'My Story'

If I could compress my entire undergraduate experience into just four days, one of them would be that day when I found my face burning hot red. Respectful, yet defiantly unyielding, I walked out of the classroom carrying the kind of rebellion only a privileged teenager can afford — to whom life had not yet truly happened.

It was the sixth semester, October 2009, when I was turned out of class, right in front of eighty students, for not paying due attention. Even worse, I decided never to return to the class again! The details, buried long ago, resurfaced as I came across an autobiography, My Story, by Prof Dr Javed Anwar Aziz.

I opened the book, and a flashback took me straight to my class. Dr Javed carried a quiet authority — dressed in a sober grey suit, polished Cambridge shoes, and a dignified silver watch. His neatly combed, gelled hair and disciplined appearance reflected his precision. Though of medium height, his expressive eyes revealed experience, emotion, and the strictness of a seasoned administrator as he spoke with the command of a leader having the gentle wisdom of a grandfather.

I opened Dr Javed's autobiography casually, almost dismissively — expecting another predictable life story. But I closed it humbled, shaken by the raw honesty stitched into every page. His life unfolded like a quiet storm: the loss of his mother in childhood, the bruises of family conflict, the pain of children's divorces, the financial struggles that shadowed him, and the undignified search for work after retirement. What moved me most was the silent tragedy of public-sector academics like him — men who spent decades teaching, researching, nurturing generations, only to reach old age with nothing but a government salary that never imagined their future. No safety nets. No investments. No second income. Just a lifetime of service, and a fragile old age.

Then comes the most painful chapter: the loss of his son.

A story of mental illness, drugs, struggle for survival, medical negligence, and how some in the health sector exploited a grieving family. But the deeper tragedy is how a father — a respected professor — was left to shoulder this unimaginable burden entirely alone. He talks about the separations of his sons from their spouses, but maintains respect for all those people who were once part of his family. This is very appreciable in a society where every relation, contract, deal and bond ends in dissent, contempt, abuse and mudslinging.

It reminds me of one of my couplets (Bharm Qaeim rahay kya kharabi hay? Izzat sa bicharna bhi kamyabi ha), what is the harm in having a graceful exit? It is indeed an accomplishment.

In the end, Dr Javed Anwar Aziz's autobiography is not the rise of a tycoon or the glory of a celebrity. It is something far more valuable: the story of a life lived fully, imperfectly, courageously against all odds.

Reading it made me wonder why our universities don't require professors to deliver a final public lecture on their retirement and incentivise them to write their autobiographies, not as ego monuments, but as guides. These lives contain navigational tools for those who will inherit the storms they once survived in silence.

True to academic tradition, he mentioned his closest students — with photos, anecdotes, and affectionate notes. But he forgot to mention those he once turned out of class, and one of them learnt the most precious lesson from it — anger management, i.e. we don't need to suppress our anger but need to channelise it. It helped me top his class, and I followed the same lesson whenever I felt angry, cornered, or belittled in a situation. I owe a lot of my gains in life to what he taught me that day.

Dr Javed is eighty-one years young now, is called 'Grand Master' and is setting a new trend of writing books post-retirement in Pakistan. I will suggest to him to involve more of his contemporaries and develop a human library for students, focusing on our local problems, challenges, issues, obstacles and how to be resilient.

Clap for you, Sir. Regards.