Pakistan: A Personal History

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From his achievements on the cricket field as the Pakistan captain who captured the World Cup and the game's best all-rounder in history, through to his racy social life? No, Imran Khan’s books cover a wide range of topics, including politics, sports, social issues, and personal memoirs.

His struggle to raise funds for the cancer hospital, his conflicting ideologies, first with Cricket boards, and later, with the State President are well documented. The fact that he was a slow bolwer in 1978 tour but he worked on his action and became lethal by 1980. His understanding of history, modern world and where Pakistan stands currently and what it needs to do to help itself come out of it is unmatched and extremely well reasoned with facts.In November 1974, the Cricketer International published an article about the new elite group of young talented players, "into concepts like fashion and pop music," and bent on challenging cricket's eternal stereotypes.

Whenever somebody told Imran Khan that you cannot do it, he would make it a point to prove the person wrong. An irreverent iconoclast, Khan established his Movement for Justice party back in 1996 and has doggedly moved up the ranks. The victory in 1992 World Cup and his famous captaincy shuffle game with Javed Miandad are engaging reads, but could have been more elaborate. One is set during the 1965 War with India when Pakistanis expected the Indian army to land in Lahore where Khan lived. Khan does offer an explanation by quoting Iqbal who said that ‘ when a State is governed without the moral values that are rooted in religion then naked materialism is likely to replace it – exactly the observation made by Mohandas Gandhi when he remarked, ‘those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.But the separation of Church and State could not happen in Islam since it has no concept of a Church.

Woven into this history we see how Imran Khan’s personal life — his happy childhood in Lahore, his Oxford education, his extraordinary cricketing career, his playboy years and marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, his mother’s influence and that of his Islamic faith — inform both the historical narrative and his current philanthropic and political activities. During these years, he conducted many interviews with many personalities linked/associated to Imran’s life and career like Mike Brearley, Geoff Boycott, Javed Miandad, Parvez Musharraf and Jemima Khan-Goldsmith. I have been following IK ‘s political career for last 18 months and followed his cricketing career for longer . Khan ends his 364-page (sans le index) tome on the most positive note, telling us that his political party Tehreek-e-Insaf is the only party which can get Pakistan out of its current desperate crisis. At many situations, Miandad’s book Cutting Edge has been used as an instance where indirectly the (mis)understanding between the two is reflected and perhaps become debatable.It would have been more readable without the details of obscure cricket matches,particularly from English county cricket. Imran Khan’s Pakistan: A Personal History takes a closer look at the country’s history and its politics. Undermined by a ruling elite hungry for money and power, Pakistan now stands alone as the only Islamic country with a nuclear bomb, yet unable to protect its people from the carnage of regular bombings at home.