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Dear Sohail;
Amusingly, after having assured you (or perhaps I was
trying to assure myself) that we do not need to worry about writing a
'definitive' book about Faiz, I find myself
suffering a slight 'writer's block' because of that very same anxiety.
Perhaps it is also because I feel a special responsibility as Faiz' eldest grandchild (and so far the only one with
any interest in serious writing) and, of course, a bittersweet
admiration/envy for the man who has always defined me (or perhaps it would
be more accurate to say against whom I have always measured myself).
A couple of ideas about the letter you sent (I am also
attaching just a few sentences I wrote before I became a little anxious
that I did not have anything worthwhile to say, thank you, Faiz Sahib!! :-)
I would like, if it is OK with you, to rewrite some of
the material that we compose to make it 'flow' better. I'm good at that. In
addition, I would like our work to be a little more in depth than some of
the essays in 'Samaaji Tabdeeli'
about those personalities. I think we have a unique opportunity to
explore the depths of Faiz' personality being
that we are psychiatrists. Also, I suggest we stay away from explicitly
stating any specific, pre-defined point of view and let what we write show
whatever Faiz believed in rather than us stating
he believed in this or that.
It's very interesting that you mentioned the 'altered
state' that Faiz himself referred to. When I
first read about that in Parvarish-e-Lauh-o-Qalam,
I had the exact same thought that perhaps he was having some kind of subsyndromal seizure activity. However, it sounds like
the initial form of what Sufis might call 'Fanaa',
the ultimate transcendental state where the ego/self/nafs
is annihilated and the person becomes one with the Universe. (a similar
phenomenon has been described after strokes http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com/)It
is commonly believed that poets reach (poetic) maturity earlier than prose
writers. The same is said of mathematicians and physicists. Einstein did
his best work in his early twenties.One can say
that those states of mind experienced by Faiz
were early premonitions of his creative abilities that were beginning to
awaken, that were molded by his early home environment and the death of his
father at age 20 and the subsequent hardships. Those same abilities were
then given a political and social direction by his involvement with the
Progressive Writer's Association starting at age 24/25 which later became
subsumed into the Independence Struggle and its aftermath.
I will attempt to expand on the attached file. How about
including a brief section on the life of Sultan Mohammad Khan, Faiz' father. Ludmilla's book
has a nice summary that we could use as a source.
Ali
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