SPEECH AT CONVOCATION OF INDUS VALLEY SCHOOL OF ART & ARCHITECTURE, KARACHI,
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN, 14 December 2024.
Honorable Governors, Hardworking Faculty, the diligent staff who ensure the smooth functioning of the Indus Valley School, the graduating class of 2024 and proud parents who made their presence here possible.
Assalamualaikum.
To say that I am honoured to be invited to be the Guest Speaker today would be an understatement. I am humbled, and especially so after reviewing the list of previous speakers.
You have had actors, authors, architects, bankers, broadcasters, businessmen, poets, and scholars at your previous convocations. You did not, I notice, have any Chartered Accountant. Well, that omission has been filled today.
By inviting me, you are honouring my profession. But more importantly, you are acknowledging that art and commerce are not simply the mundane transaction of buying and selling paintings or commissioning houses and buildings. You are including the wider spectrum of society into your fraternity.
My only qualification for standing before you here today is that many, many years ago, long before you or even your parents were born, I had the opportunity in 1966 of studying the collection of miniature paintings in the Lahore Museum. It was more self-study really, for I did not have a tutor other than the paintings themselves.
I was asked by Professor Shakir Ali (then Principal of the National College of Arts, Lahore) to catalogue the 700 or so miniature paintings in the museum. There was no wall between the museum and the NCA then. I could cross the invisible barrier and interact with professors like Khalid Iqbal sahib, Nayyar Ali Dada, Kamil Khan Mumtaz, and Saeed Akhtar. Many of them have been speakers at your earlier convocations.
And it was in the NCA that I first met Shehnaz Ismail. She was one of two students studying textile design. The other was Tahira who later married Nayyar Ali Dada.
I began in the summer of 1966, and survived on lunches of chikar-chole (it cost Rs 1 per plate with one nan). Within 8 months I had completed my research but discovered that neither the Lahore Museum nor anyone else was prepared to publish my work. It took another eleven years before my catalogue came out in book form, under the title Pahari Paintings & Sikh Portraits in the Lahore Museum (1977).
When my publishers Sotheby Parke Bernet wanted material for a publicity blurb, I asked them whether they wanted me to mention that I was a Chartered Accountant. Their immediate response was: ‘Oh, God, no! That would destroy your credentials as an art-historian’.
I replied: ‘’You should ask my professional colleagues. They think I am a nutcase for being interested in art!”
Over the years, I have made the art-history of our country my hobby, one might say my passion. I have collected watercolours and paintings, antique maps, lithographs and early postcards. Most of my 23 books have been about them. My latest – Forgotten Images: Postcards of pre-Pakistan, 1890 - 1947 – has been released just a few days ago.
I offer my career as an example that it is possible to live beyond the confines of one’s chosen profession. Duality is not a choice; it is a must. For nothing humanises a person as much as the awareness that there is a world outside one’s own.
One of my former students at Aitchison College had been granted admission in the Aga Khan University, here in Karachi. At the end of his first term I asked him what subjects he had been taught: ‘’Anatomy? Biology? Pharmacology?”
‘’No’’, he replied. ‘’We were taught Art, History, Ethics, Languages. The explanation our professor gave us was that while AKU had five years to make doctors of us, it had only three months to make a human being out of us.’’
So, as you graduate, remember that your degree is a veneer, a polish. Beneath it you are a human being. Never lose that humanity. Follow the advice of the late Steve Jobs: "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."
Convocation speakers are expected to be inspirational, to utter homilies. I leave that to future speakers who will be older and wiser than I am.
Instead, I will though touch upon a few points that might be of use to you as you enter the battle-zone called Life. Let me abbreviate it to the acronym CROP.
The first letter C stands for Competition. The world you are entering is a fiercely competitive jungle in which the animals are shaped like human beings. If you choose to remain in Pakistan, you will have to fight to find your own space. If you choose to go abroad, be prepared to face prejudice because of the colour of your skin, the green of your passport, or the tincture of your religion.
How many of you know a foreign language? By the way, regardless of what English-medium schools teach you, Urdu is not a foreign language. Equip yourself with another language preferably French, Spanish, even American.
Or Chinese. How many of you know Chinese? I ask this, not because some of you may choose to go to China for higher studies, but because wherever you go in the world, you will be competing against Chinese students.
The second letter R is for Resilience. Time will not be kind to you. You will fail more often than you will succeed. As that great humanist Nelson Mandela put it: “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Mandela spent 27 years in jail and yet rose to become the president of South Africa.
The third word is Opportunity. You have been gifted with an opportunity to study in the IVS. You will have many more opportunities in the future. Had life not offered opportunities, we would still have been Neanderthals and you would have had a career painting dinosaurs on cave walls.
Gradually, over the years, one has seen that the gamut of options to each generation of graduates has expanded. Gone are the days when you had to be either a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant or go into public service.
Once I remember asking the principal of a private school what was the name of his school. He replied: ‘Parents here ask each other: ‘’Did your child in Karachi Grammar School, or somewhere else?’’ My school is in the somewhere else category.’
Today, the IVS is beyond the ‘somewhere else category’. It is at par with the best, here and abroad.
Thirty years ago, in 1994, the first batch of 18 IVS graduates qualified – 7 in Communication Design; 5 in Fine Arts; 3 in Textile Design, and 2 in Ceramics.
Today, there are over 184 of you.
The curriculum offered here, the quality and dedication of your Faculty, and IVS’s productive linkage with commerce and industry, have set standards of excellence in our country.
Your Faculty has given you its best. It is for you to put it to a productive use. They will agree with me when I say: “Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but true education begins and ends only with life.”
Many years ago, I visited the IVS campus soon after it was established. Your faculty informed me of its plans to relocate the old Nusserwanjee building in Kharadar and bring it here in Clifton.
It took imagination of a rare sort and skilled craftsmanship for that building - a four storey structure in Kharadar - to be dismantled and reconstructed here in Clifton. Painstakingly, ‘26,000 stones and hundreds of pieces of timber were meticulously numbered, removed and carefully transferred and re-erected at the site’.
The closest modern parallel one can think of is the relocation of the ancient temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt. It had stood on the banks on the Nile for three thousand years. When, in the 1960s, it was threatened by the rising waters of the Aswan Dam, the temple was disassembled. Over 16,000 blocks of stone were removed and reassembled 200 metres above the original site.
The new height had been carefully calculated to catch (as the original temple had done) the first rays of the morning sun on two days of the year (February 22 and October 22). On those special days, the light penetrated the whole length of the temple and illuminated the shrine within its innermost sanctuary.
Here, in relocating the Nusserwanjee building, the IVS has not only performed a similar miracle of engineering but has preserved our history. And that is important.
Some years ago, when the Orange Line in Lahore threatened the Shalimar Gardens and Chaburji gateway – both precious examples of Mughal monuments – the Punjab government attempted to assuage public protests by offering to build a new Shalimar Gardens.
Those who forget history are condemned to forfeit it. Rudyard Kipling reminded of this danger when, in the 1890s, he wrote that the then Lahore Municipal Corporation proposed to dismantle Taxali gate for its bricks.
‘’Oh, Lahoris!’’ Kipling remonstrated. ‘’You can buy your bricks from any kiln. But from where will you be able to buy your heritage?’’
And this brings me to my final letter in the acronym CROP. P stands for Patriotism.
One has never known a time when criticising our country has not been fashionable. It is our favourite spectator sport. Most of us are armchair patriots. Others prefer to vote with their feet and migrate to Canada, Australia, the U.K., the USA - to any country that will have them.
Our intellectual top soil is now to be found only abroad. Our best talent, it seems, can germinate only in foreign soil.
Remember: it requires patriotism of a higher order to love your country not for what it is, but despite what it is.
In 1948, I witnessed the funeral cortege of the founder of our country Quaid-e-Azam Mohamed Ali Jinnah being drawn along what was then Victoria Road (now Abdullah Haroon Road). I was six years old – young, yet old enough to remember stepping over rows and rows of homeless mohajirs, sleeping on the pavement.
Today, that very same Karachi has expanded as far as the eye can see. And that is true of every city or village across our country.
We may be a third world country, but we are no longer a poor country. Count the number of swimming pools in a city where everyone drinks bottled water. Count the number of vehicles that accompany every ministerial cavalcade. Even our beggars can spend one and half crores to feed 10,000 of their baradari at a qul for a dead grandmother.
You are the same age that I was in 1966 when I returned to Pakistan. At the time I was confident that I could change Pakistan. Now, after sixty years, I would be satisfied if Pakistan has not changed me.
Let me conclude as one should by recalling the words of our founder: ‘No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you’.
That is why one is gratified to see that out of over 185 graduates, most of you - 80% - are female.
To the 20 % minority amongst you, let me offer you males some words of consolation. I told my driver once that my colleague who happened to be a woman was, like me, a Chartered Accountant. He looked perplexed. When he found his voice, he asked me: ‘’Sahib, you went all the way to England to learn women’s work?’’.
The truth is, as the IVS has proven over the past thirty-four years, since the time it admitted its first batch of students in 1980, there is no such thing as men’s work or women’s work. Nations progress faster when they are gender-free, as the IVS is.
Ladies, now that you have graduated, please use your qualification. Marry if you must, but never give up your career. You can always get married again. Your career though lasts a lifetime. Create space for your creativity.
Have children, and if you are so blessed, send them to the Indus Valley School. They will be a credit to you, as you are to your parents today.
Let me conclude by congratulating the class of 2024. You deserve this degree. It is the first of many honours you will earn throughout your career.
God grant you the wisdom to apply your talents beyond your own personal ambitions. Our country needs you more than you think.
IVS Zindabad.
Pakistan Paindabad.
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