Anwar Masood
I will share with you some reflections, some memories from my days as a student
and my experiences as a teacher. Beneath these brief anecdotes are layers of meaning that
I leave you to unravel.
Syed Wazir-ul-Hassan Abidi was my teacher at the Punjab University when I was
doing my Masters in Persian. He would not allow any student to enter the class unless the
student had a question, because, he would say, knowledge starts with a question. If you
collect the answers to your questions about a plant, for example, you get the science of
Botany.
Chaudhry Fazal Hussain was my teacher at Gujrat Zamindar College. This was
how he described a good teacher: A good teacher is one whose new batch of students is
the new edition of his book of research, meaning thereby that a teacher is constantly
renewing his/her knowledge. It was Chaudhry Fazal Hussain who encouraged me to ‘step
out of the quagmire of science’ and to take up humanities, as I was then enrolled in the
FSc. Pre-Medical programme. I had written a couple of poems then. One was on
childhood as I used to moan the loss of my childhood, standing on the threshold of
adolescence.
Conciseness is also an important quality for a teacher to have. I went to
Iran with a group of 40 other teachers. There I met a teacher who, when he spoke, seemed
to enfold 5 or 6 books within the capsule of one sentence. For example about Allama
Iqbal he said, ‘He came too early.’ What he meant to say was that the entire future will be
his.
I have felt the greatest joy when I was a teacher in a classroom. A teacher, as I see
it, should give his students the permission to question and secondly he should have a
strong command over his subject. In class 8th as I was teaching the three states of matter,
a student said, “Give us an example of all three states co-existing.” I gave him the
example of a hukkah. It is made of solid wood, it emits smoke and it contains water!
That’s all your three states, solid, liquid and gas.
I was once a teacher at a school in Kunjah, near Gujrat. My poem ‘Ambri’ is
based on an experience I had while teaching there. It is about a student Bashir who comes
late to class because he was stalled by his class-fellow Akram’s mother. She made a
special lunch for Akram and sent it with Bashir. And why did Akram not take his lunch
with him? Why did he leave home in a rush without eating anything? Akram quarreled
with his mother and left home angry that morning; he struck her, his own mother, with a
rolling-pin that broke from the force of the violent blow. Still the mother, bruised and
hurt by her own son, is anxious to send the choicest of food for her errant son.
It took me 10 years to write this poem. Such is the rich nature of human
experience and the imperfection of the eye that sees it, that you can never quite
encompass the true essence of an event through words. A teacher’s experience in the
classroom is no less complex than any other, as each child brings his own universe to
class; it is then up to the teacher to make sense out of it, to respond to it and to some
extent, reshape it.
The author is a celebrated intellectual and a popular poet. His poems in Urdu
and Punjabi are widely read.
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