnist, broadcaster, commentator and foreign correspondent. Above all, a role model for me and many others. People who read these pages of this paper would also remember his column which appeared every Tuesday under the title “Cutting edge”. He breathed his last (quietly, in keeping with his nature) during the last week of the year just gone by after a long, but well-handled, illness. He wrote about it once in these very columns under the heading “Cancer revisited”.

Janji, as he was affectionately called by those near and dear to him, started his career in journalism as a war correspondent during World War II, reporting from the frontlines in the Far East jungles, when there were no Blackberry or emails. I have not been able to locate his dispatches from that period, although I remember a piece about his time in a Japanese POW camp. After the war, he lived in Britain and subsequently came back to Pakistan. Even though it’s normally impossible to be a good writer on every subject, he managed to write extensively on countless topics. Politics, history, economy, national and international affairs, religious matters… nothing escaped his eye and pen. He kept writing without keeping any personal records of his work (none could be obtained from his home), and I had to sift through old newspapers in a local library to go through his pieces again. I used to read his articles earlier mainly to amuse myself, reading through in a few minutes. But now after he is gone, in reading them again I find the individuality in them in a more profound way; marked so effectively by his casual but very communicative voice.

Then he had that unique sense of humour. Once, while making a point on the need to tax the rich more heavily, he gave an example: “In the Sikh period in Punjab, it is said that the Sikhs, having come to the end of their tether with regard to tax gathering, began to go to the villages in order to discover more taxable subjects. They sowed bajra and harvested that. Nobody ate wheat. The Sikh tax examiners would go to a village and because the villagers defecated in the fields they would examine the faecal matter in the field to determine whether the defecator ate wheat or bajra. If he ate wheat, he could pay more taxes”.

His readers would remember him writing about how, when he was in the army, they loaded mules on trains. The stubborn animals, he said, when pulled towards the train, would pull backwards till a British officer showed them the way. The mules were made to face away from the train and pulled again, till they boarded it in reverse. He had a few things to say about our culture also: “Most of us are descended from Hindus converted to Islam. We tend to deny that and pretend that we come from Bukhara or some such place. The result is culturally we tend to be nobodies. We tend to adopt Arab culture mistakenly believing it to be the same as Muslim. The two, however, do not equate for Arab imperialism is still virulent and rife.” The archives are full of what he has left behind for us to read and remember him by.

Sleep in peace, Janji. As you would say, why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye.

The writer is a freelance journalist.