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| I was woken up the morning of the 15th to the very sad news of the death of Malik
Refaqat Ali. He was the son of Malik Muzzaffar who died last month. The next few
days I more or less dropped my active research due to this death. I left the village
mid-week to meet people in Islamabad and give a talk
at a local college. Malik Refaqat Ali was around 59/60 years old. He seemed to be in good health though people tell me he had had heart problems in recent years but downplayed them. His nickname among the small children in the area was 'Toffee Baba' because he had one pocket that seemed to have an endless supply of sweets. When I first met him he produced some sweets for the little children and I asked if he always carried sweets. He laughed and assured me he did. Being a very suspicious person I didn't believe him so began to test him after that. I would ask him if he had sweets probably every other time I met him. Never once did he fail to produce a handful of sweets for me. The problem with this experiment was that I didn't really llike the sweets very much but having asked for them I was obliged to eat one. Malik Refaqat didn't have as long a life as most of us would have liked but he had an interesting life. Like many zamindars he left the village early for his education. Although he continued to visit the village regularly he never returned to live there. He joined the army in the 1960's and went to war for Pakistan in 1971. He was captured by the Indians and spent a little over two years as a prisoner of war. When he returned to Pakistan he got married and had children and became a pharmacist (he was a nurse/medic in the army). He was an active supporter of local cricket and organised tournaments between villages. Although I didn't know him very long I will always be grateful for the time I did get to spend with him. He was always joking and happy and always made me feel like he was glad I was around. I am not the only one who felt this way of course. At his funeral were somewhere between 1500 and 2000 people. Even some Shi'a mosques in Taxila announced his death-- which is apprently unprecedented. Unlike most funerals I have been to where people say only a few short things about the deceased and then talk politics, at Malik Refaqat's funeral (and the few days after) people spoke almost exclusively about what a kind and gentle man Malik Refaqat was. I know the above obituary notice isn't really the norm for my weekly updates but I was greatly saddened by his death and it has occupied much of my thoughts this week. I had to leave the village and all the mourning (which I must admit I found comforting) in order to take care of other business in Islamabad. Some friends involved in agircultural development have been making more progress than usual the past few weeks. It was important that I meet with them and document their successes and problems. Unfortunately it would be premature of me to talk about any of that here. Suffice to say that with a little luck Pakistani agriculture may be transformed yet again to meet the needs of a growing population. I volunteered to speak to a local college on my research a few weeks ago. When I suggested the topics I wanted to speak on I was asked if I could please not speak about any of those topics but rather bureacracy. This was for a sociology class (BSc) who are concerned with passing exams (no surprise there-- I think we've all been in that position). I hesitated just a but since I don't consider myself an expert on sociology or on bureacracy but I have a passing knowledge of Weber and Marx so I thought I could do something to tie it together to Pakistani bureacracy. So, never wanting to pass up an opportunity to publicly humiliate myself, I agreed. It turned out to be an amazingly useful exercise for me. It allowed me to take a bigger concept and see how my data fit and either verified or negated a hypothesis-- made me feel like a pukka scientist I must admit. So I presented the paper and on the same day was invited to give a second paper the following day (at a different place). So many thanks to all the students and staff at University College Islamabad for giving me such a warm reception. I have included the rough notes I used to guide me during the talk, not because I think they are very good (which they aren't), because I think it might be useful for the students at UCI to see how different the notes can be from the actual talk. So I end the week still missing my old neighbour and friend Malik Refaqat Ali and not quite reconciled to the fact that Toffee Baba won't be pestering me to video the local cricket matches anymore. |
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