Life can be difficult but encouragement and guidance from parents always pays off. My mother’s persistence in educating me and my siblings really made the difference…..!
My mother was born in the Princely state of Hyderabad Deccan in India before the partition of the subcontinent. Her father was a civil servant and a Collector (Talukdar) in the government of the Nizam of Hyderabad. She went to the Women’s college and then completed her bachelor’s degree in Home Economics from Nizam College in the mid-fifties. A time when women were not encouraged to get higher education.
She was married in 1957 and this is her wedding picture. After marriage she moved with my father to Dacca, in the then East Pakistan. After the 1971 war our family was uprooted and we became civilian prisoners of war in India. My family spent 2 years as civilian POWs in a caged barbed-wired camp in India. We lived on a six-by-eight piece of hard cement floor and there was barely enough food to go around. But even during those difficult times, my mother taught us the Quran, simple mathematics, Urdu and English almost every day.I spent my teen years in Pakistan and my mother continued to send us to school.
She not only encouraged but insisted that I get admission in medical school and demanded that I become a doctor! My mother ingrained in our minds that one of her children will be a doctor, another an engineer and my sister would do a master’s degree in Home Economics. And with her encouragement we all reached our goals. Not only that, she also encouraged us to get higher education in our respective fields.
She had an unwavering commitment to higher education.I am indebted to my mother who ingrained the importance of education in me.GRATITUDE!
