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Friday, June 5, 2009

Jim Reeves

One day, Rahat Minhas (Rashid’s brother) showed me a gramophone record of Jim Reeves songs. The LP had been purchased by Rashid out of his salary. Most songs were happy, and he liked them, but his all-time favorite was ‘The Wreck of the Number Nine.’
It was the tale of an engineer who was pulling an old railway engine on a dark, stormy night but his heart was happy because he was going to marry his beloved the next day. Headlights shined in his face and “his brave heart stood still” as he registered that an engine was coming full speed from the wrong direction. His body was found in the wreck, and he sent this message to his beloved as his breath slowly went:

“There's a little white home that I built for our own
Where I dreamed we’d be happy, you and I
But I leave it to you for I know you’ll be true
Till we meet at the Golden Gate – goodbye.”
Rashid was also hoping to get married soon when he died. Incidentally, the singer Jim Reeves had also died seven years ago in plane crash. He was flying the plane himself.
Next: The Musician of Muslim Revival. If you are not subscribed to this newsletter, join the group or send email to KhurramsOffice@yahoo.com for receiving subsequent posts directly in your inbox.

7 comments:

  1. Those of us who have been studying the recurrence of master patterns in the lives of the shapers of destiny... would see that pattern emerging here again... Too much to be coincidences.

    Would be interesting to know how the number nine figures here?

    A.

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  2. Great work! applause!

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  3. Ahmad Bhai and InWorld, thanks. I am so happily surprised to see the blog of InWorld (Click on the name in the comment above - recommended). Ahmad Bhai, do you remember that the excerpt from Iqbal which Rashid Minhas noted in his diary fitted so well with his own destiny later? That was also from the NINTH Question in Iqbal's book :).

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  4. Check Jim Reeves on Wikipedia and you will see that he was quite a mystic himself - some New Age gurus are celebrating him as a Divine voice.

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  5. In the works of the consensus writer from Stage IV of Pakistan, the 9th Stage is the final duel between supporters of good and evil where they both recognize that they must exist together or die together (you know what I am referring to?). In his moment of truth, Rashid was pitted against his own mirror image: a superior from his own unit, son of the same soil, wanting to fight for his ideal just like him, and about to be celebrated with equivalent honor by his own faction. See how the ultimate source of good and evil becomes one? Yet Rashid had to lift this final curtain at the cost of life. That is the answer to Iqbal's NINTH Question, "Who was it that became completely aware of everything in the end?"

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  6. very strange facts chiller then fiction, Khurran Sahib. Ahmed Safi, any connection with the great Ibn e Safi.

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  7. "And, when you want something , all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."
    The Alchemist
    - Paulo Coelho

    The poem written by a 15 year old boy, the choice of music. He wanted something... "the universe conspired" in helping him to achieve it.

    "Koi Qabil ho tau hum shan-e-kai deytay hain.... Dhoondnay walon ko duniya bhi nayee deytey hein"

    It all goes round and round and round ... like the whirling derveshes :)

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