Hyderabad, Sept. 17 -- The Asian Games, sometimes referred to as the Olympic Games of Asia, are scheduled to begin in Japan from September 19. The stage is set for intense competitions and for old rivalries to be rekindled. In anticipation, the mind goes back to the 1950s and 1960s when India's ace sprinter Sardar Milkha Singh ruled the track like a king.

But within the Asian continent, he had an arch rival who wanted to dethrone the monarch. That man was Pakistan's Abdul Khaliq. Both Milkha Singh and Abdul Khaliq were among the great sprinters of Asian athletics in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their rivalry was particularly fascinating because the two represented newly independent nations of India and Pakistan and these were countries who...