SIMS and Me (Episode Two) - Abdul Majeed (Batch of '11)

u've read the "medical" side of things from my side, now is the time to introduce u to the literary part. an excerpt from the "literary memoir" " My first “original” piece(the one I wrote all by myself) was published in the college magazine when I was in 9th grade. It was a piece of Satire in Urdu. I have to admit that the idea wasn’t entirely mine and a similar article had been published by the magazine two years ago. What I did was to use the same technique but I expanded that idea and gave it my own words. I wasn’t too much enthralled by it until that Urdu Teacher(who was an acclaimed poet) saw me one day and encouraged me to write more satire because I definitely had the potential.In the Urdu essay that I wrote for my matriculation(10th grade) exam, I wrote more than twenty verses(The essay was on Iqbal, so it was not as difficult as it sounds). I went to another Cadet School the next year. Till that time, I had written dozens of ghazals and even was asked during the Entrance Interview to recite one of them. I tried to dabble in parodies of famous ghazals but failed miserably(I was hooted off stage at one of my rare recitals at a medical school for one such parodies years later). I assissted one of the Urdu teachers there with translating some of Iqbal’s lectures(He was doing M.Phil in Iqbaliaat). That teacher loved my poetry and encouraged me to start writing again. Another Urdu teacher at the institute was himself an established poet and I tried to get his help. Despite some of his effort, I was nowhere near understanding the syntax. He was kind enough to “straighten out” one of my ghazals, which was published in the college magazine. I also got an Urdu essay published which predicted a U.S defeat in Iraq based on history(it was 2003-04). By this time, I had hardly if ever written anything in English. I started reading english newspapers regularly when I arrived at the second cadet school. I also read a lot of books in English around that time. Among the notable ones, I remember reading Khrushev’s autobiography and a collection of essays written by the Pakistan Cricket Team touring West Indies in 1957-8. Based on the library register, I borrowed the most books in the two years that I was at that institute than anyone else. My next destination was a private medical school where I stayed for stayed for almost one month. In the very first week, I met a senior from my first boarding school and while talking to him mentioned that I wrote some poetry etc. I was surprised to find that he was the head of that institute’s literary society. He took me to a society meeting the next day and I recited one of my favorite ghazals there, which apparently was liked by the audience quite much as they decided to induct me in the editorial board there and then. I started work on a future magazine with the society. It was loads of fun and was a welcome respite from the exhausting study schedule. I left after a month but had enough admirers as I got a surprise farewell party when I left. I kept in touch with some of the members of that editorial board over the years. At the next medical school, where I spent my next five years, things were a bit different. Societies were not well organized and there was a preponderance of seniors running those societies, without regard for merit. Nevertheless, I submitted one of my poems for the magazine. It was published two years later, when the magazine itself was published. In the first year, I saw a notification by the University of Health Sciences that they were arranging an essay competition in which the top prizes were 25 thousand, 15 thousand and 10 thousand Rupees. That got my creative juices running and I wrote a first class essay on “Doctors of Tomorrow”. The essay was sent as the representative of our medical school but the competition was probably not held during the dates given in the notification. I never heard from the University or anyone else until someone on my facebook feed told me five years later that someone he knew had won a prize in that competition. I wrote some pieces of satire in the first three years, but not much else. I made it a habit to write at least about the first day of every new academic year. I started writing more regularly at the end of 4th year. At that time, I had planned to get at least one book(not literary) published in two years time. I had collected material for a guide-book for a medical subject. The plan never materialized. It was around that time that an incident changed my outlook on things. It was Salmaan Taseer’s assasination and the reaction to it. The year before that, I had attended a session at LUMS by Badar Khushnood on how young Pakistanis were earning money by blogging. I wrote some Urdu pieces following ST’s assasination, Raymond Davis Affair and OBL incident. They did not get many hits on my blog. I also wrote(but did not put on the blog) my travelogue of the Umrah pilgrimage that I undertook that year. By that time, I had started visiting a place in Lahore called Institute of Peace and Secular Studies(IPSS). I took up a course there on political economy and later attended a lecture series on Religious extremism in Pakistan. That course and the lectures changed my point of view about a lot of things. It was the foundation of my future pursuit of knowledge. In the “non-virtual” world, I was selected as the editor of our Med School’s Urdu Magazine. I had some issues with the person who was made the Editor-in-chief(I wrote a piece of satire about him as well, not for the college mag though) but took the job nonetheless. It was a thankless job, with no particular benefit apart from my own intellectual satisfaction. I tried to publish only those pieces that felt like written by the students themselves(I did my best) and with emphasis on pure Urdu Language(One of the pieces I received was titled “My Favorite Class” written in Urdu Font). For the poetry portion, we consulted one of our faculty members who was a poet himself. He rejected most of the poetry submissions by students and after a lot of give and take, we succeeded in keeping a few student-written poems. In the end, we had to publish poems from famous poets(who had no relation whatsoever to our med school) in the poetry section apart from some of students’ work. Compiling the articles and poems was just one of the steps in getting a magazine published. I had to compose whole sections of the magazine using Inpage myself at times, and after nudging the Chief Editor for months, the magazine was published finally, in a years time. "

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