CLIMATE change is already in evidence here in Peshawar so that winters or rather visible traces of it, as Charles Dickens would say, could be encountered even in April keeping the scorching heat of the summers at bay for a good length of time. It was perhaps this profound change turning the weather extremely pleasant that influenced the cabinet of the Edwardes College Old Students Association (ECOSA) in its decision to hold its annual dinner on the college’s lush green Shalimar Garden after a hiatus of several years.

The love of the alma mater attracted a good crowd of old timers from far and wide including among whom there was a gentleman, sporting a thick crop of shining white beard, who had graduated from the college in the late nineteen forties. He occupied the centre stage lending an aura of biblical magnificence to the proceedings which began with recitations from the Quran and Bible. The general secretary of ECOSA read out from a report pinpointing some achievements coupled with a long list of proposals and demands that he placed before the assemblage for approval through voice vote.

It was only after the general secretary had turned his attention to money matters that one got an inkling of what was in store for the rest of the long evening. It indeed was a jump down from the sublime to the ridiculous when he started conducting the proceedings in a grotesque parody of the decades old television show titled ‘Neelam Ghar.’ Whether he realised it or not, the gentleman made a hash of his prolonged stay at the dais when he wondered quite seriously if the gathering would agree to a proposal whereby moneyed old timers would pay for some room or a block in the college to be named after them in lieu of a considerable sum of money. He then pointed to the staff room on his left and informed his bewildered audience that the teachers’ retiring room had been named after the late English teacher Major (retd) Zahinuddin paid for by the late teacher’s son.

It was henceforth quite an effort to endure it any longer, but the sanctity of the occasion had the desired restraining effect. Although in retrospect one thinks it would not have been an unforgivable breach of decorum if someone had stood up and pointed out that honour can never be purchased; it can only be bestowed on the most deserving of it. The gentleman thus continued to betray his incapability of differentiating between the reverent and the profane. Perhaps unknowingly, and one would hope it were so, he was disrespecting the soul of one of the most respected teachers of yesteryears. The old major’s son is a philanthropist living abroad who had donated a substantial sum to the college as a token of his love for his father’s beloved abode. To refer to the gesture in such a manner reflected poorly on the evening that one had been looking forward to for quite some time. Just a couple of days ago one had seen the brass plate installed in memory of the old major on the centre wall in the staff room, and even on that occasion our teacher of statistics had narrated an exceedingly witty anecdote relating to Mr Zahinuddin.

One had positively hoped Canon Titus Presler, the principal of the college, would do all in his powers to rectify the damage down to the collective conscious of the invitees. But all that the respected gentleman did was to talk money, money and money in his long stay at the podium raising many eyebrows and inviting no fewer frowns from an increasingly restless audience. It was an evening that presented Mr Presler as the true image of a parish priest asking for money from wherever possible that would enable him to transform and replicate Edwardes College into an establishment similar to perhaps Oxford or Cambridge or at least the LUMS University Lahore that had touched his imagination very profoundly.

One did went over to the otherwise reticent looking principal after the long awaited dinner had finally been served only to correct some glaring misperceptions since he could be allowed an allowance for being new on the campus. He was asked if he thought it prudent asking the old teachers to start paying back handsomely to the college if they wished to be remembered on its rolls?

The ECOSA dinner is steeped in traditions, and the next event must reflect those traditions in words and spirit. The dinner was served just moments before the clock struck the zero hour forcing all to gulp down their food in a hurry and let the musicians take over the charge. The nature of the things having gone awry, owing solely due to long soporific speeches laced with praises of money, was such that the luckless musicians had hardly chewed the last taken morsel of bread before they were forced into playing some popular numbers leading to frantically executed dancing performances by the young and old alike.

It is not that the college is not getting money. While presenting the list of notable old Edwardians making it big in their practical lives, the principal recalled the former chief minister Haider Hoti whose government augmented the college’s coffers by a A dinner in praise of money handsome fund of Rs300 million. Mr Hoti who recently led his party to a humiliating defeat in the elections was widely respected for his genial nature, if not for his gifts of vision and leadership. One of his former teachers recall him being a habitual latecomer to his English class and then asking for permission in his characteristic soft tone. ‘Come in, dear Haider, if you insist,’ the elderly but unfailingly vivacious Ziaul Qamar recalls him from his days as his student.

But Haider did not delay his entry to the all powerful sprawling chief Minister’s house. In fact he gate crashed his entry on the centre stage, and ensured to be there for his allotted full term of five years. At something like 39, he was the youngest chief minister of what was until then called the North West Frontier Province. He was a cub in a province where his predecessors loved comparing themselves with lions. But his subsequent performance left much to be desired, and one would regretfully wonder if his growth had been stunted by his lifestyle portraying him as a dandy youth.

If one were to go by the official news bulletins only two things dominated his routine: official notifications regarding cancellations of his weekly meetings with the members of the assembly and frequent tours of his home district Mardan. The regularity of his second mentioned activity brought him up as though he was a farmer in the countryside keen on visiting at sunset and checking for himself that the water supply to his fields had not been stolen by the encroachers.

One would have wished the former Edwardian Haider Hoti to be a keen reader if not a man of letters. Nothing that Mr Hoti did in his stint as the all powerful chief executive showed that he even read the newspapers with any amount of seriousness. But now with a lot of time at his command, he should at least read Lord Curzon’s ‘On the Indian Frontier.’ Curzon though like Hoti was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had to travel on foot and horseback for six months from Gilgit Baltistan to what is these days called the Wakhan Corridor in extreme hostile conditions in order to be able to be appointed as the Viceroy Of India many years later. Mr Presler, the kind principal of Edwardes College, must instil this spirit in his students, and for that he needs no money.