By Sana Mir, The News, 8 July 2012.
“He spent all his life striving for truth, justice, democratic principles and liberty of thought and died with his boots on in July 1987 at the age of 48 while confronting Zia’s dictatorship. He fought the combat alone with the dictator of his times and set an example to follow. What Waris Mir wrote and how he wrote, makes him an icon par excellence who continues to live on through his writings…” the voice trailed off the microphone and the hall boomed with applause when the highest civil award of Pakistan, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, was conferred posthumously upon Prof. Waris Mir this year (on March 23, 2012) for his undying and evergreen effort to voice his intellect for the sake of the people of Pakistan.
Like all great writers of yester years whose personalities and mental cog-works are revealed to their readers via their writings instead of all the publicity humdrum in the rage these days, the avid readers of Mir know his intellectualism, his area of interests and his persona refracted in his writings. He is unmistakably logical even when he gets emotional at times. For instance, when the dictator of his era General Ziaul Haq finger pointed at him as his personal enemy and in a televised address to the nation, Zia paralleled the progressive writers the ‘water logging causing damage to the fabric of the society’. The rebuttal to this televised address was Waris Mir’s last write up in which he wrote his heart out. A dying man has no fear, they say. This phrase comes alive and sets an example in his last column titled, “Is progressive thinking salinity and water logging?”
“If any one thinks that Ziaul Haq in his speech has labelled writers having orthodox and a backward approach towards shaping the future of Pakistan, they must correct themselves. For a dictator and power usurper can only blame and play the name-game with intellectuals who think progressively and liberally. Such people are the direct and personal adversaries of the martial law administrator.”
Waris Mir was made of all of these components that Zia, or any other military dictator in general, could not simply understand. When students of literature sit down to study a poetic bard or a dramatist, they read through the writings over and over again, try to decipher the mental processes through which the writer passes while churning out a magical sheet filled with words.
For readers of philosophy, ideas so nakedly apparent to the eyes are just understood once again from a new perspective with such a moment of eureka that a single sentence or the composition of an idea can be life altering. For those studying psychology, human behaviour, the human mind and the human heart are so altering and so different in each person, that the curiosity to study the functionality of the human psychology can never be fulfilled and it encourages the student to probe more. Reading Waris Mir, is like being a student of all of these subjects – literature, philosophy, psychology – and even more – history, sociology, political science.
Those who have read Waris Mir, and still do, through his writings in a three-volumed book “Waris Mir ka Fikri Asasa”, admire him for not just being a good expressionist but also for being a hardworking researcher. His columns are more like research papers — thoroughly investigated and interpreted for all and sundry to contemplate and comprehend.
Waris Mir was read in the intellectual groups, the chai-wala dhhaba groups, students, women et al. He was a teacher at the University of Punjab, Lahore. He taught journalism and if one really takes a hard look at it, Waris Mir was not preaching the ethics of journalism to his students just not to practice them himself. He was simply being honest to his work. When one reads through his work, understands his life, being honest, however, does seem like an insanely enormous characteristic.
When the Hilial-e-Imtiaz was conferred upon Prof. Waris Mir this year, even though it was posthumously done, those who know what and who Waris Mir was, they understand, he lives on and shall continue to do so.
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/