July 17, 2020
Doctor from East
The upper crust of the American Muslim community is more formally schooled and affluent than Main Street USA. They may be tigrish trolling social media and loquacious talkers. But few take the trouble to put pen to paper. The results tell. There is affluence without influence.
Nestled in the small town of Williamsport is hospitalist Dr Asif Javed, who is among the few in the US-based Pakistan expatriate community who has been able to straddle both East and West. Williamsport, in central Pennsylvania, is 80 miles from the state capital, Harrisburg, and has a population of 30,000. Its main claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of Little League Baseball and, in its vicinity, is the annual hosting during summer of the Little League World Series. But there is nothing “little league” in the writings of Asif Javed.
Born 63 years ago in a village near Mandi Bahauddin, Asif came from a Gondal Jatt background. His early school education was being seated on tats (mats). His father was a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University and got his BA, LLB from there. He was an upstanding, old-fashioned gentleman, attired in suit, well-respected in the community, would play tennis and read English language newspapers, while also being a quietly observant Muslim. So, from an early age, Asif learned how the East and the West could be made complementary, but without compromising on quintessential Muslim values.
Asif was the youngest of 8 siblings and his primary education was in the village school until grade 8. After matriculation in Mandi Bahauddin, he joined the prestigious Government College, Lahore, as an FSC student. From there, he transitioned into the elite King Edward College, Lahore, from where he secured his MBBS.
His initial medical training was in the UK, where for six years he was in London, the Midlands, Wales, and York. In 1991, he came to America and stayed six years in Pittsburgh where he got his advanced exposure under the late Dr Usman Khan, to whom he remains indebted. In 1997, he shifted to central Pennsylvania and has stayed to date in Williamsport. Asif Javed’s passions are reading and traveling. He has gone to Morocco, Spain, Greece, Peru, Chile, and Germany.
From the beginning, Asif had an acute awareness of limitations which could hold him back and developed the drive to surmount them. It enabled him to ceaselessly strive for excellence.
Through determined grit, he was able to gain fluency and felicity in English. I, for one, have benefited from his prolific pen flowing through the pages of the well-reputed and tightly-edited California newspaper, Pakistan Link. Sitting in the US, he has been able to take a long view of his homeland, along with a keen perspective of the West.
Indian Prime Minister Modi’s actions in Kashmir may have caused much consternation but few well-placed Pakistanis undertook an individual initiative on their own to do something about it, like Dr Asif Javed, when he called me for my suggestions to put a billboard – highlighting Indian atrocities in Kashmir – in downtown Williamsport, which he did.
Medicine consumes much of his waking hours but, during the remains of the day, he has somehow managed to allocate space for daily reading on a broad range of subjects. Commendably (and unusual for a Punjab parent), he devotes each and every evening to read to his special needs child.
Today, Asif, I can venture to assert, is one of the most readable purveyors of the English language in the community. His writings have ranged from Punjab politics to post-Partition Indian cinema, to English literature, to the Tsarist wars in Dagestan – making the extra effort to dig deep. All the time, he manages to convey seemingly dense subjects in a seamless flowing style, making his writings a treat to read. His compilations now have come out in book form. Through that, many more can grasp what Pakistan is all about and what makes it relevant to the Western experience. In doing so, “The Doctor from the East” has built a bridge to the West.
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