Why is information about Jafry’s life like a page out of the record books?

Syed Ghulam-e-Panjatan Jafry and his wife Nuzhat Jafry completed 40 years in showbiz on April 5, 2007.

During this time they produced a record-setting 15 different television series. These shows ran as 6,981 half-hour episodes on television. In this period they also produced 3,124 one-hour radio shows. Surely this achievement deserves to be in the record books.

For you to get an idea about what a big achievement this is, you can compare it with Guiding Light, acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records as the Worlds Longest Running TV Drama.

The American show was broadcast 5 days a week. On the other hand Jafry’s almost 7,000-episode total was reached by only 1 show per week broadcasts of his famous Jafry’s TV Asia and other shows.

But these are just figures.

Jafry’s achievements are not limited to only producing TV shows.

In 1966 he started the first South Asian movie theatre in Canada. In 1969 he started the first South Asian radio programme Jultrung Radio. His wife Nuzhat was the first South Asian woman broadcaster in North America. In 1993 he was the first to broadcast live across Canada. These are only some of the things that Jafry was the first person to achieve.

The Jaipur, India, born president of Jafry Communications, Jafry studied textile engineering at the University of Bradford in Yorkshire, England. Later he worked in England as a textile and industrial administrator. On his arrival in Canada in 1966 he set up the first South Asian cinema hall (as movie theatres were then called). After only three years he began producing the first South Asian radio and cable TV programmes. He continued adding more firsts to the list – producing the first South Asian show on network TV that was broadcast on Saturdays and Sundays all over Canada.

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Why is information about Jafry’s life like a page out of the record books?

But he was to achieve many more things.

Perhaps his crowning achievements have been in fund-raising and promoting multiculturalism and removing religious ignorance.

In the 1990s he again took a new step in community programming by producing live television broadcasts and Canada wide Telethons to raise funds. One of the most successful was for the Scarborough Muslim Association that resulted in 1400 pledge calls and helped to eventually raise over a million dollars.  However, he would be most remembered for the 1994 telethon for the 2-year old conjoined twins Nida and Hira Jamal. This raised $275,000 to meet cost of surgery and care for the twins. On January 23, 1995, a 23-member team of surgeons at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children performed an extremely delicate surgery on the twins for over 15 hours.  There have been only 30 such operations in the world.

‘First off the Block’

Some of S.G.P. Jafry’s firsts include:

1978 -  First South Asian Programme on Network TV

1993 -  First Live Canada Wide South Asian Broadcast, from                                         Mississauga, Ontario, Canada