An Ode to My Grandfather

Hakim Sahab had already attained a legendary status during his lifetime. When he passed away, that entire class of people who value work for its own sake, also perished. It seems impossible that a person like Hakim Sahab could exist today. He is universally remembered as a thoughtful, ambitious, hard-working, but quiet, overachiever, as someone unique to his era, yet a personality like Hakim Sahab would have been successful in any era, because though technology and market conditions change constantly, the ingredients of success rarely do.

His life’s work is suffused with an abundance of goodwill best described by the Urdu word ‘barkat’. He is one of the few people who have left only positive memories and a positive attitude that drives all Hamdard institutions to this day. Those associated with Hamdard, as employees, partners, or leaders, are aware that they are working for a charitable cause, and each individual contribution adds to the resilience of the Hamdard brand. It is that enduring spirit that has survived the constant dissections of his character and emerge as his greatest gift.

If the strength of institutions can be gauged by their longevity, then the dozens of institutions founded by Hakim Sahab have stood the test of time and continue to transform lives more than two decades after he can no longer nurture them himself. Hamdard Laboratories India, well past a century of existence, is on track to attain its highest ever sales this year. Hamdard National Foundation and Business and Employment Bureau, both of which have completed more than 50 years, have expanded their activities exponentially and reached more people this year than ever before. Jamia Hamdard, the brightest jewel among the institutions founded by Hakim Sahab, goes from strength to strength, attaining its highest ever ranking this year. India Islamic Cultural Centre is as vibrant a social hub as ever. These and many other institutions set up by Hakim Sahab have proved their foundational stability by continuous growth and expansion.

I was 21 when Hakim Sahab passed away. Increasingly now I look back at his life and try to piece together his drives and motivations. Hamdard Archives and Research Centre has done an excellent job in preserving the documents, media, and other artifacts from his life for a thorough study. He comes across as a determined experimenter with the rare amalgamation of unfathomable curiosity, relentless drive, and unbending discipline. In his 40’s and 50’s, in a flurry of activity that is almost scary in its sheer productivity, he broke the shackles of his unexceptional background to emerge as an exceptional leader of his times. The American comedian Eddie Cantor once said that it takes 20 years to become an overnight success. It took decades of daily practice and incremental progress for Hakim Sahab to build one strong institution after another.

I remember him as a quiet man who made his words count. By the time I was born, he was 70 and had reached the Maslow stage of self-actualization. He liked nothing more than withdrawing from the world of commentary and dedicate himself to what he loved most, the books and labs that had claimed his heart, mind, and spirit ever since he was a teenager. He did not have anything to prove to anyone and his biggest competitor was himself. He did not have to say much for us to draw endless lessons from his example.

Firstly, there are lessons on health. He was very particular about both the content and the timing of his meals. He tried everything but ate sparingly. Those of us who are in a constant struggle to control our appetites can appreciate the restraint required to never overeat. However, this did not mean that he did not indulge. Dessert after dinner was a must but never more than one or two spoonfuls. I am yet to come across anyone with such steely resolve in the face of sugar. He was equally fastidious about his sleep and exercise. His daily morning walk invariably started at the break of dawn. Being a Hakim, he knew the body well and took good care of it, and never allowed himself to get overweight. It was hard to keep up with him during walks well into his eighties. Many tried, trotting along, huffing and puffing, while he maintained his pace, hardly breaking a sweat.

There are valuable lessons to be gleaned from Hakim Sahab’s work life as well. The most important one, in my opinion, is to maintain discipline. He never wavered from his schedule, rarely letting himself get sidetracked. I think it was this quiet discipline that helped him make daily incremental progress and achieve his goals. He was not catapulted to success by some stroke of luck. He engineered his own destiny, brick by brick. He had a deep respect for his own time and that of others. Like most successful people, he hated wasting time. At meetings and functions, he always arrived a few minutes before the stipulated time. It is a paradox of our times that these days, when we all have multiple time-keeping devices on or near us, the value of time is diminished rather than enhanced, perhaps because there is the available option of calling to let others know that we are running late.

Hakim Sahab proves the point that genius is overrated. When we think of someone who we consider a genius, the image we normally have is that of a person with extraordinary mental capabilities and a capacity to understand things far easier and clearer than the rest of us mortals. But what matters still and will matter for the foreseeable future is the disciplinary work ethic that grows on itself and through slow but constant progress yields extraordinary results. There is an elegant symmetry to his decisions because they were based on strong intrinsic principles and structure.

Despite Hakim Sahab’s enormous professional success, his personality was warm and personal, and despite his busy schedule, he was a one-man public relations machine. The Hamdard Id and Holi parties brought together guests from all walks of life. Politicians, artists, business leaders, doctors, lawyers, all mingled and waited for a small chat with Hakim Sahab. As a kid, I remember how much people wanted to be around him. He cherished and nurtured personal relationships; as a result, he built lifelong friendships. Apart from the large parties with hundreds of guests, he hosted dinners every Sunday with a handful of guests. Part of his appeal lay in the natural magnetism of a self-made man who has built a name and an empire by sheer hard work and willpower, but equally he was liked for his affable nature, never letting his achievements drive his ego. He respected others as much as he was respected, never letting cynicism come in the way of his positivity. I never saw him make a public speech. He did not like attention. For him, the work was enough. When he won the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Shri, he did not go to receive these prestigious national awards. Yet, the top politicians of the country regularly paid him personal visits.

Even the people he hired had a lifelong loyalty to him. I still hear from people he hired and mentored that he was an excellent coach because he led from the front, not only because of his title but because of his knowledge and experience. Employees did not want to leave Hamdard because of his very personal management style and their loyalty was reciprocated. Once he spotted talent, he stuck with it and groomed potential.

Due to the sheer longevity of the institutions founded by Hakim Sahab, it is impossible to quantify the number of lives he has affected. Hakim Sahab dedicated his entire life to the upliftment of the poor. At his clinic, he cured and advised countless patients, most of whom he did not charge a single rupee from. It was said of Hakim Sahab that he did not have a set consultation fee. Instead, he would charge what a patient could comfortably pay based on his/her socioeconomic condition. For most patients, he did not charge anything.

As a kid, I often visited his clinic at Asaf Ali Road just to pass time when my school was off. I remember his clinic as a great equalizer. People from all strata of society could be seen sitting shoulder to shoulder on the long benches outside his clinic, waiting their turn. Ministers seated next to injured factory workers, film stars next to rickshaw pullers, and business tycoons next to poor pregnant women, was all a common sight. Outside the clinic, luxury cars and bicycles and everything in between would be parked together, with no special parking area for anyone. In a way, the clinic embodied Hakim Sahab’s values - dignity for all, equal treatment at a fair price, and commitment to the task.

Original sources are good at revealing the motivations of individuals. In the original Memoranda of Association of Hamdard National Foundation, Business and Employment Bureau, Hamdard Education Society, and other societies that Hakim Sahab founded, in the section that lists the founding members along with their addresses and occupations, Hakim Sahab’s occupation is always listed as ‘Physician’. This is a telling detail because he had numerous options, like ‘Business’, ‘Educationist’, ‘Researcher’, ‘Social Service’, all fields in which he excelled, but he identified himself by his core competency, that of being a Hakim, which allowed other, more profitable successes. He continued seeing patients and maintained the same schedule of clinic hours until he was in his late eighties.

In addition to the hundreds of patients he saw daily for decades, he reached even more people through the various educational, social, and cultural institutions he founded. His achievements were only surpassed by his ambition. One cannot underestimate the tens of thousands of families that have benefitted from employment in his various organizations, those who have received scholarships and grants, and those who have received the gifts of education and employment.

As a researcher of Unani medicine, he standardized Unani pharmacopoeia and developed a wide variety of Unani medicines for all sorts of ailments. As a businessman, he employed or contracted with thousands of people, contributing to their livelihoods. As an educationist, he was an institution builder and benefitted millions of students and staff over the years. All his achievements and activities are tied together by his charitable instinct and largeness of spirit. To this day, I am approached by strangers who tell me how Hakim Sahab once treated them, or employed someone from their family, or worked with them, or imparted a piece of wisdom that they benefited from. It fills my heart with great awe and joy at how much impact he had. Indian society is so much richer because of selfless visionaries like Hakim Sahab.

In the last decade of his life he seemed to be in a hurry to achieve as much as he could. Full of heart and vigour at an age when most people have long hung up their boots, he founded Jamia Hamdard in 1989 and Hamdard Public School in 1993. The original memorandum of association of Jamia Hamdard is a study in institutional design because of its balancing of stakeholders. Anyone who studies the MOA marvels at the way the public and private institutional balance is maintained.

To preserve the legacy of Hakim Sahab, the Hamdard Archives and Research Centre in Jamia Hamdard has done an excellent job in archiving all his documents and records. A new project to showcase the preserved material is in the works. Fortunately for us, Hakim Sahab was a meticulous preserver of documents, and any document that passed through his desk was sure to have copious notes jotted down in the margins. He was also a prolific writer of letters. His exchanges with some of the leaders in industry, politics, law, and medicine display not only his vast knowledge but his generosity of spirit as well.

The cavalier use of the word ‘leader’ has reduced it to a platitude, but real leadership is easy to identify when we see it. My favourite definition of leadership comes from the writer David Foster-Wallace, who in a political essay wrote:

“A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people… A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own. A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn’t ever get to on your own.”

I often think of these words when I think of Hakim Sahab. He was followed because people wanted to follow him, not by diktat, and that’s why he continues to have a strong following today.

Am I the only one who thinks that Hakim Sahab had a marked resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi? Albert Einstein wrote on Gandhi’s death: "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." The similarities between the Mahatma and the Hakim went beyond physical likeness - they were both 5ft 5in tall, they both had a roundish face with a wide, Nubian nose. Though separated by a generation (Hakeem Sahab was 39 on Gandhi’s assassination), in his later years Hakim Sahab had developed an uncanny resemblance to the Mahatma. In many ways, he had become one himself.

But the similarities did not end there. Both these great souls worked tirelessly for the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the underdog. They had strong principles and a stronger work ethic to realize their goals. They were both self-made men, who rose to prominence by sheer determination. They did not let setbacks, which are inevitable, hamper their discipline and progress. The rarest of qualities among them was that they did not toot their own horn. They just moved on and let others do the talking.

Hakim Sahab is one of the true enigmas of our time. An austere man with a saintly aura as if he belonged to a different epoch. Gazing across the stale horizons, past all the successes and failures, he stands above the murk forging a realm at once bold and very human.

Sajid Ahmed