Masarat Daud
TEDxDubai - Masarat Daud - 10/10/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8y8UyT2UMk
The World Economic Forum has recently published a report that has immense relevance to our time.
Faith and the Global Agenda: Values for the Post-Crisis Economy is the report that shares research findings from respondents all over the world to questions about values, ethics and the economic / political crisis we have got ourselves into. The research was conducted on Facebook and some 130,000 responses were noted from 10 countries. A majority of the respondents were below 30 years of age and the findings showed that over two thirds of the people interviewed believed that the global financial crisis is also a crisis of values and ethics.
The scope of the research is wide. However this article seeks to draw attention to one of the aspects that emerged in the findings. When asked, “From where do you primarily derive your personal values?”, about 62% of the respondents answered, “From Education and Family”.
The above response sets the theme for this article. It points to the fact that despite a vast number of people looking onto education for shaping their personal values, the world is beset with deep-rooted problems that need urgent redress.
There is an increasing need to reform the existing education structure so that it enables individuals towards helping the world out of conflict and greed. Here is what we at Schuitema believe needs to change in the way education is being imparted:
Cooperation Vs Competition:
The dynamics of human community changed on the planet as it moved towards agriculture from hunting and gathering.
As a hunter / gatherer, man was working with others to secure his livelihood and to protect himself and his family against common dangers. This was the Cooperative Model. But as a farmer, man was focused on his own patch of land to produce his own surplus. Surplus brought wealth and wealth brought power. And thus began the rat race for power through competition.
Sadly, Education today is also feeding a failed system of competition versus cooperation. For too long now, Education has sought to produce winners against losers. The highest marks, grades and GPA’s raise one’s probability of landing up with a well paid job and cushy life. Quite like the agricultural surplus.
This has brought grave repercussions to humans as society because:
And ironically, little was being imparted in the education system about handling the dynamics of this; conflict / stress / time management, being receptive, active listening are all derivatives of the vacuum caused by Education based on the Competitive Model.
Life Skills Vs Earning Skills:
As it is based on a competing model focused on outcomes, the Education System is churning out individuals who are focused on earning well as against living well!
Specialists are now concerned that the education structure does little to impart life skills such as morality, values, respecting the environment, positive adaptation to change, etc. Values Education is being taken up as unconventional movements in many countries, but it needs to be disseminated to the teeming masses that desperately need this kind of stuff.
A positive development in this regard is the emergence of Holistic Education (the basis of which is the 3 R’s of Relationships, Responsibility and Reverence for all Life as against the 3 R’s of Conventional Education which are Reading, Writing and Arithmetic); a subject we will explore in future articles.
Time Bound Vs Flexible Time
Sometime ago, conventional education experts realized that numeric surpluses as criterion of academic success was flawed. Thereby the outcome based learning system of education was devised.
According to this, experts specified the skill set or competencies to be gauged in a student for instruction / teaching received in a particular field of learning. Take for instance martial arts. The successful graduate is to demonstrate a series of maneuvers at the end of a course. Ancient methods of education focused on imparting the series of maneuvers as per the student’s learning pace; whereas, modern education binds the teaching and learning outcome within a time frame.
“As William Spady described it in both 1994 and 1998, the world’s education systems are time based: that is, they are defined by, organized around, focused on, and managed according to the calendar and clock, not outcomes. Virtually everything that happens within them is forced to exist within fixed, predefined blocks of time, no matter how much actually needs to be accomplished by either instructors or learners. When an official time block ends, so does the learner’s opportunity to pursue the outcomes and improve performance on them.
From this perspective, introducing outcomes into a time-based system is like trying to force soft, large, round pegs into rigid, small, square holes. To date, the holes have emerged the overwhelming winners. Across the globe time has remained the given and the constant, even though outcomes have increasingly been emphasized as the reason the time blocks exist.” – Education Encyclopedia.
Until these deep rooted flaws are removed from the structure of education as we know it today, human society will continue to move towards a moral bankruptcy despite having ‘highly educated’ individuals.
References:
Images courtesy:
Delaying Gratification
One of the greatest challenges in my life has been to start a piece of work. I have suffered from delaying things endlessly and would only do them when the push comes to shove. This habit of mine has won annoyance of my parents, wife, friends, bosses, subordinates and even my clients. I always wonder why I do that. Strange thing is that once the work starts to roll, doing it is a very pleasant experience for me. Isn’t it weird that one delays something that fundamentally brings joy to him? This article is an exploration into the self trying to understand what underpins this behavior.
Let’s take a specific example; it’s always useful to understand things from a point of reference because it brings in the clarity. My work as a consultant, trainer, coach and counselor provides me with opportunities to interact with people in varying contexts on the issue of excellence. It is an extremely interesting work and it gives immense insights into various issues. I have found these insights to be very helpful in my life and many of my audiences also have similar experiences. Therefore, there is a natural desire to write about these insights. However, I delay writing on one pretext or another which is so trivial that it would require some courage to mention it.
Question is why is it so?
In order to answer the above question it would be worthwhile to analyze what happens when I sit down to pen my thoughts. Naturally to start with, thoughts are scattered and there is no flow in the ideas. One writes a few lines and then they are erased. It takes quite a while before focus develops and sentences start emerging. This is the most critical period. If I am able to survive it the article gets done. Otherwise, my notebooks are full of unfinished articles. Generally, as soon as I enter into this period of confusion I want to do something else, for example: cleaning my table, having a snack, watching TV, calling a friend, etc. Now if you look at all these activities they provide an immediate gratification because the outcome is immediate.
On the other hand writing an article requires me to delay gratification. I need to sit down, develop focus, overcome my frustration of not being able to sequence my ideas etc. However, as the time passes and the article takes some shape, I start enjoying it and I feel excited.
So the key is can I delay gratification? Can I live with the notion that even though I will be working, there will not be any outcome for sometime?
If we want to do anything substantial in life we should be able to suspend our need for immediate gratification. This is true for an individual as well as collective and in all contexts. The reason why we fail most of the times is not that we don’t have the means or the ability to do things. It is because we don’t have the patience, we are too focused on the outcome. And when the outcome is not there we lose interest. Any meaningful task requires a sustained effort over a period of time. There is always a time delay between contribution and results.
Path to excellence lies in finding gratification in effort and the results come automatically.
Last month a property tax notice showed up in our mail. It was an exorbitant sum that needed to be paid urgently. My parents-in-law have over the years made sure that they do everything it takes to abide law. But this sudden notice was a bit unsettling for them.
We decided to ask around for advice on what to do about it. There was a suggestion that we bribe our way to a settlement that ensured no further property tax ever. There was another suggestion to ignore the notice since the government had done little development in the area anyway. The gentleman said that he even paid for the electricity pole for his house from his pocket and to avoid further tax notices from a corrupt, irresponsible and wretched government, he had gotten his house registered as two small houses which fell under the No Tax bracket!
When we asked around if we could apply for the sum to be paid in installments, we were told that the government office staff is incredibly rude, bureaucratic and corrupt and chances are that we would be making several trips to the offices all asking us to go through a really convoluted process that will make us regret our very nationality!
Nevertheless, my folks decided to give it a shot. That is getting the sum chopped into installments. This was a feat that required great courage. Since my in laws have been through the ‘incredible experience’ at other government offices which we were now being warned about. Anyone who is familiar with the Pakistani government office system will know what I mean.
However, to their surprise, they met a very competent and cooperative officer at the Revenue Office. He thanked them for coming and explained that the sum was exorbitant because they had not been paying the tax for six years since they moved to this place. When he was told that this was the first notice ever served, he took responsibility of his department’s negligence and agreed to chop the payment into installments. He also informed them of dates by which full payments receive tax rebates. The property tax he explained paid for making and repairing the sewage pipes underneath our locality, without which our neighborhood would be a filthy swamp of refuse and stench.
When he was told that no Water Tax notices ever came either, he made a note of it and told my folks the sum (which was paltry for the amount of water we use in a year) that they would be paying every year from now. My folks readily agreed and returned thanking him. They were expecting him to demand his ‘Commission’ for making their trip productive and running around in various departments to get the installments process expedited. Yet he claimed nothing for himself.
The incident brought a realization that if one earnestly intends to follow the appropriate way, things smooth out most of the time. There is an Urdu saying ‘Niyaat Saaf, Manzil Aasaan’ which translates roughly to ‘Clean Intent, Easy Destination’. How life treats us really depends on what we intend to give in a situation.
It’s common in Pakistan to blame the government for not providing basic amenities that Pakistani expatriates avail of so effortlessly. And yet, bribery, tax evasion and shortcuts by citizens in Pakistan are rampant.
There is a price to pay for availing of bounties. Consider this. To ensure that your teeth remain strong, healthy and disease-free, you would need to brush them twice daily, use floss and mouth wash regularly.
Tooth paste, tooth brush, floss and mouth wash. These are the prices you have to pay if all is well. If you do not give your body the due you owe it, the price will rise higher and higher with time. Eventually, if you keep evading the price, you will land up in the dentist’s chair and pay an exorbitant sum for a cavity filling, a root canal or a complete denture. If you still decide to forego this essential payment, chances are that you are compromising on what you can eat. Diet deficiency leads to serious disease. And if you still don’t care enough, the price will now shift onto others for its scale. Your family might end up paying for your hospitalization and so on. There then comes a time when no matter what price you are willing to pay, you cannot afford to have things as you want them.
Same goes for a society.
One stolen electricity connection means a higher per unit cost for the rest of the people. The higher the price for electricity, the higher the input cost in factories making items everyone uses; the electricity thief included.
In Pakistan, a nation of 180 million people, the tax revenue collected is only 10% of the GDP, which is one of the lowest in the region. An estimated 796 billion rupees worth of tax was evaded in 2007 – 2008. Additionally, out of a population of 180 million, there are 2.7 million commercial and business establishments which are registered as being able to pay tax. Out of these only 685,000 pay tax! And there is no data to say how many individuals are actually claiming to be unable to pay tax in the first place. Tax evasion in Pakistan is a colossal menace. And it stems down to an individual’s selfish intent.
Maturity requires that a citizen gives what is due to the society. A body of individuals that act appropriately by giving what is due to the society make up a benevolent society. A society that emphasizes on its duties more than its rights is mature and driven towards benevolence whereas a society that emphasizes on its rights more than its duties is driven towards malevolence and selfishness. This simply means that in a given situation, a citizen must see what he can give as duty rather than what he can take as a right.
Little wonder then that in Pakistan one often hears entrepreneurs say that in order to manage a profitable business in this country, one has to compromise on one’s values.
Is it pure coincidence then, that a nation with so many individual and commercial tax evaders is being ruled by a leader who is facing allegations of misappropriation worth billions of dollars?
Consider the price that is rising with each minute of inappropriateness.
Reference:
Zara Husain is the Schuitema Hero this month. We think so because she has realised at a very young age that her condition and circumstances enable her to make a phenomenal difference in the lives of people like her in Pakistan.
In her story, we found Trust, Courage, Gratitude and Generosity (from the matrix of Benevolent Intention in the book Intent by E. Schuitema).
This article was printed in 2008. Today Zara’s mother heads a school for the deaf in Lahore at her residence and is a certified speech therapist. The staff at the school rave about Zara’s enthusiasm and zeal for helping children who are deaf. They yearn for Zara to complete her PhD soon and be back at the school where she plans to implement all that she is learning.
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Demanding a Hearing
Written by Maria Blackburn
Photo by Will Kirk
Courtesy: The John Hopkins Magazine 2008
Zara Husain, Ed ‘08, could not believe her eyes. The yellow school bus she saw idling at a traffic light on a busy city street in
Lahore, Pakistan, caught her attention for being old and decrepit, but it was the sight of the two little boys riding the bus that made her stare in disbelief. Their hands moved in a flurry of gestures that were unmistakable. They were speaking sign language.
Her heart raced. Husain, who is deaf, had been forbidden from learning sign language as a child and had rarely seen deaf people signing on the street in her hometown. She moved closer to the bus. “Hey,” she wanted to say. “I’m deaf like you.” But the light changed and the bus lurched forward. That’s when she noticed the words printed in Urdu underneath its windows: “Gung Mahal, school for deaf and dumb, Gulberg, Lahore.”
The words infuriated Husain. Deaf and dumb? They still have this? she thought. Don’t they know that dumb means stupid?
Husain knew. Going to high school in the United States had opened her eyes to deaf culture, to the need to assert her rights as a deaf person. She knew the use of the word “dumb” was not only outdated and outmoded, it was wrong. The administrators of the government-run school for the deaf should know it, too, she thought.
Being called “dumb” was just one of the many issues deaf Pakistanis confronted. Many had never learned how to read and write, and therefore lacked decent jobs. Unable to communicate with the hearing, they were treated like second-class citizens. “Most developing countries, including Pakistan, have a paternal attitude toward people with disabilities,” says Husain. “They say they pity them and they help give them hearing aids, but they don’t encourage them to do things on their own.”
On the street that February afternoon in 2001, amid bus exhaust and idling cars, an unlikely advocate was born.
Husain considers herself a good Sunni Muslim woman — respectful to her elders, obedient to her parents, devoted to her family and to Allah. But when she realized how badly those with disabilities were educated and treated in her native Pakistan, she could not stand by and watch. “Sometimes you have to speak up,” she says
Now 27, she has spent the last 10 years working for change, and plans to continue that work for the rest of her life. Her vision: that Pakistan’s deaf get the assistance and education they need. “I want society to understand there’s a need not to take the paternal approach,” says Husain, who came to the Johns Hopkins School on scholarship from the government of Pakistan last fall to pursue a master’s degree in special education technology. She graduated in May. “There needs to be empowerment via a social model where the deaf can feel stronger, stand on their own two feet, implement their own ideas, and live a successful life.” of Education
As the only deaf child in hearing schools, Husain knew how it felt to be isolated, invisible. Her graduate research gave her a richly detailed picture of the state of the Pakistani deaf community. She holds a second master’s in special education, and hopes to continue her studies in special education through a PhD program. “I came to America for one reason,” she says. “To learn all kinds of different things so that I can go back to Pakistan and help the deaf community there.”
Sitting at a table in the busy student lounge at the School of Education’s Columbia Center one evening in mid-March, Husain
looks like many other graduate students studying for midterms. She has shiny shoulder-length dark brown hair and wears jeans and designer tortoise-shell glasses. “I hate my glasses, but I need them because I ruined my eyes with all the closed-captioned TV I watched in the dark when I was in high school,” she says.
Zara with her parents
If Husain had been born deaf in the United States, she likely would have gone to public school with interpreters and other resources to accommodate her needs. She would have watched closed-captioned television at home, used hearing aids to make the most of her residual hearing, and taken advantage of assistive technologies like teletypewriters to talk via telephone. But none of this was available in Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Husain was a child, and very little of it is widely available today. In fact, 25 years ago when her parents realized their year-old daughter was deaf, even hearing aids were an unheard-of luxury. The few schools for the deaf in Pakistan’s cities offered a poor quality education in shabby buildings that lacked even the most basic equipment, Husain says. Teachers didn’t speak sign language, and students were taught through memorization, with little emphasis on actual learning. Few deaf students went to college; most were limited to jobs like working as tailors or doing data entry, forcing them to live with relatives throughout adulthood.
Most of these conditions haven’t changed in the last quarter century. “Ours is a backward country,” says Iftikhar Husain, Zara’s father. “We are not as well off as the United States. The feeling of the general public here is that deaf people can’t be brought up to the level of hearing students.”
In Pakistan, people with disabilities are largely perceived as “unfortunate ones who can’t perform their roles in society,” says Zara Husain.
This is especially true in rural areas, according to Akram Muhammad, a Pakistani deaf advocate who was interviewed last October for an article on i711.com, an Internet relay site for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. “Some . . . families do not send their deaf daughters to school,” Muhammad, who is deaf, said in the interview. “They may feel ashamed if they have a deaf or disabled child in the family. Deaf women and girls are doubly discriminated [against]; they seldom have an opportunity to develop their abilities. No one listens to them, and they can’t express themselves.”
Pakistan “is essentially the way the United States was back in the 1950s, the way we treated people with disabilities then,” says Husain’s adviser, John Castellani, an associate professor in the School of Education’s Department of Teacher Development and Leadership. “People don’t really understand concepts like inclusion.”
Husain was born with a hearing loss of 85 decibels in her left ear and 95 decibels in her right ear. Without hearing aids, she is unable to hear a sound as loud as a telephone ringing or a dog barking. With them, she can hear papers rustling, a cell phone beeping, and understand some speech sounds. Though her parents found her the best hearing aids possible, from the outset, Husain’s mother, Salma Iftikhar, had difficulty accepting her daughter’s condition. She forbade her to learn to sign because she didn’t want her to be marked as deaf. “In America, sign language is accepted as a language itself,” Husain explains. “In Pakistan, it is like a taboo.” (Even now, Salma says her daughter has a “hearing problem.” Zara’s response: “Mom, I’m deaf. What’s the problem?”
When Zara Husain was about 5, her mother decided not to put her in a deaf school. “I want her to read like any other child,” she told her husband. She approached the principal of a small private school called Eton and volunteered to teach her daughter’s class of six students. For five years she taught there, adapting material for Zara and teaching her how to speak, read, and write. However, when she became ill and had to stop teaching, Zara’s school experience changed drastically. From then on, she sat in classes where she couldn’t understand the teachers. She stared at the walls, the clock, the other students, trying to pass the hours of silence. “I missed so much,” she says of her lessons.
In 1995, her father accepted a post at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C., so the family could move to the United States and Zara could go to school. At W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, Husain thrived. As one of about 60 deaf and hard-of-hearing students, she attended regular education classes accompanied by an interpreter. For the first time in her life, she made deaf friends, learned sign language, and went to speech therapy. “At home in Pakistan, Zara was often depressed,” her father says. “In the United States she loved school. She could go out with her friends. There was a transformation in her personality.”
Husain had long struggled with the question of whether or not she was “normal.” While in the United States, her parents strongly encouraged her to get cochlear implants. When she was 16, Husain decided that for her, deaf was normal. She didn’t want the surgery. “I thought, if I [continue] speech therapy and I speak pretty well, then why would I need a cochlear implant?” Husain says. “I am natural the way I am born. So if Allah made me deaf to face tough tests, then it is fine. I will succeed
Husain graduated from high school a year early and returned to Pakistan with her family in 1999. She earned a BA in English
literature, journalism, and applied psychology from Kinnaird College in 2001, then enrolled in a master’s degree program in special education at the University of the Punjab. While in the States, she had read plenty of books about American Sign Language (ASL) and American deaf culture. But when she looked for similar materials in the university’s library, she found nothing at all about Pakistani Sign Language and Pakistani deaf culture. “I was bothered by how the deaf community was given a non-existent status in the literature,” she says. “They were around in society, but our people did not give them the recognition they deserved.”
Faced with such a dearth of information, Husain focused her graduate research on understanding and documenting the deaf community in her country. Her thesis would be the first substantial research devoted to the topic — and the first step, she thought, to changing the way Pakistani society treated its deaf. In 2003, accompanied by a deaf friend who was fluent in Pakistani Sign Language, Husain interviewed 50 deaf adults and teenagers in Lahore. She asked a series of 40 questions about their education, social and communication skills, job satisfaction, self-esteem, and life goals. What she discovered was a diverse group of individuals who enjoyed being with other deaf people but didn’t identify themselves as a distinct culture. “Deaf communities are being divided, not united under one umbrella,” Husain says.
Zara with her husband in the U.S.
Deaf people she interviewed in Lahore thought they should do their best to fit into the hearing world. They hadn’t heard about technological devices like TTYs and relay systems. Nor were they aware of Pakistan’s National Policy for People with Disabilities, a legislative paper finalized by the government in 2002 that aimed to provide care, education, and rehabilitation for people with disabilities but remains unfunded and largely unpublicized.
During the interviews, nearly every person she spoke with, teen or adult, started off by telling Husain they were happy to be deaf. “To be deaf is considered a gift from Allah,” Husain explains. However, as the interviews went on, her subjects revealed just how miserable they felt.
They were poor. “My husband is very cruel,” said one woman who, because of deafness, was largely isolated from the world outside her home. “He does not give me money for feeding the children. I keep borrowing money from people, other relatives. My fate is destroyed with this man.”
Many couldn’t read and write. “Our teachers are not good,” a student at Ram Nagar School for Deaf Girls told her. “They sit free all [the] time. They tell us to clean the rooms. They drink tea and have us buy food for them.” One male student, who said his teachers did not sign at all, added, “My teacher is foolish. He always scolds us for no reason. When we can’t understand, he talks for an hour telling us we are bad and deaf. Why can’t we be like hearing people? We are stupid. We can’t speak like hearing people — this is what he does. He insults our feelings.”
Some believed that hearing people were universally superior to them. “Normal and deaf people are never equals,” an old woman told Husain. “We do not have good jobs. But hearing people do. We are uneducated, and we understand language very little. But hearing people are educated, and they understand language. What can we do? Hearing people are better than us. We feel sad.”
So many of the deaf she spoke with sounded so helpless. Some talked about how they wanted foreign governments to help them move away from Pakistan; others complained that their own government should do more. “Change your approach,” she wanted to tell them. “You all have a responsibility to help the government as much as they have a responsibility to help you. Teach them how to communicate with you. Learn to help each other. You have to let go of that helplessness and be assertive.” Her interviews led Husain to realize how much needed to be done. There needed to be equal education for the deaf from elementary school through college, development of intervention programs to reduce communication problems among the deaf, increased recognition of Pakistani Sign Language, and access to skilled translators. Perhaps most importantly, deaf Pakistanis had to learn how to advocate for themselves and come together in a grassroots movement. “People needed to know that they could be successful,” she says. “They could do it.”
Husain knew the readership for her thesis was small, and she didn’t want her work to languish on a library shelf. So she decided to make a short documentary that would reach both deaf and hearing audiences through voiceover and onscreen Pakistani Sign Language interpretation. The film features interviews with deaf Pakistanis and portrays both the positive and negative aspects of being deaf in Pakistan. “I wanted to capture the voices and realities of the lives of deaf people and students in Pakistan,” she says.
Husain also saw the film as a way to introduce Pakistan’s deaf to the idea of advocacy, a concept that had changed her own outlook a dozen years before. She concluded the documentary with a brief explanation of the National Policy for People with Disabilities and told viewers how Pakistan’s deaf could bring about change by working with provincial and federal governments and by collaborating with deaf communities in other cities. The 15-minute film is scheduled to air on television in Pakistan in the coming months. “I hope once it’s shown on TV there will be a change,” she says. “I wanted people to know that it is OK to be deaf. Deaf voices should be seen and heard.”
When Husain graduated with an MA in special education in 2003, she became the first deaf person to earn a graduate
degree from the University of the Punjab in the school’s 121-year history. As the top student in her class, she was also awarded a gold medal and 100,000 rupees (about $1,500).
A year after graduation, Husain married Tahir Rathore, a deaf American-born Pakistani who works for the U.S. Department of Defense, and she moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to live with him. It was an arranged marriage, one that Husain, a dutiful daughter, readily accepted. But she refused to give up her life’s work for it. “I don’t want to let the marriage interfere in my plans,” she says. “I still have a goal to finish” — the goal of working with the Higher Education Commission in Pakistan to help people with disabilities get a quality education.
Husain began graduate studies in international development at Gallaudet University. But when the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan awarded her a full scholarship, she found that Gallaudet wasn’t on the list of universities the scholarship would cover. Johns Hopkins was, however, and offered a master’s degree in technology in special education. Husain saw technology as a “breakthrough” to helping accommodate Pakistani students with disabilities in schools. She began at Hopkins last fall.
Her courses, which focused on assistive technologies like online classes and software programs that help students with disabilities relate to lessons in the classroom, were a challenge at first. “Learning to do technology in the first course of the program was very overwhelming for me. I was used to . . . teaching by paper, chalkboard, transparencies, pen, group activities, and worksheets,” she says. “I had no idea about online discussions and the complexities that come with designing an online course.” An academic year later, Husain can imagine herself using blogs and video logs to encourage deaf Pakistanis to sign and type over the Internet. Computers, she says, will provide the “visual platform to real-life situations where they can present their understanding practically.” Although technology resources in Pakistan are limited and Internet speed and access could be major hurdles, Husain is determined to adapt what she has learned for her home country. She plans to start a school for the deaf in the speech clinic her mother opened in 2001, and to use assistive technologies and computer software and hardware to help students learn. Her school, she says, could serve as a model, offering Pakistani educators a vision of how technology could be used to help people with all kinds of disabilities.
Of course, technology won’t solve every problem. Sometimes, Husain says, the parents of deaf children she meets in her mother’s speech clinic make a fuss over her ability to speak. She deflects their attention, suggesting instead that they focus on themselves and, more importantly, their own children. “Parents at my mother’s clinic cry in front of me,” she says. “‘I have a deaf kid,’ they say. ‘What am I going to do about their future? Will they be able to marry? Will they have a high education like you?’”
“Don’t cry in front of your children,” she tells them. “Even though they cannot hear, that doesn’t mean they don’t know you are upset about them.”
And when parents say they feel terrible that their deaf children are “not normal,” Husain stops them from speaking another word. “I am normal,” she tells them. “Your children are normal. They are fine. You are the person in need of help.”
Maria Blackburn is a senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine.
Zara and her mother at the Lahore School for Deaf
Am I a grain of sand in the universe
Or is the universe a grain of sand in my hand?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Make your dreams a reality
Before reality makes YOU a mere dream
Make history
Before you are made history
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When they stopped believing in us
We were given the divine choice
Should we be like them all our lives
Or should we never stop believing in us
I wont stop believing in us
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
True brilliance rises,
Like roses from a dark pond;
From some of the most insignificant
and troubled waters
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You think you are safe when you scorn
When you hate and when you discriminate others
But your safe haven behind ‘their’ walls is a prison
Where you shall be locked all your life
So learn to appreciate
That what you cannot understand my friends.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I shall seek and I shall find
The waves in the seas of my mind
To swim through and beyond unconfined
To realms undefined
To peace, to solice,
In my parallel mind
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I feel
I grieve
I remember the fragrances
The distant sounds
The glimpses of my past
The memories of a forgotten life
My life.
Am I still the same person as I was back then?
I wish I was
But then
Would I cherish all of my past
As I cherish it today?
Would I feel it as much
As I feel it today?
I guess all I should do now is
Live and love and strive
To be cherished…forever
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Somtimes life gets difficult
And we feel we might fall
We endup neglecting a lot of special things
Which actually might be our ticket out of these difficulties
If we just open our eyes
We get trapped in the bottomless pit of worries and pretention
We stop feeling as well
Just to survive
Or so we think we are surviving
We are merely breathing
When we tread this dangerous path
We do fall
Only further than we had anticipated before
Lets try and change
Lets try and cherish the special things
We ignore every day.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There comes a time in all our lives
When we feel loneliness, hurt and fear
All three at the same time
The hurt we really feel as it feels like our hurt is a
boxers practice punching bag
It keeps hitting us and tiring us
All we can do is take deep breaths
And keep telling ourselves
We understand… we understand.
I recently saw an advertisement for a children’s nutrient drink that was amusing and thought provoking.
In the ad that blamed nutritional deficiency for the lack of concentration, children put up questions like, “What if Newton had kept sleeping when the apple fell on him?” and, “What if during his Eastern conquest, Alexander the Great had gotten confused between his left and right?”
While it is true that a person with dietary deficiencies may find it difficult to concentrate, what really accounts for focus and presence is the Mind.
Many a times we are not giving our best to a situation because we are just not present in it. Our mind is on an ‘auto-pilot’ mode as a friend calls it and simply enacts and reads out its own script. That is why we sometimes get hit trying to pass through a glass door we never really saw. In the schuitemese terminology this is called Internal Dialogue and is a big deterrent to enabling a person from responding to a given situation appropriately.
I have had a chronic problem of Internal Dialogue since I was a kid. Perhaps that is why my frequency of forgetting where I put the car keys and the phone charger as well as hitting doors, walls, cabinets, gates, faucets etc has been incredible. The problem becomes even more pronounced when I sit down to write a piece; the mind wanders so far off that it’s difficult to reign and produce something worthwhile.
At Schuitema, we include an exercise for ‘Silencing the Inner Dialogue’ in all our workshops. What this does simply is to train the mind to coming back into the present by being attuned to the environment one is in. I have found that if done conscientiously every day and especially before doing something that requires focus, it can greatly expand my attention and focus.
Silencing the Inner Dialogue Exercise:
Participants always remark how blank their mind feels after the exercise. It is in this state that the human mind is most alert, effective and productive.
Meditation techniques like yoga, sufic chants or simply prayers are actually meant to bring the mind to the its rightful place. Like Eckhart Tolle says in the ‘Power of Now’ that you are phenomenally more powerful than your mind.
In our observation, prayers or meditation following the exercise above can do wonders for expanding one’s concentration, focus and presence.
Paying Attention to the Present:
Eckhart Tolle further states that the key to being present is to bring your mind to Now. In the Now there is no regret, guilt (feelings tied to the past) and no anxiety, fear (feelings tied to the future).
How can one arrive to NOW?
Simply by giving attention to the moment one is in.
For instance, I find that making chapattis is one of the best ways to bring your mind to the NOW. It is really an art to make the perfect chapatti. You have to give your fullest to the moment in ensuring that a given piece is perfectly round, thin, cooked and soft.
Birds had been an inspiration for Da Vinci in designing the sketch of the first aircraft in human history
Perhaps that is why; the diaries of Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most genius men that ever lived, was enraptured with NOW. He advised people to attune themselves to the trivia around them; feel the morsel bite into tiny pieces as it’s eaten, absorb the colour of a bright blue sky, smell the air and hear the universe.
Now has a beautiful and magical way of opening wonders should one pay attention. Insights, discoveries, inventions, nirvana… all exists in the NOW.
What seems trivial NOW may hold the key to some of the greatest wonders one might ever come across.
Jim Collins has rightfully indicated that a key quality of exceptional leaders is humility. This view has become increasingly current, with the growing interest in the spiritual quotient of leadership and the growing body of work in the field of servant leadership. As an independent theme, I have found many clients struggling with the issue of employee trust in the leadership of the enterprise, since this is often seen as a critical variable in enabling the success and, in some cases, the ongoing viability of the enterprise. While the Care and Growth model provides a framework to understand how and why trust in the leadership of an organisation develops over time, I think it is useful to explore the explicit relationship between the perceived trustworthiness of a leader and the leader’s humility.
In the course of some fieldwork I was conducting on a goldmine in the eighties, I asked an employee why he did not trust management. His answer was straight forward: ‘I can’t trust a man who does not trust me’, he said. At the time the comment struck me as being insightful in a folksy way, but it took some time for the profundity of what the man said to sink in. If I don’t trust someone I clearly feel that they are dangerous to me. My attitude to them will therefore be combative, I will seek to control them or disable them in some way to protect myself. If I don’t trust them I will therefore probably behave in ways that will make them not trust me. This suggests that the there is a direct relationship between the trustworthiness of the leader and the degree to which the leader trusts.
So, if the ability of the leader to trust is a key variable in cultivating his trustworthiness, then it is important to understand the necessary conditions that set up his predisposition to trust. It is important to recognise that trust has a very definite deportment with regard to time. Trust looks forward. You trust what someone may do, what could happen. You trust that outcome is probably going to be benign. In this sense trust is diametrically opposite to control. When you control you are trying to ensure or guarantee an outcome. You therefore assume that the outcome cannot be entrusted to the other, because you have to control the other. Trust looks forward in time.
This ability to look forward in trust is based on particular attitude to the past. If I look at the past and recognise that what has happened to me in the past has had more blessing than curse in it, and that things have worked out in ways beyond what I can account for on the basis of my own ingenuity, then it is easy for me to trust. In short, the degree to which my appraisal of the past is grounded in gratitude is simultaneously the degree to which I am able to trust the future. The degree to which I look backward in gratitude is the degree to which I am able to look forward in trust.
Gratitude that is not based on an insight of inselfsufficiency is not really gratitude at all. If I am self sufficient then the other’s assistance to me is of no account. I don’t really need it. If and if I express gratitude under these conditions it is with very little sincerity. In fact, my expression of gratitude will at best be seen as cosmetic and at worst be seen as smug. It is precisely this smugness that so winds people up with untrustworthy leaders. This smugness is experienced as a deep arrogance. The opposite of this smugness is a genuine appreciation and gratitude that indicates a measure of vulnerability in the leader. This vulnerability is experience as humility.
To conclude: The gratitude of the leader is manifest in a humble demeanour. It is precisely this gratitude which enables the leader to trust. The degree to which the leader trusts is the degree to which he is trustworthy. There is a direct connection between the humility and trustworthiness of the leader.
I was reading a comment in response to an article I had written entitled “Cultivating Willingness in Teachers”. The author of the comment stated that the basic structure of schools as we know them today is malevolent by design. ie. it is intended to get something out of children rather then to give something to them. The author went on to assert that this makes it impossible for teachers working in schools to have a benevolent Intent.
Sadly for our children, the first part of the comment is fundamentally accurate. The basic school structure we take for granted today originated in Germany in the 1850’s in institutions known as “gymnasiums”. This was the first attempt at mass education and its purpose was to create administrators for the growing colonial empires of the 19th century. These schools were not intended to grow, empower, or unleash human potential. The curriculum was, and is, designed accordingly. That is, not be a life enhancing experience but to prepare children for the job market.
No two children are alike in terms of ability or maturity. Schools today are divided into classes or grade levels. The children put in those classes share only one thing in common: their date of birth happens to fall within two points on the calendar.
To actually “teach” a child a teacher must first asses his/her skill level, ability level, maturity level and then choose the portion of “curriculum” the child is ready for. A good teacher is expected to design a lesson that fits that child, much as a doctor prescribes medicine based on his diagnosis of the patient’s condition.
A teacher dealing with large classrooms of chronologically grouped children then has no choice. She teaches to the middle of the group and the “bright” children get bored and create mischief while the “weak” ones flounder. At the end of the year she is then expected to sit in judgement and decide which child is to be rewarded and which one punished by giving them A’s, Bs’…. and F’s or by using some other arbitrary scale.
Our failed school system reflects this reality. Then why does the system continue? Two simple reasons: economics and parental expectations. Obviously teachers’ salaries are the largest part of the cost of education. So if you have one teacher teach the same thing to a large group of children you cut down the cost, much like a mass production factory. One worker stamping the same mould on a conveyor belt as it goes by. Secondly, parents send their children to school, not to fulfill their human potential but gain them entry to a college or university whose degree will “secure” their future.
The miraculous thing is some individuals do escape the drudgery of the system and become real teachers. They play the game and teach the curriculum. They assign grades. But somehow in spite of that, they let children know that they are there for them, that they genuinely care for them. The miraculous power of this healing Intent still saves children. I have seen children who ‘failed’, or have done miserably all their lives, become “good” students because of the intervention of one teacher. I have seen children whose sense of self had been crushed by the system, become leaders because one teacher cared and reached out to them. Such is the power of benevolent Intent.
Schools then also should be judged not on the “curriculum” they offer, or the grades their students produce, but rather on the basis of cultivating and growing teachers who are there to serve their students within the existing structure. If a school is able to have a critical mass of such individuals, the culture, feeling and tone of the school reflects Care & Growth where children flourish in spite of, and not because of, the existing structure.
