Imran Khan, the captain of the 1992 World Cup winning team, turned 70, and fans wished their cricket hero on social media.
Khan, a former Pakistani prime minister who was also present at the ceremony, was greeted with birthday greetings when he approached the podium.
“Khan Sahab, Happy Birthday,” people presented in the hall shouted. “Usually, when a man turns 70, people don’t remind him about his birthday,” the former captain replied.
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Social media was flooded with happy birthday messages for Khan, who became famous in the 1990s for playing cricket.
#ImranKhan, ‘Salgirah Mubarik Ho Khan Sahab’ and ‘Pride of Pakistan’, became Twitter trends in Pakistan as netizens took to the microblogging site to wish the former prime minister on his birthday.
Imran Khan was the only son out of the five children of Ikramullah Khan Niazi and Shaukat Khanum. He received his primary education in Lahore, then moved to Britain for higher education, where he graduated from Oxford University.
He returned back to Pakistan in 1971 and joined Pakistan’s national cricket team. He served as the captain of the team from 1982 and 1992 and the South Asia country bagged the country’s only world cup in 1992.
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Ending his career, he entered the world of philanthropy and laid the foundation of Shaukat Khanum Hospital in the name of his mother who died battling the deadly disease.
Khan later formed his political party in 1996 while he struggled for more than a decade before being popular among the Pakistani youth. PTI first succeeded in forming a government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2013 and came to power in the center in 2018.