School Timings: 9.00 AM - 2.00 PM
Objective: The objective of penning this not so unique a story at the request of a well-wisher(Janab Vinod Tripathi ji) is not to seek any kind of recognition but a hope that it might inspire and motivate some of our young boys and girls who are going through their formative years and struggling to find their calling. The future India will be shaped by the visions and missions of this generation and the least we can contribute is to bring some rays of hope and light to brighten their pathways otherwise enveloped by darkness of hopelessness.
I was born on 20th Feb, 1949 in a small village called Phadgudia about 4Km from tehsil Phulpur and 45 Km west from district headquarters in the district of Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh in the house of a middle class farming family of Janab Ashfaque Ahmad and Qamrunnisa Begum. Father was only primary school educated but had a very strong personality with an intellectual bend. He was surpanch of seven neighboring villages, mother was home educated and could read and write Urdu. I was 5th among seven siblings after 3 sisters and one brother. Around the age of 4 years, I started going to village madrasa to learn Quran and Urdu language under the tutelage of sole hafizji who was having a hard time managing 40 to 50 boys and girls. After an year and half at the madrasa, I was admitted to the Islamia Primary school class one but still continuing Quranic education under hafizji for an hour every morning before going to school. This routine and happy go lucky life continued till class 3, an average student with no signs of any brightness. However, I used to take lead roles in out of the school activities whether it was organizing kabaddi and gulli-danda teams or chasing foxes and birds.
It was towards the end of primary 3 that an unusual incident happened. I was severely punished by the teacher for some mischief along with another friend of mine so much so that I had cane marks all over my legs and the back. When mother saw this, she was very upset but she gave me a neem-patti hot bath and applied some village ointment. When father came home in the evening, I was running high fever, only thing I can recall is they had unusually loud conversation. Next day father took me to school and after some conversation with the teacher(which I don’t recall the details), he was going through the books and asking questions to the students of all classes, spending more than two hours in the school.
When he later went back home, I remember him telling ammi that situation in the school was very unsatisfactory and he needs to do something soon. My father was a member of the district education board governing all the primary and middle schools in the district. He managed to get appointment of newly BTC trained young teacher, name Janab Nizamuddin to our school.
This proved to be a great turning point of my life as he was not only an enthusiastic and passionate teacher, he was from a village about 60 Km from ours. Consequently, he had to stay with us and this was purposely planned by my father, I came to know later. Now I had 24 hours watch and tutelage of a great passionate teacher who was not only highly knowledgeable but master in the art of transferring knowledge to his students. His special passion was for maths, he was fond of telling me often, “son if you learn maths as it should be learned and able to see its inner logic and beauty, you will enjoy it no less than Ghalib’s poetry”.
Indeed, I do enjoy maths till today and like to struggle with difficult maths problems, so much so that at Hera Public School(established by me at Phadgudia) I have commissioned a maths lab which is one of its kind. The evolution of maths and its history, its famous contributors and their works are spread around to produce a conducive environment. Lab has tools and equipment to demonstrate mathematical logic, algebraic formulations and geometrical theorems etc. I find great pleasure in taking maths classes even today when I am there.
It was great credit to that great teacher that I came tops in the primary board examination and this performance continued in high school and Intermediate at Shibli College where I achieved merit positions and national scholarships. In Shibli again, I was very fortunate to have great maths teachers like Babu Ram Rao and Nazar Siddiqui who were not just great teachers but great human beings.
One day while struggling with a coordinate geometry problem I noticed IIT entrance test mentioned in brackets and wondered what it was? When no body could enlighten me on the matter, I took the issue to Nazar Sb and he explained to me in his usual affectionate manner that IITs were the top institutions in the country for pursuing engineering and it was quite tough to pass the entrance test, only the best students from each state could hope to enter. He quickly added, probably to encourage me, that if I was prepared to work hard I could possibly get through and he was more than willing to help me in my endeavor. The very next day he got me the address to write for the application forms and that’s how my journey to fulfill my dream to be an engineer started.
I sat for the entrance test at Gorakhpur Polytechnic and was called for interview at IIT Kanpur in July, 1969 and entered IIT Madras for my chosen branch of Civil Engg. The journey at IIT Madras was no less fascinating, the very first morning when I stepped out of my hostel room into the corridor, I saw a fellow student coming out of the next room. After hello and brief introduction, I noticed he was holding Biswin Sadee Urdu magazine and eager to Talk. He happened to be Ratan Lal Labroo a Kashmiri Brahmin from Shrinagar. The fate had brought us together and we bonded so well that throughout the 5 year stay at IIT, we not only always stayed next to each other, we also went through every thick and thin together and still best of friends. I and my wife Anjum just spent a week with Labroo family in Delhi who were celebrating their son’s wedding.
After graduating in 1974, I received a scholarship from Australian Government to do masters in geotechnical engineering at AIT, Bangkok which was a renowned international research institution. I completed my master’s degree in Dec 1975 and joined an engineering company in Malaysia. During the next 37 years of my professional life I worked in Malaysia, Indonesia, Middle east and north Africa and undertook more than 200 civil infra and building projects in various capacities from junior engineer to project director. Projects varied from school buildings to 1000 MW power stations and multibillion dollar railway, housing and highway projects including the longest cable-stayed bridge in South-east Asia and at the time the tallest building in the world, The Petronas Twin Towers(I was the leader of the foundation design team). My wife is Malaysian and conveniently I took Malaysian citizenship too and now we both hold OCI(overseas citizen of India) which is very convenient for our frequent travels to India. I retired in 2011 from the CEO position of an engineering and construction company and live in Shah Alam, Malaysia, have two daughters and a son all well settled in their lives.
Ever since leaving the village for IIT and exposed to the cosmopolitan and intellectual environment of IIT, I was very sensitive to the falling standards and deteriorating educational environment in the rural areas and I used to ponder over it. After coming to Malaysia, I used to visit my parents every two years and during those visits It fully dawned on me that the basic education system in rural hinterlands like Azamgarh had literally collapsed, the students coming out from those schools were no match for the competition they were supposed to face. I also noticed in the later period the emergence of English medium (mostly CBSE) private schools charging high fees and providing mediocre education. The Muslim community had additional problem of madrasa education who were enrolling significant numbers of students and churning out hafizs and molvis year after year mostly from the poor underclass. These madrasa educated young men who had no marketable skills would open new madrasas and go round the world looking for donations tapping the sympathy of the Muslim community. During one of those trips in 2003, I decided that time had come to own the problem and do something about it. I called the village folks and managed to convince them that they should handover the village madrasa to me and allow me to run it as I deemed fit. After much discussion and reluctance they agreed on two conditions that I will take full financial responsibility and religious/moral education will be maintained as important part of the curriculum.
I immediately took steps to start construction of a 7 room proper school building and classes started in July 2005. The school was officially inaugurated in March 2006 by the local MLA Alam Badi Sb. I had a very clear plan from the beginning where I wanted to take this school but changes were introduced slowly in steps to avoid hurting local sensibilities. Today with the grace of almighty the school has reached class VIII (CBSE) with 800 students from 22 villages and 45 teachers. 600 of the students are fees paying while the remaining 200 belong to economically under-privileged families and do not pay any money. They are fully sponsored by my family and friends (INR20K per year, per child covering tution, books, uniform and transport).
Today Hera Public School has excellent facilities matching any elite school in urban India comprising about 35 class-rooms, an auditorium of 250 seats for guest lectures and seminars, a 25 seat English language lab(Wordsworth) fully equipped with audio visual facilities, a maths lab and a digital library. One can visit the school web-site (herapublicschool.org) or type Hera Public School Phadgudia in Youtube to see students’ performance on various occasions. We have also established a coaching academy in Aug 2016 (Azam Coaching Academy, ACA) to provide training to our teachers and coaching to external students from other schools for various university entrance tests and allied services like police, railways and judiciary etc. It is my dream to build up this academy progressively and one day help our students to compete for IITs and UPSC exams.
We are planning for a new campus on a 7-acre piece of land donated by my family. Planning for the campus is presently in progress and hope to start construction, In Sha Allah, in 2020. Initial plans for the new campus can be seen at the web-site. It includes hostels, teacher’s quarters and an ITI.
I normally visit 3 times a year and spent in total 4 to 5 months there so much so it has become my sole purpose of life and I involve in every aspect of the school, specially teacher training, motivation, maths classes and public speaking. Moral rectitude of the society is of great concern to me and I spent great effort in inculcating into the students the sense of moral and social responsibility and social justice. I wish them to be good human beings before they take upon any other identities.
This is the story of the village boy so far and I hope my story can make a difference to the story and idea of future India. I also hope you will pray for my success. Vinod ji, I am afraid it has taken too many words to tell the story and you are at liberty to edit it as you deem fit and publish at any forum you like. I am also attaching few recent photographs of the school.
Jahane taza ki hai afkar taza se hi namud Ke sango-khisht se hote nahin jahan paida
