BUCK UP SHABBIR
CAPTAIN MUNSTER HOUSE

Annual Sports Day St Anthony’s Lahore

I hated sports. I was never a sports freak. But the schools forced you into something or that. I remember in Sacred Heart School I was pushed in a group race and I came last. Not that I could not run, I was just plain shy in front of people. Without realizing it, I was the intellectual type. Thinking all the time.

The same happened in St Anthony’s. We were forced to participate in sports and the annual Sports Day was at the Railway ground, where we had to go. No fancy cars to take us, but a bicycle of an elder cousin, sitting on the dreary cycle rod, and cursing your luck to be forced to go into something. We were divided into four houses, or four rows in the classes. Mine was MUNSTER house, and the Captain of Munster House was a guy named Shabbir Sharif. A tall handsome guy with a physique of Charles Atlas, and all we could do, was look at him in awe. And man, could he run! Run he did all the time and he won every race there. Straights dashes, relays, jumps, hurdles and what not? And all of us boys would stand on the side and shout with full vigour ‘BUCK UP SHABBIR’. We never heard from him again.

And one day a friend by the name of Munawar Hussain came to me and he was talking of is classfellow Raheel Sharif, and he said Shabbir was his elder brother. And I said which Shabbir? He said the one of the Munster House, don’t you know about him? He embraced Shahadat in the war and obtained NISHAN E HAIDER. I was amazed. The energy wich Shabbir had even at that time, had to come out and ventilate itself in life. It was inevitable that he obtained some feat in life. And then there is the story of another classfellow and that is three times Prime Minister Nawaz Shareef, but that is for another time.