Word: bashir
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Tooling along a street in Karachi last May on his Asian whistle-stop tour, Vice President Lyndon Johnson spied one of Pakistan's prime tourist attractions: a camel cart. Lyndon stopped the car, got out to shake hands with startled Camel Driver Ahmad Bashir, 40. While the photographers snapped away, Johnson made small talk. "President Ayub Khan is coming to the U.S.," he offered. "Why don't you come too?" Bashir agreeably smiled "Sure, sure," went home to his mud-and-gunny-sack shack and forgot...
Johnson, who shook hands from Bangkok to New Delhi, drawling "Now you all come see me." went home and forgot it, too-until he read in Washington a translated press clipping from Pakistan's biggest daily newspaper, Jang, that "the U.S. Vice President has invited Bashir, a camel-cart driver, to come to America. My, Bashir is certainly lucky. He will go by jet and stay in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York." Faced with a féte accompli, Lyndon did the sporting thing: at a televised People-to-People luncheon, he suggested that it would...
Kidnapped. Bashir, meanwhile, had melted back into obscurity among Karachi's 1,000 camel-cart drivers. When the news of Johnson's TV bid reached Pakistan, the Morning News posted a reward for Bashir, spurring a citywide search by Karachians from every walk of life. Bashir and camel were found by two reporters, collecting a load of firewood in a railway yard. The reporters hustled Bashir off to the editorial office of the morning Dawn, where he was feasted, quizzed, and kept virtual prisoner for 14 hours to assure the paper a scoop. Finally...
Since then, Bashir has become a victim of his own fame. Assaulted by the press and the curious, he has been unable to make his rounds, which usually netted him $4 a day. Now broke, he is living off friends. He was forced reluctantly into his first pair of shoes. His family and neighbors were worried: "Will they let him come back to Pakistan?" "Will he bring back a mem-sahib [white wife]?" What was worse, the bewildered Bashir heard nothing from anyone in the U.S. about his trip. The reasons: the Digest backed out of sponsoring him; People...
...succeeded in lining up the votes of eight of the twelve attending archbishops-who are responsible for electing one of three candidates nominated by a council of religious and lay delegates. The Communists also circulated reports of an American imperialist plot to take over the patriarchate with Archbishop Antony Bashir of New York (a U.S. citizen born in Lebanon). The Reds played their final cards two days before the election, when a representative of the Patriarch of Moscow donated some $8,000 to "victims of the Lebanese revolution...