A
Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
By Athar Mian
Director of Business Development
Global NorthStar Inc.
www.globalnorthstar.com
Redwood City, CA
We, ex-students of Prof. Shahid
Hussain Bokhari at UET (Engineering University,
Lahore), are keen to express our admiration for
our mentor. Sadly, Prof. Bokhari decided to retire
from UET on October 3rd, 2005 after a brilliant
25-year local teaching and global R&D career.
His selfless devotion to teaching on a subsistence
pay ($5000 yearly) while refusing prestigious
US-based alternatives is truly remarkable.
Dr. Bokhari, a 1980 PhD from UMass-Amherst, USA,
is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM (global
engineering and computer societies), major honors
that resulted from his numerous refereed publications,
including a book and pioneering papers on computer
architecture, graph theory and Linux software.
He is also on the coveted list of Highly Cited
Researchers published by the Institute for Scientific
Information. After graduation, he has had regular
sabbaticals at top R&D institutes in the US
and Japan. His industry contributions include
multi-million dollar revenues from addressing
the Y2K problem in 1999, NASA research (1985-1995),
and co-founding a Silicon Valley start-up (2000).
His first undergraduate paper was published by
the IEEE in the 1970s, while he was enrolled at
UET.
Dr. Bokhari himself funded a new computer laboratory
at UET via alumni and corporate donations in the
late 1990s. This center has educated hundreds
of undergrad and grad students and put Pakistan
on the global technology map having the 2nd largest
Linux teaching laboratory in the world. Dozens
of cutting edge refereed and journal publications
by well-mentored students, some of whom were working
with Silicon Valley US companies, are a great
instance of intellectual value-add (as opposed
to plain vanilla call center) outsourcing.
His ex-students now include tenured professors,
executives, and entrepreneurs both in the US and
Pakistan. Dr. Bokhari will certainly be offered
tenure at a leading US university given his current
active research into new areas. Unluckily the
young and talented in Pakistan will miss his mentoring.
Prof. Bokhari’s sudden retirement has been
linked to his teaching and R&D policy disagreements
with UET and the national HEC (Higher Education
Commission) bureaucrats. His suggestions on faculty
training and hiring, and a balanced higher education
policy were ridiculed and he was forced out of
UET’s research council years ago. Even though
many new centers and universities (public and
private) have sprung up in Pakistan over the years
as government and high-tuition funding has flowed
in, the results to date have been disappointing.
Little genuine research has resulted, but the
well-connected with scant credentials have benefited
by way of lucrative assignments. Since Prof. Bokhari’s
IEEE Fellow status a decade ago, Pakistan has
had no other resident Fellow.
As neighboring India, with 1.2 billion people,
has absorbed all the technology limelight with
its growing outsourcing business (2004 estimates
of $14 billion), Pakistan, with a 140 million
population, hardly accounts for an annual $200
million today. Given this bitter reality, Dr.
Bokhari’s single-handed contributions stand
out. We hope that Pakistan can do better with
genuine long-term education policies that could
raise its global profile from the current shallow
one. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Multiply
that by 140 million.
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