GOD's OWN HOME IN MANAKPUR

            The branch of Chisti Sufis named after Hazrat Ali Ahmed Sabir is known as ‘Sabiri’ and in Punjab its teachings are believed to have spread by Shah Mira Bhik about 300 years ago. One of Mira’s favourite followers was Hazrat Shah Alam. After him, the work of preaching Islam was taken over by his disciple, Hazrat Shah Salam, and by establishing his durgah in the Ropar district of Punjab, he promoted the Sabri cult in the area in a big way.

            Soon, a young man born in Behlolpur (Ludhiana district), immersed in God’s love, came over to Ropar. After he received spiritual advice from Hazrat Shah Salam, he lost interest in worldly matters and started towards the jungles. Returning to his pir after years of sadhana, he was given the order to develop his own Khanqah (House of Muslim mystics or Sufis). This man’s name was Hafiz Mohammed Musa, who has been one of the greatest saints of the ‘Sabri-Chisti Silsila’.

            On the orders of his pir, Hafiz Musa moved from Ropar and came over to a village known as Majri Nasi. The Rajputs of the village, devotees of another saint, did not want him there. Sialwa, the headman of the village, who was deeply devoted to Hazrat Musa, presented him 100 bighas of land in Manakpur (on the Mullahpur-Kurali road) and appealed to him to go and stay there. Musa then moved there and started living in the mosque of the Rawals – next to which the plot was located. Today, an exquisite durgah stands there.

            In a short span, reverence for Hazrat Musa spread from Manakpur to distant places. It is said that a general from the royal family of Hyderabad, Muhammed Shah, became a staunch devotee of Musa. From his life’s savings he established the dargah and became a faqir. A pond, dug about 200 years ago, still remains there.

            When Shehzada Moin-ud-din was born in the royal family of Hyderabad, his mother took him to Ajmer, from where she ws directed to go to Manakpur. There, she handed over the child to Musa, and the little one grew up to be the great Sufi saint Shah Khamosh. A garden was laid out on some land Shah Khamosh’s mother had bought and till date, it is still known as ‘Dakhniyon ka bagh’.

            A mosque was built by Shah Khamosh within the durgah in 1864. The main gate to this mosque is magnificient. This rare monument, which depicts so wide a range of the Mughal art, remains sadly neglected now.

The Fall of Education

With changing times everything has changed. Nothing is permanent but change and fortunately or unfortunately, change is something that always keeps changing. It is now my fifth year of association with students on various indoor workshops and outdoor adventure camps. Recently, I had the experience of being on an excursion trip with the students of a prestigious school of Chandigarh. Though the way the trip was organized was not upto the mark, yet I expected that the students will be well behaved and cultured as they, in addition to studying in a good school, belonged to good families of Chandigarh. Even before we had reached the venue, I could sense that it was not to be so. I had an instant feeling that the education system has degraded badly, something that probably all of us know. I could make out that the students as well as the teachers are no more the same as they were ten years back; let us not go much into the past. The trends have changed and education has become a profession and has definitely become sub-standard. Out of the one hundred and fifty odd kids I was with, I could not even point out a handful that I could say were well behaved. The abusive language they were using astonished me. I wondered if I knew all these words and their meanings when I was their age. I was just trying to get over this fact when I spotted a bunch of them destroying the plantation at the venue and overheard one of them saying, “How does it make a difference, we have paid for it.” I was astonished to know their belief that they have the capacity to pay for the ill done to nature. Soon after, it was time for lunch and all the kids were provided with a bottle of mineral water and disposable plates etc. By the time lunch got over, I could see that the place had been transformed into garbage bin with litter all around the place though the arrangement for dustbins had been made there. Perturbed, I decided to take a stroll around the place and I could see numerous half filled mineral water bottles al around the place and it was not even half an hour later that the kids started making a hue and cry about more drinking water. I wondered what made these kids waste so much water when majority population of our country does not even get to drink water, what to talk of mineral water. To add to this all, I had also seen almost all of them washing hands with it despite the fact that public water supply taps were available at the venue. The instructors and organizers at the venue were feeling helpless too as the teachers seemed to be a party to all this. A child took two bottles of water from me stating that the teachers needed them and five minutes later, I had another one of them with the same reason standing next to me. I enquired about this from my accompanying colleagues and I was flabbergasted to know that they were storing the water bottles. We all felt so helpless, the kids, the teachers as well as the organizers, though for different reasons altogether. The kids and their teachers were unhappy about the way it was organized, or probably more so because the teachers did not get tea till afternoon and also about the unavailability of things they had demanded. We, the organizers felt so because we had realized by now that probably it was a wrong choice all together but I had another reason to be upset. I was helpless and annoyed to see the cultural values that the new generation has inherited. I was helpless to see the way they were treating the “Mother Nature” and the sense of carelessness that they have developed. I am a teacher myself and I have been into a dilemma since then thinking that where are we heading to. Is it we the teachers, who have forgotten to inculcate moral values amongst our students, or the parents who have made them believe that money can buy anything, or have they developed a world of their own with passing time where values and culture have no place. Whatever the reason may be, one thing is for sure that in today’s date, our education system has deteriorated drastically and if corrective measures are not taken at the earliest, it seems we will have no option but to reinforce the age old saying that we have been inculcating into every Indian since the time of the British that, “Bharat Bhagya Vidhata.”

बँटवारा

न जाने क्यों हमने अपने को

लकीरे खींचकर जुदा कर लिया

न जाने क्यों जात पात का

जाल अपने गिर्द बुन लिया

हम सब का खून भी लाल है

और पसीना भी खरा पानी ,

फिर भी रहते हैं जुदा

कहते हैं अपने को हिन्दुस्तानी पाकिस्तानी,

अज़ान यहाँ भी होती है

आरती वहां भी

फिर भी दामन छुड़ाए बैठे हैं,

हिंदू भी मुसलमान भी

रात का अंधकार भी वही है

सूरज का तेज भी

पर फिर भी रहते हैं जुदा

हम नासमझ हर घड़ी

न खुशीआं बाँटते हैं

न ग़म

पर खुदा को बाँट रखा है हमने

यहाँ भी और वहां भी।