Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi RA
By Dr Basheer Ahmed Khan
Garden Grove, CA
Death is inevitable, yet the death of a person sends the people related to him in gloom. There are some others whose death evokes sadness in the people unrelated to him because of the impact they had on their lives. Mushtaq Ahmed yousufi was one such individual.
The rich and the influential people and their children who surrounded him like sycophants to benefit from his position as a top banking officials might not even know how great this man was. But those who have read his masterpiece writings feel the grief of his loss and renew and strengthen their bond with him by reading his work again and again as they remember him in his death.
When I thought of writing this article about him, I thought hard and deep about how to address his name in the title. Even though the suffix RA (Rahmatullah alai, meaning Allah’s Mercy is with him) is conventionally used for companions of Nabi SA and other prominent religious people, I thought it fit to apply it to his name for two reasons.
It is high time we started to respect the good work of the people in public service like we do with our religious people so that we end the dichotomy between the secular and religious dimensions of a personality. We should consider good as good and bad as bad rather than view it from the tainted glasses of religious, racial, political and nationalistic pride and prejudices to see good as bad and bad as good for our own convenience.
Mushtaq Ahmed as a chief banker in Pakistan was the equivalent of Yousuf AS who was the treasurer to the Egyptian King. I don’t know for sure if Yousufi is his pen name or his surname. The pen name Yousufi has also the pun associated with his personality if it is split into You and Sufi. Possibly, he saw himself in his profession as an intellectual and his heart must have always cautioned him in his intellectual decisions by addressing him as “You Sufi, be careful”.
The reporter of Dawn has summarized the life and work of Mr Yousufi comprehensively and beautifully (PL dated June 22, 2018). What I am trying to do in this article is only to elaborate on it from what little I have understood of this man through his writings.
When Pakistan was struck with earthquake and flooding, on top of the political uncertainties in the first decade of this millennium, Mr Haqqani the then Ambassador of Pakistan in US had said: Pakistan is a resilient nation. What explains this resilience? Faith is an important factor. It matters in times of adversity. But surely the second factor is humorists and satirists like Mr Yousufi who give to people the opportunity to see at their own self and reform, not with a frown but in a state of merriment.
Dawn has rightly called him “Wordsmith par excellence”. The paper’s reporter correctly assesses the artistic value of Mr Yousufi when he says: “Mr Yousufi was not remarkable only for his wordplay and repartee” but his “refraining from traditional ways of invoking mirth as in situational comedy or slapstick.”
Mr Yousufi has given us an insight into the genesis of his artistic talent thus in his very first and renowned book, “Chirag Tale”, which was published when he was 38 years young. He says: A person with a brilliant intellect but a darkened heart can only show his peevishness and criticize everything and everyone. But when he controls this irritability and restores calm in his internal milieu then the same situation which caused irritation can result in good humor. Humor, he says, is the art of emerging from the heat of your boiling blood after burning in it. The wood burns into coal and the coal burns into ash. But if the coal avoids becoming ash and internalizes the heat of fire, it becomes a diamond. He further says: I have laughed at my own deficiencies whenever I could, if I am able to make you laugh through it, it is my good fortune. A people who can laugh at themselves can never be enslaved. My poet friend, late Shakeel Mazhari, has described the nature of people like Mr Yousufi in the following couplet:
Thum Gham Ka Bhoj Ro kay bhi Halka Na Kar Sakay
Aur Muskra Kay Hum Nay Har Ek Gham Chupa Liya
By making slight change in the word “Sar Guzasht”, meaning autobiography, he coined a new word “Zar Guzasht”, meaning the story of money. This was the title of his book that was published in 1976. He showed the pitfalls of the financial system with which he was familiar after working for the capitalistic system designed for Pakistan under Gen Ayub Khan. He says:
People come to a bank to get loans for all sort of plans for their products and inventions with promising language and confusing charts. When they are asked the question about the utility of their products and inventions to ensure the profitability of their project and its capacity to repay the loans, the typical answer which is given by the entrepreneurs is: Nobody knows what the future of their products and their progeny is. Only if they had known it Alfred Noble would not have invented gun powder to destroy the beauty of this world again and again, and nobody would have produced children to suffer this invention. Mr Yousufi’s answer to this rhetoric was: If it was a small loan I would certainly give it to you because then you will be at the mercy of the Bank, but by giving you a big loan I don’t want the bank to be at your mercy.
We experience the truth of this prophetic statement cyclically in all capitalistic societies of today. It is working for them because they have lot of virtual wealth generated in stock and future trading to waste on projects which are on board and waste more money to end them. It did not work for Pakistan and brought Bhutto to power. While a great many Bank officials left Pakistan after this change for fear of Muhasiba, Mr Yousufi stayed in the country till his death at 95 years of age. It speaks either of his honesty and integrity or his connections.
One of the bank officials who migrated to America and settled here was a customer at the company where I worked in the 90s. He had been a colleague of Mr Yousufi in Pakistan. One day he told me that Mr Yousufi was not as bubbly as he sounded in his writings. He was a quiet, compassionate, serious and sensible human being.
Mr Yousufi has taken subtle digs at the irresponsible liberal societies in several places. When he was deputed to France for training, the elders of the family advised him to take his wife along. He recalled that a wise elder amongst them came to his rescue by saying: taking your wife along with you to Paris is like taking ice in a thermos when you are going on an expedition to Mount Everest.
Some other one liners of Mr Yusufi:
It will be a great service to the children of Pakistan if we use a fraction of the amount in teaching them science rather than teaching them about the contribution of Muslims to science.
In fairy tales a person who turns back becomes motionless like a stone. We are a victim of this stasis not because of any fairy but because of our own thinking.
History is the record of misdeeds of celebrities handed over to us by mistake.
If it was a small loan I would certainly give it to you because you will be at the mercy of the Bank, but by giving a big loan to you I don’t want the bank to be at your mercy.
Taking your wife along with you to Paris is like taking ice in a thermos when you are going on an expedition to Mount Everest.
It is difficult to do justice to this man and his writings in one article in the English language; one should read his writings in Urdu to know him and his true artistic worth.
Unwise friends and formidable foes have always colluded with each other to tarnish the fair name of every popular person ever since Adam and Eve set their foot on earth. Lectures and speeches are the dirty laundry which Public Figures sometime have to wash. By giving these lectures and speeches the shape of a book at the twilight of his life the unwise friends and formidable foes of Mr. Yusufi played the same old trick on him. Mr. Yousufi will be remembered as to how he characterizes himself rather than how others want to portray him, and this he had said poignantly and prophetically to Dawn in 1995, much before publication of fifth book attributed to him titled Sham e Sher e Yaraan. He said, “What the readers want is not my problems. I only worry about what I like and what I publish. If the readers like it I take it as my good fortune and if they don’t I can live with it.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
