WINSTON Spencer Churchill was not only a great imbiber of brandy but was firmly convinced that its consumption in large doses would do a lot of good to a lot of men.
At the end of his second term as British prime minister he asked his scientific wizard, Frederick Alexander Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, who was well aware of his daily drinking habits, as to what his estimate was of the number of railway tank wagons full of brandy he had put away in his lifetime. Cherwell took out his slide rule, did some quick calculations, and came up with the answer. ‘Not even a full 20-ton wagon load — merely 0.7653 per cent of a wagon.’ ‘Oh dear,’ sighed the great man, ‘so much to do and such little time left to me.’
‘So much to do’ — that is what strikes me when I think about the education of the people of this overpopulated country.
While trying to find an old book ‘A Physical and Economic Geography of Sind’, written by Dr Manek Bejonji Pithawalla, once principal of our school, the BVS, a doctor of science, a geographer, a geologist, an FRGS and an FGS, I ran into my old friend Godrej Sidwha, a former keeper of the Dasturan Dastur Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla library. This library has an interesting past.
Dhalla, not a rich man, sent a letter to Hoshang Dinshaw, a Parsi philanthropist. He still had a lot to learn, wrote Dhalla, and a lot of research to do. But he had few friends, and the only asset he possessed was his library. He was badly in need of funds and offered to sell it to Dinshaw. The following day, Dinshaw sent him a cheque with a note : “I will buy the books provided you keep them in your home for your use as long as you may live.”
Dhalla predeceased Dinshaw. He died in 1956. His sons, following their father’s ‘farman’, handed over the books to Dinshaw who found a home for them in the government archaeological library. Naturally, they were neither well cared for, nor read, nor appreciated, so eventually the Parsi community retrieved whatever books had not been destroyed or stolen and founded the Dastur Dhalla Memorial Institute Library.
In the year 2000, an efficient librarian of the British Library (oriental and India Office collection), Ursula Sims-Williams, contacted a member of our community. She wrote :
“........ [This letter] concerns some Zoroastrian manuscripts which we have examined and are fairly certain originate from the Dastur Dhalla Memorial Institute Library..... “I enclose a list of the Zoroastrian manuscripts which were offered to us for sale, and we should like to have purchased them, particularly as Dastur Dhalla has a close connection with the India Office Library and catalogued our collection of Iranian manuscripts for us in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1912. However we have serious misgivings as to how they came to leave the Dhalla collection and whether they were legally exported from Pakistan, so we cannot possibly purchase them....”.
So Sidhwa went off to London, identified the documents, and members of our community were able to buy them back from the thief who had offered them to the British library.
More about Dhalla : During the first half of the 20th century the Zoroastrian boys of Karachi’s Bai Virbaijee Soparivala (BVS) school were extremely fortunate in that they received their religious instruction from a scholar of rare brilliance, a highly learned, tolerant, balanced and unassuming theologian, Dasturji Dr Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla, who in 1909, at the age of 35 years, was installed as the High Priest of our city, an office in which he served for over 45 years.
He was born in 1875 at Surat, into a priestly family of modest means. He was trained at the Athoman Madressa in Bombay, and with the help of the Tata Trust, the Karachi Anjuman and other individual Parsi philanthropists obtained admission to Columbia University for advanced studies in Avesta-Pahlavi under Professor A.V.W. Jackson, and was there awarded a PhD for his dissertation on ‘Nyaishes or Zoroastrian Litanies’. When he returned to Columbia in 1929 to participate in the 175th anniversary celebrations he was awarded an honorary D.Litt, largely for his contributions towards the documentation of Zoroastrian civilization.
Dhalla, dubbed Shams-ul-Ulema in 1935, was a great educationist, a firm believer in both religious and secular education, a combination of which he knew was necessary not only to impart knowledge and appeal to understanding, but to build and mould the characters of the young and to teach them to behave according to the knowledge they receive. With Jean-Jacques Rousseau he held that the aim of ideal education is not to train certain faculties of man but just the man. A harmonious culture of body, mind and soul is its objective — physical culture being given its due importance. It has been stressed throughout the ages, down from civilization to civilization that the fine qualities of leadership are developed more on the playground than in the classroom.
Education as we know it today is aimed at the liberation of the mind. There can be no repression, no restriction, no fudging of facts, no distortions of history, no white lies, let alone outright lies in which this country, for one, tends to indulge when teaching its children. The young must learn to question — not merely to accept — to seek, to strive and to find.
They must be taught self-reliance, self-restraint, objectivity, and must be in no doubt about the enormous gulf between good and bad, between truth and untruth. Above all, if a nation is to benefit, progress and rise, education must be universalized, it must reach out to the masses, it has to be brought to every town and village, it must be freely available to those without means, and it must be compulsory.
Now, how far has this part of the world progressed since Dhalla’s days? In his autobiography, he writes of the subcontinent of 1908 : “The Indian nation was illiterate, ignorant and uneducated. It was not conscious of its political rights. It had not yet awakened.” Substitute the word ‘Indian’ with ‘Pakistani’ (not that India is much different) and just under a century later we find that there has been no radical leap forward, no 21st century huge transformation. The minds of the majority of our 160 millions remain tightly fettered to a 10th century stake.
But there is some hope. The people owe a debt to the Musharraf government for having last year denationalized the Forman Christian College of Lahore. Now, last month, Sindh Minister of Education Hamida Khuhro finalized the denationalization of St Patrick’s Boys College and St Joseph’s Girls College. These three institutions were nationalized some 30 years ago and during that period they have surely churned out an unenviable lot of some hundred thousand souls, many of whom, imbued by our national curricula, have been brainwashed into believing that life is not a gift of God and that there is ‘honour’ in killing.
Prime minister-in-waiting, Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz was very nearly murdered on Friday evening. As prime minister he will head the ministry of population welfare (which should be known as the ministry of population control). To suit his financial statistics, he estimates the population of Pakistan to be no more than a 150 million.
The men of the population ministry right now are with him in their estimation that we are a 151.1 million strong. But they are willing to allow for an error of five per cent more or less. The question of it being less cannot arise, so if we calculate it at more, the figure comes up to 159,075,000, or close to 160 million.
God — and Musharraf — willing, Shaukat Aziz will soon be the proud ‘democratically’ freely and fairly elected prime minister of Pakistan. All we can wish him is good luck.