OLD HABITS DIE HARD, OLD PASSIONS HARDLY DIE.

Success is a state of achievement, that sense of having “arrived” for some, while it’s just a position in the social strata for some, a reward for their struggles for few, while it could be a state of liberation from agony for some.

Everyone who asked Mazher what was the secret of his success in life was surprised at his reply. He would take a deep breath, smile, and say “Reading”.

“Reading”! Really!?! How was that?

Mazher would slip back into his memories to those days when he was hardly 8 years old...

The Doctor had diagnosed the fever as typhoid and that meant a long time in bed. Mazher loved going to school and he missed his classmates as well the friends in the locality where he lived. His brother was returning home after completing his college studies and he had picked up a comic book in English for Mazher, little realizing that he could hardly read and understand English as yet. But for Mazher who was in a pitiable condition in the bed, that comic book was the most precious gift he had ever received. He wouldn’t forget the title even now after so many decades; it was “The Three Stooges”.

Mazher would go through that book ten times at least in a day. He’d try to comprehend the dialogues printed in the book. Words like “Whoa”, “Huh”, “Ahem” would intrigue him and he would wonder how they had to be pronounced. But what baffled him most were the symbols that were used in lieu of foul language. After literally memorizing the story in the book, he requested his Mom to get him one more book. That opened the doors of Mazher’s house for Uncle Scrooge followed by Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Phantom, and Tarzan.

“Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.”?

~ Art Spiegelman

Mazher had formed his own pronunciations for the words that intrigued him. As he progressed in his education, he graduated in his hobby of reading from comics to storybooks by Enid Blyton, then moved on to Perry Mason. In the pre-final year at school, he was awarded a Dictionary which was no less than a Nobel Prize for him. It became his daily companion. He would pick up any piece of paper that he could lay his hands on, choose some word whose meaning he presumed he knew, and look it up in his Dictionary. At times, he was annoyed with himself that he had presumed the meaning incorrectly for so long. Such revelations motivated him to use the Dictionary more often and helped him expand his vocabulary.

When Mazher reached the final year in High School, he picked up his first “James Hadley Chase” and got into trouble at home! Curiosity may have killed the cat but it only made Mazher more curious. He finally made his debut in completing the book, playing hide-and-seek between his school books and that forbidden fruit - the Chase novel. Wow! What an accomplishment!?

Then came the enticement of “Pen-Pals”, making virtual friends through letter-writing. Mazher used his reading skills to start writing letters to pen-pals across the country. He chose to write in English and his pen-pals enjoyed his conversational style of writing. He experimented more with his much-appreciated style, and his joy knew no bounds when his pals told him that his letters sounded like “poetry”.

That motivated Mazher to venture into writing poetry. At that juncture, especially at that age when one is surrounded by the Cupids, he was enamoured by the charm of Urdu poetry. Very soon he recorded his first audio recording, a few of his Hindi/Urdu poems at the All India Radio station. Simultaneously, he started writing to various programmes popular on Radio Sri Lanka. His content started getting popular with the radio anchors as well as the Listeners which further broadened his circle of pen friends thereby increasing his sprees into writing.

Books, which included the Dictionary, continued to be constant companions in Mazher’s toolkit even when he started working. His first presentation at the Head Office got him a hug from the programme moderator who couldn’t believe it was his first presentation.?

“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”?

~Roald Dahl

In a job that required frequent communication with his clients, wherein he had to be diplomatic, polite, and firm, all in the same breath, Mazher's writing skills helped him get his job done with ease. He managed to woo a client with as much ease as he could exit from an unviable business relationship, keeping his options open, to go back whenever the circumstances improved.?

“You learn to write better by reading.

You learn to read better by writing.

Reading and Writing work together to improve your ability to Think”.

~ Unknown

Mazher never forgot how his habit of “Reading” had helped him in “Writing” and both habits together had contributed unimaginably to his “Success” in his career as well as his personal life, especially in his role as a father who could imbibe those habits into his sons as his legacy. Hence, encouraging his teams at the workplace to read more and motivating them to cultivate the habit of using the dictionary more often to improve their communication skills, became an obsession with Mazher. He would sometimes buy a book and gift it to his team asking them to circulate it amongst themselves because he had a firm belief in Garrison Keillor’s words:

“A book is a gift you can open again and again”.

~ Mazher H. Syed