Looking Back!

     Looking back I was remembering a teacher of mine who was very strict, a disciplinarian and a ‘hard task-master’. He was a very good teacher though. His teaching method and his skills were amazing. His subjects were English and Pakistan Studies. The way he taught us and the way and the exact time when he tested us it all fit into the picture so well. I said ‘Fit into the picture’ because I treat the whole system - the teaching, learning, exams and the result and all the other constituents like a picture and all these elements building blocks of that picture. Meaning that if we put a piece somewhere it does not belong; it will not fit and make the picture as a whole look disorderly. So, all his ways fit into the picture so well that elegance emerged.

     

     He was such an iron-fisted teacher that some of the students might have attached the adjective “Draconian” with him. We always remained in awe of him. And the one important thing I forgot to tell you that he was my most favourite teacher in school.

     There was another one of nearly the same category. Very strict he was but was no match for the one I wrote about above. This teacher I really disliked. The reason being that I believed he was unjust, oppressively stern and unreasonably so. He did not even let us cough (even if someone was ill and had cough). Yes cough I mean. He thought that students did so intentionally and to provoke him (and some of us did do it to tease him). So whenever someone coughed, they were in for it. Tough luck! Besides he did not let anyone look back (not even for a reason). In his class you had to sit seriously still, without any movement and with ramrod stiffness; no movement – neither this way nor that. You produce any sound that even remotely sounds like a cough and you have invited trouble. There was always pin-drop silence in his class.

     Then there are some government officials whom we give undue respect (if you let me call that behaviour ‘respect’). Once I saw a soldier (a sepoy) supplicating to a principal to give his son admission. And my God what a poor sight it was. He just did not prostrate physically before him. Short of it everything else he did. Now I do not blame him but our system (for those who do know I am talking about Pakistan). Because that system made him do it and that system did not put any force above that principal who could ask him why he behaved the way he did – arrogantly.

     Now think! These people I just talked about neither give us food, nor drink, nor clothes, nor shelter. Nothing! They are nothing if we take a look at this grand system that we are in – the universe. But still we bow to them, we listen to them, obey them like they are the celestial being. Think! At times even we call ourselves their slaves and literally act like slaves. This is abject slavery – slavery to officials, slavery to system, slavery to feed ourselves and our children, slavery to money. You do not need to think hard to know that some rather most of us are slaves to our own diabolical desires. We are so far from ‘life’. We are social animals in the sense animals are. They attack one another and try to prolong their own life by killing the others – the ones in other species if not the ones in their own group. We do the same – unconsciously we believe aggressively and literally in the ‘survival of the fittest’.

Looking at all these things when I think what part of this respect we give Allah, I shudder. Whereas HE is the God – Allah, The Feeding, The Caring, The Sustainer, The Maker, The all-Knowing, The all-Seeing, The Just, The Forgiving, The Rehman, The Raheem, The Hakeem, The Lateef, The Wakeel and The Kareem. There are many more attributes of His that we even do not know. When we pray we are actually somewhere else (if we pray), we do not listen to Him when in actuality whatever He asks us to believe and do is for our own good. Think!