Sohale Siddiqi is the dude on the couch with Obama
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/03/barack-obama-wild-drugtaking-roommate
When historians look back on Barack Obama’s first and second presidential elections, they may see some commonality. Four years ago, the country’s first black White House candidate was smeared with all sorts of allegations. The would-be president was not born in the US. He was a mole. A socialist – no, make that a communist. Barack was gay. Barack was a Marxist. And a Muslim too.
Now the same myths are rumbling through the country’s bars, online forums and, worryingly, major news outlets. And this time there is a list of failed promises – on Guantánamo, universal healthcare – to add to the attack, while the personal claims seem to be yet more torrid (this week’s most bizarre is that “Obama’s mother was a porn star”).
It is against this backdrop that new playwright Rashid Razaq is staging his debut production, based on Obama’s college days at Columbia, New York. Provocatively titled The President and the Pakistani, it revisits Harlem, 1981, when “Barry” Obama was living with his alleged party-loving, drug-abusing, illegal alien Pakistani friend, Sohale Siddiqi.
“They had an odd-couple relationship,” says Razaq, a reporter for the London Evening Standard, showing me a picture of the pair sprawled on a mustard yellow sofa, a leather-jacketed and polo-sweatered Obama kicking back with an impressively moustached, skinny Pakistani. In the play, Siddiqi has been renamed Salim “Sal” Maqbool; in Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, he was recreated as a composite character named Sadik, mentioned in only a few pages.
More from another source;
https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/obama-his-room-mate-and-rewritten-history-8153016.html
“Sohale Siddiqi was Obama’s room-mate after he transferred from Occidental in Los Angeles to Columbia in New York and was revealed to be “Sadik”, when he was tracked down by reporters in the run-up to the 2008 election. He is also the inspiration for the title character of my first play, The President and The Pakistani, directed by Tom Attenborough, which looks at how Obama became the man we know and at the friend he left behind. He could easily be written-off as a bit part player in the story of the 44th President of the United States , but Obama and Siddiqi’s time together marked a fundamental turning point in both their lives.
Hailing from Karachi, like Chandoo and Hamid, he struck up a friendship with Obama after the lanky black kid greeted him with “How’s it going boss?” in Urdu at a house party. They later moved in together into a “slum” apartment in a drug-ridden neighbourhood on the border of Harlem and the Upper East Side where gunshots were a constant presence on the soundtrack.....Etc”
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