Published on: 09-06-2019
Written By: JYOTI PUNWANI
Source: https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/civic/a-farishta-shining-the-light-of-education/articleshow/69707895.cms
Syed Feroze Ashraf was a life coach who ran a
silent mission for needy students at his Uncle’s Classes in Jogeshwari
It was befitting that the two boys who rushed Syed Feroze
Ashraf to hospital when he was tragically knocked over by a speeding
autorickshaw on Friday night, were students, both strangers to him. Aman Jain
in Std X, and his friend Mohsin Shaikh in Std XII, could well have been among
the hundreds of children in Jogeshwari whom Ashraf helped to complete their
education. Many of those first generation learners wept at his funeral,
remembering how “Uncle” boosted their morale through school and college.
“Uncle’s Classes” became an institution in
Jogeshwari. Daughters mainly, but occasionally sons too, of hawkers,
construction workers (one girl lived in a half-finished building, surviving on
the eggs of pigeons who shared space with her family), and even a grave-digger,
found in Ashraf a “farishta” who guided them for free through the fog their
syllabus was for them.
It all began when the watchman requested the only
man in his building, who spent all his time reading and writing, to coach his
daughter for a modest fee. Ashraf, by then retired from Indian-Oil-Corporation,
refused the fee. Soon the girl’s cousins landed up at his door, then the entire
neighborhood’s children.
Supported by his wife Arifa, a municipal employee,
Ashraf didn’t just coach these children. First he fed them, then cajoled and
sometimes chided them, even took them on outings. Simultaneously, his wife made
them realise the importance of their own lives, showed them that they could
dream of a future beyond an arrested education, early marriage and motherhood.
Together, the Ashrafs taught these girls to do something no one else could
have: stand up for themselves in a society loaded against them.
For Ashraf, seeing to it that these children
finished school and at least Std XII, became a mission. He would visit their
homes to convince their parents that it was their duty to ensure that their
daughters got a couple of hours’ respite from housework, a
quiet-corner to themselves, a bulb, a pen, a notebook and some
food. This wasn’t easy; their homes were tiny rooms teeming with large families
hooked on TV soaps, where daughters ate last. It was this life mission that
made Feroz Ashraf so contemptuous of Urdu intellectuals who bemoaned the fate
of Urdu and of their community, but did nothing for those who had no choice but
to go to Urdu schools. Ashraf himself might have ended up like these
intellectuals, had it not been for the 1992-93 riots which forced him to shift,
for the sake of his traumatised school-going son, from his Hindu neighbourhood
in Malad to Muslim-dominated Jogeshwari. In Malad, he would discuss the day’s
headlines with his Hindu neighbour. In Jogeshwari, no one read the papers. No
one played Holi either. “Mumbai’s riots stole the colours of Holi from me,”
Ashraf would often lament. But victimhood was not for Ashraf. He used his
changed circumstances to get to know his community, initially visiting the
nearby mosque every Friday, then navigating the narrow, slippery lanes where
his students lived. The poverty and ignorance which reigned in Jogeshwari’s
Muslim ghettoes never ceased to shock him, but he spent his life trying to
change the lives of as many as he could. In the last decade, confident that his
work was being carried on by his ex-students who have started “Uncle’s Classes”
in their own areas, Ashraf developed another passion: discovering Muslim
leaders from across the country whose contribution over the centuries remains
unknown even to the community. He chronicled their lives in a weekly Hindi
column which will soon be a book. Hindi came as naturally to Ashraf as Urdu.
Growing up in Hazaribagh Holi, Saraswati Puja, and
dressing up as Bal Gopal on Janmashtami was as much a part of his childhood as
was wearing fresh clothes for the Eid namaz. It was this legacy that he
imparted to his students. At his funeral, half a dozen veiled figures made a
sudden appearance; they were the latest batch of students to whom he had taught
Urdu journalism at Bombay University. Feroze Ashraf would have been proud to
know that breaking tradition, these girls managed to pay their last respects to
their ‘Sir’ inside the cemetery.