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Sunday, June 26, 2016, Ashar 12, 1423 BS, Ramadan 20, 1437 Hijri


On Tagore's 80th
Four score not enough! Out of the box
Dr Rashid Askari
Published :Sunday, 26 June, 2016,  Time : 12:00 AM  View Count : 23
On Tagore's 80th birthday as Mahatma Gandhi sent him a telegram saying 'Four score not enough. May you finish five', Tagore, wearied of age and illness, replied with thanks, 'four score is impertinence [and] five score intolerable.' But on his 80th birthday Serajul Islam Choudhury is quite alive and kicking. 'Life's all about enjoying work,' he says in interviews with the newsmen. For sure Choudhury has proved that he has the 'impertinence' to live for four score years and to finish five will not, perhaps, be 'intolerable' to him, and it never appears that he has outlived his usefulness. He still teaches, writes, thinks, critiques, gives academic and intellectual talks, and works to combat what he thinks injustice in his society.
It was a great privilege for me to be a student of SIC, an acronym given by the students for Serajul Islam Choudhury. I had him as my class teacher at all the levels of my graduate and postgraduate studies at Dhaka University in the mid and late eighties. He appeared before us time after time with fiction, poetry and literary criticism, but could never bore us with his lecture. But he sometimes used to disappoint us or some of us by his proverbial punctuality especially during the rainier mornings when we would prefer chit-chat and tea at Madhur Canteen and expected him to be prevented by the torrents of rain from coming to the university. However, to our great disappointment, we saw the man, half- drenched with rain drops, showing up on the dot. Neither the torrents of rain nor the gust of wind could stop him from taking our classes.
On first acquaintance it was clear to me that SIC is not an ordinary teacher. I could realize that the world's noblest profession really becomes a person like him. He never conforms to the stereotype view of a teacher as a man with dark suit and thick glasses who delivers lectures like a record player with robotic posture, and whose students attend it with frequent yawns and stretches. This is not the way how SIC teaches. He has taken up teaching not simply as his job, but as his vocation, his mission and vision, his aim and assignment, his quest and trust, and tries to achieve it in his own sweet way.
He becomes the heart of the class. He can create an atmosphere in the classroom refreshingly conducive to the course contents. There is never a dull moment as long as he is in the class. He has the charisma to turn a boring subject into an interesting one by virtue of his pleasant personality and vibrant performance. He is a good psychologist, and is possessed of the power to capture the hearts and minds of his students. He teaches his students in a no-nonsense way, and never tries to show off the parade of knowledge. He acts as a tool to connect the students with the subject he is teaching in a very easy and simple way.  He is, as the author, Louis A Berman attributes to a good teacher, 'a master of simplification.' This is what we can call 'active teaching' of which SIC is a champion. He educates his students to acquire the knowledge and skills needed for successful careers, leadership roles and ability for lifelong learning. Apart from this immediate objective of teaching, there is a greater end in his view. He guides the students to strive to discover their latent talents and make the most of them. They are given to believe that true education should not aim at procuring certificates only, it also teaches them the ways to face newer challenges of life confidently and successfully. SIC makes his students realize that the final objective of real education is not only to cross the bar to semesters but also to achieve something permanent in life that would make them avoid what Socrates called 'the unexamined life', which is 'not worth living'. He never 'hammers on cold iron' by 'attempting to teach...', as the early 19th  century American education reformer Horace Mann puts it, ' without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn.'
In this age of wholesale commercialisation while education has become a means of increasing students' marketability causing a steep decline of moral standards, a teacher like SIC teaches his students  not to be slaves to this diseased trend and to develop both intellectually and morally and to attain confidence and high self-esteem. He wants his students to be kept abreast of the principles of simplicity, honesty, integrity, and above all humanitarianism. He thinks that the present civilization is more in need of good humans than of the highly marketable human commodities. To guide students to pursue these idealistic ends is the educational philosophy of SIC. Moreover, his purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to help students create their own images. SIC is a candle that consumes itself to light the way for his students and his fellow countrymen. He is a public intellectual by all implications of the terms.
SIC is not one of the decadent intellectuals who just play the intellectuals, and do everything for pure selfish reasons. He is not like the self-cantered intellectuals, who are wrapped up in themselves, concerned only with their own wants and needs, always look after number one and never think about other people's good. He is not like the varsity dons who work part-time with different private institutions, NGOs, multinational companies and projects to earn a fortune and most of whose time is spent shuttling between their homes and workplaces, and no spare time is left for them to work for their country and her people for free. SIC is not one of the one-eyed intellectuals who work as the vanguards of their parties, see everything with a partisan eye, wait their turn at power in order to grab the chance of holding high office and suck up to people in authority for this and are sapped of their integrity and moral standards by years of ugly polarization. Nor is he one of the seemingly nonpartisan intellectuals who love being called 'civil society', but work as the social, cultural, political and economic think tanks by way of picking holes in both the Power and the Opposition affairs in order to paint the country in a bad light with a view to catering to the tastes of their western masters and vested interests. SIC is not an armchair intellectual living in ivory towers. He is an intellectual of the masses and lives in their midst and works for them.
SIC is, in light of the core image of intellectuals conveyed by the Dreyfusards' stance, 'a defender of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity.' He is an intellectual from Chomskyan point of view, whose responsibility is to 'speak the truth and to expose the lies'; an intellectual from Gramscian point of view who views himself 'as autonomous from the ruling class'; an intellectual from Sartrean point of view who can be considered ' to be the moral conscience of [his] age,' and whose task is 'to observe the political and social situation of the moment, and to speak out freely in accordance with [his] conscience;'  and an intellectual from Edward Saidesque point of view whose role is 'to speak the truth to power' even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Though not of imprisonment, SIC is always a victim of social, political and intellectual ostracism since he is a public intellectual in the truest sense of the term. I am as sure as eggs are eggs that the bulk of our present time intellectuals is far away with these basic tenets of true intellectuals and is reduced to the specialized servants of vested interests.
Serajul Islam Choudhury is the quintessence of a true intellectual amid the razzmatazz of the fake intellectuals' activities.  All the pseudo-intellectuals must be overshadowed by the ones like SIC. I would like to echo Mahatma Gandhi's birthday wishes to Tagore and wish SIC, one of my best and most respected teachers- at least another score years to live and guide the intellectuals of the country. Happy birthday to you Sir!
Dr Rashid Askari writes fiction and columns, and teaches English literature at Kushtia
Islamic University, Bangladesh.
Email: [email protected]









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