ALIGARIANS:

Interested In Everything & Serious About Nothing

The Aligarians are easy going and majlis pasand (is there an English equivalent?) people. ‘Live and let others live’ is their undeclared motto. This I like a lot. Though someone may feel that I am trying just the contrary by my frequent emails. An Aligarian may sound communal as he will talk a lot about the Muslim community. But in reality he is not. He is a strong believer in peaceful co-existence. Though he does not have any higher goals to achieve from this harmonious living.

The Aligarians can bear severe criticism – another very much admirable trait. I recently read Janab Jawaid Iqbal Badauni Saheb’s beautiful words addressing Janab M Sayeed Alam Saheb: “By the way, who prevents you from expressing your views at the network? Please write to us and I shall approve your mails without delay. Every member has a right to express his views freely. Even if you write against me, I shall approve your letter. It is a promise, really.”

The Aligarians are interested in all sorts of topics. You come up with a subject and they will furnish some valuable information and share some worthwhile comments about it. When, however, the topic changes they will forget about the previous one. It provokes me to conclude that the Aligarians aren’t really serious about anything. Of course, there are exceptions (which further strengthen the rule).

The Aligarians might not care and think that much about all other Institutions that they might have studied at – except the Aligarh Muslim University. They may not consider any other school or college as much their alma mater as they consider the AMU. Hence, it will be difficult to make the Aligarians think beyond and above Aligarh.

The Aligarians will many a times mix up in the spelling of the singular and plural of the English equivalent of Talba-e-Qadeem. The Aligarians will always believe that they know English very well. And they will not realize that sometimes they are correct. (They may also take this observation seriously!)

Each generation of Aligarians may believe that their generation was the best, their batch of their specific Department was the best – certainly better than the current generation and the present batches. They will remember the minute details of the hostel life. They will have very strong reasons for being nostalgic about everything related to Aligarh. I am one among them. I also believe that “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”.

One may or may not agree with one or the other description given so far. There is, however, one very serious issue, which is the crux of it. The very describability of an Aligarian and the chances of that description being correct is a point of concern. This should not be the case. What do I want to say? I want to assert that human beings are not for counting and not for finding a pattern in them at the cognitive and educated levels. They are not a “product” of which one could easily say that the “products” of this or that company are like x, y & z. If we are able to describe a large number of human beings as we are able to describe other “items”, it is unfortunate.

A seat of learning is expected to groom an individual (and he himself) to the maximum possible extent and give full expression to his uniqueness and peculiarity. There are no repetitions when it comes to the human beings. We are able to find a pattern and describe the “products” of the Aligarh Muslim University because of a faulty education system.

How could we know what the graduates of a University will or should be like? We should not be able to know that in advance and we should not be able to find a pattern. The human beings are not for sampling. Things and materials are.