by Arunabha Sengupta
When Sunil Gavaskar refused to accept the offered MCC Membership as a protest against some typically boorish display of authority he had been subjected to at Lord's, Qamar Ahmed was the one to break the story.
When Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, Ali Bacher invited a few handpicked cricketers and journalists to meet him. Qamar Ahmed was one of them.|
When Mohammad Azharuddin insisted on halal meat and refused to visit a fan in Napier otherwise, Qamar Ahmed was the one recruited to slaughter the chicken and ensure the Indian captain's presence at dinner.
Once when he witnessed a furious Lala Amarnath refusing to send in his match summary to PTI because he had been asked to provide scorecard details. Qamar Ahmed wrote the report for the Indian legend.
Qamar also played first-class cricket for Sind and Hyderabad - as a very decent left-arm spinner, bowled to all the five Mohammad brothers, once travelled from London to Pakistan by car, fell out with Imran Khan at least twice, picked up a girl during Churchill's funeral, and was once put down in the scorebooks as 'Qama Sutra' due to a combination of faulty hearing and a decent prank.
These were, of course,what he did apart from covering more than 450 Test matches for BBC, The Daily Telegraph , The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Mail-On-Sunday, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Sunday Express, Dawn, The Hindu and most of the other prestigious publications of the world.
Along the way he also penned a few important books on Pakistan cricket.
He was also a dear friend, my staunchest supporter and one of the greatest admirers of my books.
We met for the first time in 2014 – in the media centre during the India-England series. Thereafter, we caught up in London at least once every summer. It was during one such meeting that the accompanying picture here was clicked - and eventually it found its way into page 179 of the international edition of his autobiography Far More Than a Game.
The last time I met him he was 86. We were late for a meeting with John McKenzie. We reached the turnstiles at Vauxhall Station with our train to leave in one minute. He ran with me down the concourse and up the steps and we jumped on board just in time. I looked at him, and saw that he was not even breathing heavily.
Last week I enquired about a possible talk on an online forum. He told me he could do it only a couple of weeks later, since he had had a heart attack and had a stent inserted.
He passed away today at the age of 88. It was a long, rich and full life, but he was the one I would have backed to get a hundred.
Legendary journalist, an endless fountain of memories, and a very dear friend. The cricket-space will have to deal with an eternal Qamar Ahmed-shaped hole that will prove impossible to fill.
Qamar Ahmed
23 Oct 1937 - 18 Jun 2026