Rawalpindi’s Arya Mohalla-born Ali Akbar who is the lone and perhaps the last newspaper hawker on Paris streets, is in his native town these days primarily to attend to his 90 plus years old mother, to look after her health, to visit his father’s grave and to release birds from their roadside captives.
It costs heavily on my pocket but I can’t help it, said Ali while explaining the last of the three reasons he is in the garrison city.
Sometimes, he asks the auto-rickshaw man to stop in the middle of the busy Saddar road and despite protests by his sister rushes to the man sitting on the pavement keeping dozens of sparrows and mynas in his makeshift cage and gets them released in the open sky.
This is almost an obsession with me and in Paris too, I feed birds and arrange water for them in St Germaine, Paris where I have been selling Le Monde, said 72-year old Ali Akbar who has been selling the newspaper since 1972. After more than 50 years of selling newspapers he has now become more a Parisian than a ‘Pindiwal’.
Ali is well settled in France and his five sons after education have started their professional life. “Despite the odds of life and the struggle of the early days, my biggest relief is that my children, all five sons have received good education in France and they are now grown up responsible French citizens,” said Ali Akbar. But what is his secret of surviving in a foreign land and making the French people buy newspapers from him? Ali Akbar said the secret was that he coined funny headlines to get the attention of the Parisians and then he sold the papers to them.
His funny headlines and humorous outbursts make people laugh. One such headline that became utterly hilarious was: Monica is pregnant with twins from Bill Clinton! He has become a darling of Parisians. Different filmmakers have made documentaries on him. He has been invited to TV shows and gatherings of scholars. His book “Je Fais Rire Le Monde Mais Le Monde Me Fait Pleurer (I Make the World Laugh, but the World Makes me Cry) has also earned him huge fame. The book has been translated into English, Greek and Korean languages. Currently, Ali is looking for someone who could translate the book into Urdu. “I want the world to know my story: how a boy, the eldest of two sisters and seven brothers after doing odd jobs in Rawalpindi like selling corn, carrots and sweet potatoes and working at petrol pumps, printing press etc had the chance to leave the country and find a life of his own.
The beginning was tough and quite challenging but that boy didn’t lose heart and even worked on ships and risked his life in the cold numbness of Europe. But his goal was to help his family back in Pakistan and start his life anew.
Ali regrets things have scarcely improved in Pakistan rather there is an element of decadence and downfall in almost all fields of life. People under the financial burden have grown impatient and least respectful. My dream is to see Rawalpindi as clean and well-administered as Paris is. Only a leadership like Mao can make this happen, he said as he also visited China back in the 1970s and saw the opium-smoking nation turned out to be the most disciplined nation in the world.
