Bushra Ansari's fab website is a much-needed tribute to Pakistani TV's history

‘Golden period.’ It’s an easy, catch-all turn of phrase.
It's also a concise alternate for ‘the good old days of the PTV', a neater way to say 'the Waheed Murad era of cinema’ and a quick acknowledgement of the greats that preceded today’s stars, even though we may not be terribly familiar with all their past achievements.
So we blanket our ignorance with the necessary nod to times gone by, and move on. Isn't it a pity that we aren’t better acquainted with our history?
Our experience of the ‘golden period’, for those of us who have actively sought it out, is formed by slow buffering Youtube videos, the occasional screening of a classic, or the one-off exhibition of film buff Guddu Khan’s vast collection of memorabilia. We hurray at these scattered opportunities, hail them as ‘much-needed’ (which they undoubtedly are), but they're no substitute for a proper cultural archive — a concrete, cohesive, comprehensive collection of records that document our history and make it readily available to the public.
That’s what Nariman Ansari, a 35-year-old photographer and visual artist based in Toronto and the elder daughter of iconic actor-comedian-writer Bushra Ansari, set about to create.
Rescuing the contents of a cardboard box that held photographs, articles and other records of her mother’s life on and off screen — documents once endangered by their proximity to the sea in Bushra’s former residence — and scouring the internet for everything else she could find, Nariman decided to put it all together and make public an archive of her mother's life and work.