Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. | Tausiff / CC BY-SA 3.0
Jate hue kahte ho qayamat ko milenge
kya khub qayamat ka hai goya koi din aur
My beloved bhaiya, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, departed this world for the next on 25 December 2020, leaving our entire family with a lifetime of memories and an incredible legacy for generations to come. We had all gone to welcome him back home that morning, but destiny had other plans.
It was around noon when we stood around him, clinging to one of the most desperate human emotions that exist, hope, but “to Him we belong and to Him we return”. Bhaiya left us, numb and hollow. His favourite poet Mir Taqi Mir’s couplet came to my mind immediately:
The convergent evolution of fiction
As incredulous as it seems, a curious set of coincidences tie Terminator, Doraemon and Umro Ayyar together
KARACHI:
Picture this premise. You go about your life in routine fashion completely unaware of a catastrophe you are destined to suffer. That is until someone from the future whose fate is tied to yours sends back a robot to protect you. Safeguarding you from that impending disaster will change the life of your future benefactor for the better. But in choosing the right robot saviour, the latter must account for his or her own constraints. The only automaton he or she can send back is an outdated or defective one in the context of that point in time.
Born in Azamgarh and raised in Gorakhpur, Faruqi was a chief postmaster-general and member of the Postal Services Board in New Delhi until 1994.
Part of the first batch of the BA programme at Maharana Pratap College in Gorakhpur, he pursued a Master’s degree in English from Allahabad University in 1955. Although he topped the university, he did not receive a first-class, which he thought was probably because “he asked too many questions, or did not dress in the three-piece suits”.
He had chosen to work on a doctorate in English symbolism and the influence of French literature, and poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan was assigned as his supervisor. But after Bachchan came down heavily on him for missing a meeting, Faruqi did not return to pursue his doctorate, he had said in an interview.