Going the extra mile

It only takes courage to go that extra mile and accomplish what you want. I met a man in his late 70s who had a dream, a dream to educate out-of-school children. His dream is called ‘Ilm Dost Qaida’.

We barely know people, even with the money and resources, who would want to work for a noble cause. This man, with no resources apart from his pension money and time, made a simple textbook for children and adults who cannot get formal education. The man was not educated but he was taught by a librarian and his education made him sensitive to the needs of others. Twenty years on, he sits on the same makeshift bookstall with the same dream.

The Pakistanis cannot give back the years that Waseemuddin Siddiqui spent on making that qaida, but maybe they can join his mission. When Siddiqui made the first 50,000 copies out of his pension money, he did not think of selling those — rather, he distributed the batch to children begging on the streets. On a fine afternoon, I went to meet this Ilm Dost on Aliya Bookstall next to the Khairabad Tea Shop on the main roundabout of Shaheen Complex, Karachi. He took me to the teashop and opened up a file; it had all his documents, the qaida, newspaper cuttings and some notices. One by one, he explained each document: the newspaper cuttings were stories in which he had been mentioned while notices were like fake promises the government made to him countless times as he still keeps on writing to them hoping that one day they would reply. “You see the problem is, parents do not send their children to school  because they can’t go through the hassle of submitting their documents,” he said. “They don’t even have the documents to begin with,” he said talking about birth certificates, B-forms and NICs. After we were done with our tea, he did not even let me pay for it.

We have all kinds of literary heroes and those people are either teachers or writers — why not consider this man a hero too? The last time I checked, he falls equal on the checklist for heroes.  Do we even bother looking around for such ordinary people trying to achieve something extraordinary? I know many education initiatives but has there ever been any initiative so selfless? We see the government spending huge amount on making schools, why haven’t they ever thought of children out-of-school? How many of us bother to go the extra mile?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th, 2014.