A doctor with a passion for poetry

Diagnosing ailments of others comes easy to him but his own malady eludes a remedy. He is a doctor with an incurable passion. No, it’s not a case of physician heal thyself. Dr. Syed Taqi Hassan Abedi is smitten with the love of Urdu poetry. And his obsession with it grows by the day.

The Hyderabad born Canadian physician is a man of many parts – scholar, poet, critic, author – all rolled into one.  Abedi was presented the Life Time Achievement award last month by the Doha based Urdu language literary organisation, Majlis-e-Frogh-e-Urdu Adab. Having obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in medicine from Osmania University, he served in Iran, England, US and is presently working in a hospital at Ontario, Canada.

Abedi’s dalliance with Urdu poetry began right from his student days and it has taken him to different parts of the world where he delivers talks to packed audience. Recently he was in Hyderabad to deliver a talk on the relevance of Allama Iqbal, one of the Urdu’s top notch poets.

The city’s literary calendar is never dull. Not a day passes without a mushaira being held somewhere or  the other. But Abedi’s arrival brought the literati out of the woodworks as it were. Urdu aficionados thronged the Urdu Hall in Himayatnagar in large numbers to listen to the son of the soil.

Abedi’s dalliance with Urdu poetry began right from his student days and it has taken him to different parts of the world where he delivers talks to packed audience. Recently he was in Hyderabad to deliver a talk on the relevance of Allama Iqbal, one of the Urdu’s top notch poets. The occasion was the 914th address in the ‘Iqbal Shinasi’ lecture series being organised by senior advocate, Ghulam Yezdani, and it turned out to be a landmark. Audience demanding an encore during mushairas is nothing new. But Abedi’s lecture saw people hanging on to his words and uttering ‘wah-wahs’ as he expounded the philosophy and poetry of Iqbal.

In his scholarly talk, Abedi dwelt on the notion of ‘Khudi’ (self), the epistemological dimensions and the metaphysical concepts enunciated in Javid Nama, the most mature of Iqbal’s Persian epic. Quoting extensively from the works  of Moulana Rumi, he touched upon the dialogue with ‘Jahan Dost’ which is a reference to Vishvamitra.

The erudite speaker tried to scan Iqbal’s intellectual horizon and explained at length the concept of khudi (self), shaheen (falcon), taqdeer (destiny), the recurrent themes in Iqbal’s poetry. He recited several inspirational couplets that goad man to realise his infinite potentiality in shaping the destiny of universe. The poet uses the attributes of shaheen like sky-aspiring, vigilance, perseverance while spurring the youth to reach the soaring levels of excellence.

Tund-e-Baad-e-Mukhalif se na Ghabra ae Uqaab

Yeh to chaltee hai tujhay oonchaa udanay Ke liye!

O’ Falcon, don’t be scared of the headwinds

They just blow to keep your flying to greater heights.

Iqbal was primarily concerned with the human predicament and propagated a life of desire and action. To dub him as poet of Islam or to blame him for the partition of the sub-continent is to do a great injustice. To quote his own words “even Iqbal doesn’t know Iqbal’.

A poet and thinker of his stature can’t be confined to just India or Pakistan. “Iqbal is not the representative of any particular country, race or era. His is a poetry of purpose and his message is boundless and universal”, says Abedi.

-J.S.Ifthekhar,

Hyderabad based journalist.

Article published in Telangana Today,

Dated 14 of January, 2018.