Faryal Gohar

Faryal Gohar Actress, TV Writer, Human Right Activist
Faryal Gohar

Faryal Gohar is an acclaimed Pakistani actress, television writer, human right activist from Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. Faryal Gohar was married to artist Jamal Shah; the couple is now divorced.

Biography

Daughter of well known social scientist and enthropologist Khadija Ali Gohar, younger sister of Madiha Gohar and Amir Ali gohar, Faryal studied in American International School, Kinnaird College Lahore and McGill University Canada. Her contributions to poverty alleviation were appreciated by the Planning Commission of Pakistan.

Feryal is the youngest child of dynamic, accomplished parents. Her late mother, Khadija Gauhar, was a leading intellectual in Lahore who came to the city from South Africa after marrying her father, Sayyid was a military man from the NWFP who later retired from the army and took to farming. Her elder sister, Madiha Gauhar, is a talented theatre personality who founded the Ajoka theatre group and has managed it for over two decades. Feryal was initially associated with Ajoka as its first female actor. The sisters also have an older brother, Aamir, an industrial engineer who operates a business in alternative energy products.
Early life

GULBERG facing MM Alam road, Ali Tower, 1st floor office, 1050 sft, 4 rooms. H.A. Associates.
As a young woman attended Ferial Lahore American School. Her experience there included a reaction to the condition of the school that all students, regardless of nationality, pledge allegiance to the United States. In response to this practice, and insisted on Ferial eight years old to be playing the Pakistani national anthem for the whole school as well. Later, Ferial was the first woman and the first Pakistani to head the Council school students. She was a student leader of the role of honor and several sports teams. Several scions of leading feudal families at Aitchison College at the time remember Ferial lead her team in the school yard to play football. What is especially remember the football team uniforms, which detect the presence of a beautiful pair of legs instead. “Some people have never forgotten that vision,” she chuckles.

Ferial followed her college years with a brief stint at Kinnaird, where she played basketball and acted. Then studied political economy at McGill University, and trained in the production of a documentary film in Europe and later the University of Southern California. Upon her return to Pakistan, Ferial married artist and sculptor, Jamal Shah. In 1984 she moved with El Jamal to Quetta where the challenge that the province are required to veil themselves, and threatened with physical harm if appeared on the TV screen. This was not easy at the stage of the life of Ferial. She explains the end of her first marriage, saying: “It was beauty aspirations that did not include me.” Ferial has been a commitment to her marriage and politics have enabled it to adapt to life in a remote part neglected in Balochistan. Thus, I found it ironic that her husband took the first opportunity he has to get out of this marriage, “and never looked back.”
Personal life

After her split from Jamal Shah, Gauhar married a successful Pakistani doctor practicing in California. Feryal divided her time in those years between America and Pakistan. Her experience in California was bittersweet, ending with her second divorce. It was in California that Feryal became a serious writer. The isolation she felt there, while painful, sparked her career. Feeling isolated in small town America, Feryal turned to writing for remedy and release. Writing at this time meant salvation. “Words, for me, are a balm. They soothe me when the anguish is too deep,” she explained in an interview given last year. In addition to her fiction work, Gauhar has been a magazine writer and newspaper columnist for twenty six years.
Career

Referencing the characters of her novels at the 2006 Afro-Asian Writer’s Conference in Dehli, Feryal commented

I am an empty shell in whom many lives, met and unmet, live. What is autobiographical [in my work] is what comes from the personal space. Many times, I do not create the characters, they create me. I also write a political column, which is personal too. My marriage between my personal, professional and political lives is the most successful one yet.

It also continued to interview the light of early January, retreat, and our shadows stretch along the garden Ferial, and expansive scaped carefully. Ferial passed a small plate of dried fruit, and made coffee house. She shared the details of the impending journey to India to participate in the Jaipur International Heritage Festival, was invited as a speaker along with prominent figures in South Asia, such as Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai and Salman Rushdie. Requests such as these are largely a result of her first novel, the smell of wet earth in the month of August, which was widely acclaimed. Work is a superb combination of feelings of Ferial film industry, and awareness of the “other”, and knowledge of animal behavior. The novel was published by Penguin in 2002 and $ 5 in the list of The New York Times bestseller new, more international.

It is based on the smell of Tibbi Ferial in Galle film. Work reveals the endangered lives of outcasts who live in red-light district of Lahore. And choiceless-Nice Feryalà ¢ â, ¬ meet characters on “¢ s are woven into a clear, in the heart of prose times painful. Plot is unconventional and melancholic mood. Focuses the novel on the protagonist, Fatima, a girl mute who falls in love with the protected Molloy local, and tragedy ensues.
Gauhar’s forthcoming book, No Space for Further Burials, is set in the wild, violent terrain of contemporary Afghanistan and concerns the socio-political situation there. No Space explores the deaths suffered by Afghans and Americans. Captivated by the subject matter, she penned the book in several weeks. Before 2001, No Space was intended to be a film script. It was inspired by both the fallout of the 1989 Soviet pullout from Afghanistan and the three year war between the Serbians and Bosnians that began in 1992. The 2001 World Trade Tower attacks and their impact on Afghanistan added another dimension to the novel.

No Space is the diary of a US Army medical technician incarcerated by warlords in a mental hospital in Afghanistan. “I wanted to reverse the experience of looking at America through my eyes. I wanted Afghanistan to be seen through an American’s eyes,” the author explains. No Space for Further Burials will be released by Women Unlimited Press in March. A French publisher has purchased its rights and translations are underway in Dari, Pushto and Spanish. Finally, the work is being translated to film. Gauhar recently returned from a writer’s residency at Sanskriti Kendra, near Delhi, where she has been writing the screenplay. She hopes to go into production by the end of the year.

In addition to her novels and plays, Feryal has produced several works of non-fiction. Several years ago she completed a documentary simply titled, Pakistan Poverty Assessment. The work was the result of research from 54 districts and concerned the poor’s perception of their poverty. It underscored the need for land redistribution in the country. Almost immediately after its release the Prime Minister announced that there would be no further land reform in the country. Feryal remained undaunted. “My task was to get the message across through the voices of the poor, and I did it and it was heard quite clearly,” she comments.
Future Goals

Feryal plans to extend her commitment to environmental preservation by registering for the PhD programme in Conservation Management at the National College of Arts, Lahore. In the future, the writer would like to work on conservation issues full time, and she would like to create a national trust modeled after the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. Here her goal is to, “develop a new paradigm for development which respects cultural identities and the natural environment while enhancing the quality of life on this planet.”

A loner by nature, Feryal can be extremely gregarious when the occasion arises. Such dynamism makes her an enigma for those who have not met her personally. Feryal is not a high profile scandal seeker. She shuns vacuous social scenes, preferring to spend time with her beloved pet dogs and ‘underdogs.’ An animal rights activist, Feryal cares for an astounding eighteen cats, seven dogs, three goats, and one donkey. Most of these animals were stray or rescued from animal cruelty. “ I would much rather talk to my donkey, Sanober, than feign interest in the lives of women of means, who are often merely mean women,” she declares curtly. Despite her low profile lifestyle, in recent years the news media has linked Feryal to powerful figures throughout the country. “This is simply not the case,” she insists. “We live in a country that thrives on mediocrity and the ludicrous. All such rumours have to be understood as a manifestation of boredom in people’s lives,” she says, laughing uproariously.

Feryal’s second novel is already being release. The accompanying screenplay is underway, and her film, Tibbi Galli, will be showcased at the Rome International Film Festival. Feryal is at a landmark moment in her life. These achievements and her acceptance by the world community is no small feat given the often virulent xenophobia aimed at Pakistan from abroad, complemented by misrepresentations about this place and its people. Such news may seal the lips of national and international gossip fiends alike. Let us hope that it inspires them to emulate Feryal and adopt more constructive endeavors.

 

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