Yousuf Raza – In Memory of Prof. Malik Hussain Mubbasshar
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The speaker discusses various examples of successful individuals in the medical field, including a former psychiatrist named Fareed Aslam who passed away 10 days ago, a former psychiatrist named Mubasher Kia who used tools to convince patients to join his mental health program, and a former psychiatrist named David Goldberg who was a co-author of a successfulFikra project in Pakistan. The speaker emphasizes the importance of mental health and the psychological health of the first president, Mubasher Tucson, and the struggles of working in a psychiatry field.
AI: Summary ©
Yes, in the name of Allah, peace and
blessings of Allah be upon the Messenger of
Allah.
Assalamu alaikum everybody, this is Yusuf and Azam.
Azam, Assalamu alaikum.
Walaikum Assalam Yusuf, how are you?
I am fine, how are you?
Alhamdulillah, I am fine.
Yes Yusuf, what are we doing today?
Yes, today we are holding this program in
memory of Professor Malik Hussain Mubasher.
Professor Sahib passed away around 10 days ago.
It's a huge loss for the family of
psychiatry.
In Pakistan.
He was part of the founding faculty of
that college as well.
And today, we have the good fortune of
having one of the greatest students of Professor
Mubasher.
Fareed Aslam Minhas Sahib.
He's my supervisor, my mentor.
Mubasher Sahib has carried his work far beyond
where Mubasher Sahib took it.
And I heard these words many times in
which he expressed how proud he was.
And how happy he was to see where
Professor Fareed Aslam Minhas has taken Pakistani psychiatry.
So, without further ado, I ask Sir to
join us.
Sir, Assalamu alaikum.
Walaikum Assalam.
Sir, how are you?
Well, grieving and surviving.
Sir, we can understand.
Sir, we wanted to thank you so much
for joining us.
We wanted anyone who's listening, our new psychiatrists,
younger psychiatrists, psychologists, generally people of Pakistan, Mubasher
Sahib, for all the favours you've done specifically
on psychiatry and for the people of Pakistan
in general.
If you can share with us your memories
of Mubasher Sahib.
First of all, thank you very much Azam
and Yusuf for organising this meeting.
And I am greatly indebted to you for
doing so.
Mainly because of the fact that the man
that we are talking about, and the man
that we have lost 10 days ago, is
not an ordinary man.
He came to Pakistan with all the qualifications
that we wanted to get from the United
Kingdom.
And he could have settled down anywhere in
the country.
And he could have continued to practice medicine
if he wanted to.
But the passion that he had for psychiatry
was so enormous, that he came down to
Pak Rawalpindi and started to organise a department
that he called as Department of Psychiatry.
And the resistance that he met in terms
of organising that was absolutely horrendous, ridiculous and
uncertain.
He was given one of the worst places
in the hospital, which was close to the
boundary wall and to the watching station of
the guards and the laundry of the hospital.
From there, only you could see the boundary
wall.
And if you jumped the boundary wall, you
were on the road.
And there he started with by taking a
shirt and a chair and sat under a
tree and started to organise the department.
And single-handedly, he fought the battles in
terms of organising those battles.
And I think his greatest asset was that
he gave to us a platform where psychiatry
was launched in the country, in Rawalpindi at
that time.
And then he was such a restless soul
and he had such an enormous amount of
connections with the British psychiatrists that as soon
as he got hold of establishing his department,
which I remember one patient used to come,
five patients used to come, but then over
the period of time, patients started to accumulate
and they would come in and he would
treat them.
But he would also get into the training
mode also.
And that is the kind of stigma of
psychiatry so enormous and so big that many
people never wanted to come into psychiatry.
We were contesting at that point with jinn,
jadu, taweez and faith healers and people would
have more trust in them rather than in
psychiatry.
So Professor Mubasher was the only lonely man
with a vision, with a mission that he
established that department.
So that's the initial bringing up of the
department of psychiatry that he had.
Sir, you shared that he could have practiced
medicine.
So from what I remember, he had membership
of three colleges of medicine in the United
Kingdom and then he proceeded to psychiatry.
For when medicine offered so much of a
better chance, less stigma, why would he go
towards psychiatry?
That's a very interesting question, Yusuf.
And the answer is that he was a
man who was a very traditional man.
He was a man who would not refuse
anybody, his elders especially.
And his parents, the link between him and
his parents was absolutely phenomenal.
His father, who was a man of a
vision, discussed with his son that, well, I
want you to do medicine.
And Mubasher Saab, the brilliant man that he
was, he went with all the preparation of
medicine, went to England and not only appeared
from one college, he appeared from three colleges.
And his vision was not to become a
professor due to MRCP, but since he had
that contract with his dad, he went on
to do that.
And once he did that, he said to
his dad, listen, I've done what you wanted
me to do.
Now kindly let me do what I want.
And at that point, his dad had probably
no option left because the son had outsmart
the father by saying, I've done you what
you wanted to and now let me do
that.
And that is why I say that he
could have been easily a professor of medicine
in any of the medical colleges in the
country at that point.
For him to park his MRCPs on a
site and get on with MRC psych as
a forerunner was in itself the beginning of
a great man thinking about organizing the psychiatry
in where there was nobody around at that
time.
And he was the first psychiatrist in the
civilian sector to have come into the country.
And he had the passion and the vision
to start that.
So, as a professor, practicing psychiatry is one
thing, but we have heard stories that he
not only practiced psychiatry, but he also prepared
a next generation of psychiatrists, one of whom
is you.
So, how he was so passionate?
Yeah, I think another hat that he had
was the salesmanship of psychiatry.
And he would come to the medical college.
He was a smart man dressed immaculately in
the suits from Harrods of London with a
bow tie that he adored on very special
occasions.
He had a fluent command on English.
He had fluent command in Urdu and Punjabi.
The knowledge was bubbling out from him in
every corner, every sentence that he had.
And I think teachers are the best salesmen
of their subject.
And Professor Maveshwar was the best salesman of
psychiatry.
He came into the class, a class that
used to be around 300 students, and then
300 students would be sitting and psychiatry was
never a popular subject at all.
But then Professor Maveshwar had that magnetic sense
and that penetrative sense and that collaborative understanding
of the psyche of the boys and girls
at that point that he would come and
explain to the students what psychiatry is all
about.
And one of the very first things that
he talked about, and I've spoken about this
several times before, was the fact that a
lady with a somatization disorder was seen by
the surgeons and the surgeons had opened her
up three times, finding something was wrong in
her GI symptoms and they could not find
anything in the GI symptoms.
And repeated investigations and three surgeries, this lady
was referred to Maveshwar Sahib and he made
the diagnosis of somatization disorder and depression and
he started to treat that.
And as luck would have it, this lady
got better and better.
And then that was his example for the
students who would come to him and he'd
talk about this.
And then when he would go to the
class, because depression is one of the more
common disorders in psychiatry, but then psychiatry has
a whole range of other problems.
And he was absolutely conversant with all the
topics in psychiatry and he would lure the
young generation with the work that he had
done, the way he had done, and the
way he was proposing the things to move
on.
And I think that's where we got attracted
to his sales venture.
And within the span of, you see, there
was a time before central government hospital was
just a hospital that was not attached to
medical colleges at all.
So Maveshwar Sahib, 72, when he came in,
he was working in central government, established the
department, had a few house officers with him.
But when around 76, 77, the Rawalpindi General
Hospital became part of Rawalpindi Medical College Complex,
then he had links with the students.
And I think that's where his salesmanship got
a bigger audience.
And he was a man who loved the
audience.
And he loved the audience and he understood
what the audience wanted.
He spoke what they wanted and most of
the time he understood what the audience was
thinking.
So that man with that vision and with
that power goes on to talk to the
students and he started to sell.
And I think I was in batch number
three of Rawalpindi Medical College.
And by the time our class came for
the house job interviews, I think a sensation
broke open in the office of the principal
when my colleague Shakil Jahangir Malik, who had
married number nine, went into the big room
of the professors and they said, what do
you want to become?
Said, I want to become a psychiatrist.
Everybody was stunned.
Married number nine wants to become a psychiatrist.
What was this all about?
Then I went way down.
I went in.
I wasn't married number nine or ten.
I think I was around 15 or 17
somewhere that married.
And when I said psychiatry, now then the
professors understood that the revolution was in the
making.
And then another person came in and believe
me, by the time 25 people went in
for interview, the seats for psychiatry were full.
And that's where Mubasher Sahib made the mark
that he was getting top married boys into
psychiatry.
And that's where psychiatry started to settle.
And I just want to quote one example.
We had a function in the medical
college a long time back, around
77, 78.
And there comes a man in a black
tuxedo.
And dressed immaculately, speeches were happening.
And I went to him and I said,
Sir, can I take a picture with you?
And in those days, these mobiles were not
there.
And we had to call the photographer and
so on and so forth.
So Ghazanfar, our all time great photographer in
Ralphini Medical College, we requested him.
We used to request him for many other
photographs, but this was a very different photograph.
So we got him there.
And there is a picture that I took
with him, with him in the tuxedo, as
I said.
And one more doctor, a student standing with
me.
And that was the beginning of my admiration
for this man that came into the first
picture of mine with him.
And a few years later, when I went
to United Kingdom for my further training, I
took out that picture and I wrote on
that picture, which he quoted many times, I
said, to master yourself, give yourself to the
master.
So that's a quotation that I had heard
and I felt I just wanted to share
that with him.
And that was the time when I was
doing my master's in England that I sent
him that.
And when I got my result, I said,
if you give yourself to the master, this
is what happens.
Because by then I had cleared the membership
examination of the college.
I had done the diploma in psychiatry and
I had done the master's in psychiatry, which
included a lot of research to do.
So I think my journey with him was
absolutely right from the beginning, based on respect
for the subject, respect for the knowledge that
he had, respect for the communication that he
had, respect for the dealing that he had
with all of us.
Sir, there's one thing that we often hear
about Mubasher Sahib is that he was very,
very capable of picking out the best potential
in people.
And that's probably how he was able to
identify the psychiatrist in you.
If you could tell us something about how
he was able to do that, to have
that eye, to be able to see that
this person is, he has it in him.
Okay, now that's a very interesting question, Yusuf.
The point is that he knew the subject
and when he was speaking, he used to
pick up the responses, non-verbal responses on
the people that he was looking at.
And that is where he made up his
mind that non-verbally, who is listening, who
is attentive and who is keen.
And don't get me wrong here that if
20 people he picked out who were interested,
according to the students, but he would make
a very quick mental state examination, which would
include your past, present and potential future.
And there were many people that he would
not select.
He would say, no, no, no, you are
very good to be a surgeon.
You're very good to be a physician.
Don't come into psychiatry.
This doesn't offer anything.
So I think he selected the breed for
psychiatry and he tested that breed.
And he tested with various methods that he
had up his sleeves.
He would give you difficult tasks, difficult questions
and difficult scenarios to prove to him that
you actually are the man that he is
looking for.
And he would test you in difficult waters,
give you very awkward situations, preach you very,
very, very strictly, not give you any breathing
space.
And then he would realize that this is
the man that I'm looking for.
And if you had crossed all the passing
lines with him, he would select you.
Now, having said that, I think in the
course of time, many colleagues who were interested
in psychiatry would attend his classes, but not
many would become psychiatrists.
And the subject had an appeal for so
many people in the medical college when he
was teaching, but very few would be selected
to come in and join him.
Many people, competent people who went on to
become qualified surgeons and physicians and gynecologists and
public health specialists who came with us, worked
with us for some time, but then left.
Only because of the fact that they were
not delivering what Professor Mubasher wanted them to
deliver, therefore they went away.
And many a times, many a times, even
the best of the best who came to
work with him couldn't hold on to the
tight rigors that he used to have.
You had to be in the class 10
minutes before in the boardroom, 10 minutes before
the boardroom would start.
Your progress notes had to be completed.
The senior registrar needed to have their formulation
written down.
My colleagues used to, and we used to
write about 20 formulations before the boardroom and
boardroom was not once a week, it was
every day.
And every new admission had to be clocked
the same night and next morning, 8 o
'clock you had to present the new admissions
with full history and full formulation.
And presenting formulations to him was a nightmare.
It was a nightmare.
I have very candid memories of presenting my
history to him, my formulation to him.
And then I would start, and I'm just
sharing it with you and the audience here,
trembling was a very normal phenomenon, but getting
cyanosis was a regular phenomenon because of the
fact that you open up your mouth and
there you get plastered.
Not for any wrong reasons, but the sentences
that he wanted to hear, if they were
not there and if you were not onto
his level, then many times you would not
be able to speak more than two lines
of your formulation that you had written the
whole night before.
Next morning, he would say, give me the
white, give me that formulation.
And then he will correct and tell you
where we went wrong.
So I think that was the stringent criteria
of his histories.
And one of the things was that, again,
a very interesting phenomenon, that when we were
doing work with him, he would ask only
that person who hadn't done the job.
Now, very often we thought that he had
spies in there who go and tell him
that XYZ person hasn't done his history.
And he'll say, oh, you tell me your
history of that patient.
Now, surprise, surprise, that history wasn't the one
that was completed.
But that doesn't mean that somehow it was
not completed.
Now, I don't believe in that paranoia that
he had informants who would tell him, but
I think it was sheer intelligence that he
would pick out from our expressions how comfortable
and how confident that he looked, that he
would pick out that man.
So some of us at trainees had that
paranoia about you as well, that you had
informants around the world.
Well, it's very interesting.
I was very blessed that he was very
kind to me.
And I had learned a lot from him.
As I allude to the fact that in
a Pakistani setup, we normally don't get many
teachers around.
But when you go to an English setup,
you can't stay with one consultant for more
than six months.
So I stayed there for about five years,
which meant that I had seen 10 consultants
in England with whom I had direct work.
And I can tell you the impact that
Mubasher Saab had on me is much higher
than the impact of those 10 people in
England that I worked for.
And I was very lucky that Mubasher Saab
and I, if you do our personality profiles,
we are very different from each other.
But the fact that I learned from him
the tricks of the trade, which over a
period of time, we gather how he manipulates
things and how he delivers things and how
he detects those things.
So because I have lived under tremendous degree
of pressure with him, I had some of
the transformation of his techniques into this.
But my personality, as I alluded to, the
fact is very different than his.
I had my own style.
So if you had paranoia about me, that
meant that I had learned the tricks right.
And believe me, there wasn't a kind of
a man that he had implanted amongst us
to tell him.
And there wasn't a man that I had
implanted to tell me that who has not
done the job.
But it is just the on-job training
that I had.
Sir, we've heard about...
Asim, please go ahead.
Yeah, we already talked about how good a
psychiatrist and how good a psychiatrist professor he
was.
He has a career, a part of his
career, when he left Rawalpindi Medical College and
joined University of Health Sciences.
And so what changes did he make to
the medical syllabus?
We hear a lot about behavioral sciences being
incorporated into the medical syllabus.
So how and why is this important?
Again, when he went to the medical college,
by then, he had established the department at
its best.
The department at that time was gathering trainees
from all the four provinces in the country.
And by the time he left, there were
representation from four plus one provinces in the
country.
The department had become the WHO Collaborating Center
for Mental Health Research and Training.
And the research and training that you see
in psychiatry was initiated under the leadership of
Professor Mubasher in the Institute of Health.
And we were regularly taking up the public
health aspect of psychiatry at that point.
In terms of the disaster management, in terms
of the primary care setup, he had launched
successfully two important programs, which we call as
community health program, a community mental health program
and school mental health program, which meant he
used to say that it is too sad
to left to leave psychiatry only for the
psychiatrists alone.
And he knew it very well that if
the psychiatry doesn't go into the primary care
setting, teaching hospitals, which he used to call
as white elephants, will do nothing for psychiatry.
So he was a man who initiated the
community mental health program, which meant that he
went over to the Rawalpindi district, Gujar Khan,
Kandar Saeeda, Jhelum and Gua on this side,
and Attock and so on, so forth, a
whole primary care centers where he went out
to train the primary care physician in the
early detection and treatment of psychiatric disorders.
And then he would go supervise, do the
training.
And then after the training was done, he
would embark upon them that they would be
linked up with the Institute of Psychiatry.
Any referrals from there would come here.
And then I spoke about the stigma of
psychiatry.
He initiated the school mental health program where
he would go to the in the morning
assembly to the schools and address the students
and the teachers.
And dissociative disorder, we know is very common.
Epilepsy, we know is very common.
He would talk about those things to the
students and to the teachers.
And again, the referral system was established from
the schools to the Institute of Psychiatry.
I think that was the beginning of the
public health impression of Institute of Psychiatry.
And I think when he broke the shackles
of the Institute of Psychiatry and extended that
service out into the community, that's where psychiatry
began to get recognized.
And the stigma of psychiatry that was so
phenomenal in the beginning started to reduce.
And I could see that our numbers from
15, 20 patients a day began to rise
up to about 120 a day.
And there was no space in those.
And there was nobody was willing to give
him a building.
Remember, he started from a tree.
Then he began to have rich people who
were not well.
He got hold of them and he started
to get the donations and he made a
very enlarged building into the Institute of Psychiatry.
So, you know, by then he had set
down the foundations.
As you asked me about his going to
the principalship, by then he was so contended
that his mission was accomplished.
The job was being done.
The teaching at undergraduate level had taken up.
Postgraduate trainees were coming in.
The patients were treated in different lines.
Many other specialties were coming into the Institute
at that point.
Research publications were coming up.
And that's where he took up the offer
of going to the medical college.
Now, it's a very interesting phenomena that when
he was appointed as the principal of Medical
College, he took me to three places.
He took me to his office and he
removed his nameplate and put my nameplate.
He took me to the Ministry of Health
and said, this man is now my replacement
and he is going to become the director
of the WHO Collaborating Center and the Community
Mental Health Program.
And thirdly, the first letter that or the
orders that he issued after becoming the principal
said, in my place, Fareed Minhas would become
the head of the Institute.
So I think he covered his ground and
he abdicated his seat only when he was
very sure that he had trained his successor
to deliver and to carry on the mission
that he had so wonderfully fought and delivered
at that point.
So I became, after his appointment as the
principal of Ralph Vindy Medical College, I became
the head of the Institute of Psychiatry.
That's a different story.
I'll come back to that in a moment.
But to take up your question, what changes
in medical education he wanted to bring.
Now, I think his reason to go into
medical education section was that he could bring
up psychiatry into that level and he could
have bigger leverage on what he can do
for psychiatry.
And that's where I think he began to
start working on behavioral sciences, making psychiatry as
a compulsory subject, involving the physicians in the
problem-based learning, involving scenarios which meant psychiatry
has to come in.
And for the first time, we were sitting
into the final year MDBS examination on a
station for behavioral sciences, on a station for
psychiatry that it began to evolve.
And then I think he had bigger landscape
as a principal of Ralph Vindy Medical College,
but then he was picked up to become
the vice chancellor of the University of the
Health Sciences, the first university that came.
And because before that, we were at the
mercy of Punjab University as one of the
departments of Punjab University.
And the University of Health Sciences, which Professor
Mubasher founded, was the first medical university of
this country.
And when he sat on that chair, I
think he made sure that he called all
the principals of the medical colleges and made
them talk about behavioral sciences.
That's where behavioral sciences became an integral part
of your examination system in MDBS.
In my time, before this thing was happening,
there were 15 lectures of psychiatry, which nobody
attended.
There was no examination in psychiatry that anybody
attended.
Whatever people interest had in psychiatry was because
of the salesmanship of Professor Mubasher.
But once the behavioral sciences was established and
organized, people couldn't run away from that.
So we used to have the examination of
behavioral sciences in about in third year, in
fourth year.
But the students would come for rotation from
third year onwards.
And we would get 50 lectures of behavioral
sciences in the first two years.
So I think that was the beginning of
a successful implementation of behavioral sciences that Professor
Mubasher wanted to accomplish.
And he did that wonderfully well.
Now, when he became the vice chancellor, I
was one of the members of the syndicate
of the university.
And from being a very young professor, I
used to attend the meeting as a member
of the syndicate because Professor Mubasher asked me
to do that with the senior most professors.
And my God, what a pleasant and sad
sight it was at the same time.
I began to brush my shoulders with the
elite of professors of medical universities and the
way Mubasher fought, convinced and bulldozed them all
to get behavioral sciences as a part of
the examination as a classic example of advocacy,
determination, motivation, and moving people in a way
with the principle that follow me, lead me.
And if you don't follow me, and if
you don't lead me, get out of my
way.
And that's how I saw him doing behavioral
sciences recognition, bulldozing many professors of medicine, professors
of surgery who were very competent in their
own right.
But because they had no knowledge about psychiatry,
they were not convinced that psychiatry and behavioral
sciences should become that.
And for me, that was an on job
learning that Professor Mubasher, how he dealt with
them.
And within a flash of a time, the
syndicate voted that behavioral sciences would be recognized
as an essential teaching component.
So I think that's his teaching that brought
him into making behavioral sciences as an important
subject.
So the way you described that Professor Mubasher,
when he was starting off at the central
government hospital, he had to start his department
literally under a tree.
But as far as he went, it looks
like from the first day, when he's setting
up his table under that tree, his vision
is set at making psychiatry, establishing it in
the country, ground up across the different levels.
And he's not thinking, if four patients come
to me, it's a big deal.
He's thinking all the way, okay, I'm going
to take this as far as we people
like us could not even have conceived in
his position.
But he seemed to have a very clear
vision as to where he was going.
Absolutely.
I think he had a dream about psychiatry
and he fulfilled that dream.
And he was the architect of thinking very
early and delivering over a period of time.
Any objective in his life, you see, his
eyes were very clear.
He made no bones about it.
And Saripur Road or Murray Road wasn't his
territory to flourish.
His territory to flourish was the whole of
the country and connected with the world.
That was the vision that he had.
That was the man that he was.
For him, Murray Road was not attractive at
all.
Saripur Road wasn't attractive at all for him.
He had very higher aims in his life.
And I think that's what he did.
Sir, you mentioned the Community Mental Health Program.
There is an article in The Lancet by
Professor Goldberg in which he talks about it.
And he says that Professor Mubasher's contributions are
the envy of the industrialized world.
That this is something that there is so
much that the West has to learn from.
What was that program?
How was it so successful that it led
Professor Goldberg to say that?
Well, you see, Professor Goldberg is another phenomenal
man.
And I had the pleasure of working with
him for over one and a half years.
And I still work with him on different
projects.
And he was the main man of psychiatry
in British psychiatry at that time.
And he was a man who had spent
a lot of time in America talking about
primary care setup.
And this was a niche of the WHO
Collaborating Center that Mubasher went to meet him
in Geneva and in Cairo.
And then his Indian counterpart, N.
N.
Rig was another phenomenal man at that point
in time in India.
That these two men got together, these three
men got together and they devised this plan.
Indians were slightly ahead of us.
And as soon as Professor Mubasher got into
that, he left the Indians plans way behind.
And he wanted, he developed the Pakistani community
psychiatry much ahead of what N.
N.
Rig had done at that point.
And when Goldberg came to Pakistan, he saw
what Mubasher had offered in terms of the
community program and the school mental health program.
And he became a co-author in some
of the evaluation work that was being done
here.
He wrote that phenomenal article in Lancet at
that point where he said that what Mubasher
had done is the envy of the industrialized
country, whereby he meant that the integration of
psychiatry into the primary health care that the
UHS in England and in America, they had
been trying to set up but not able
to do so.
So that was the envy that Professor David
Goldberg at that point had.
And Mubasher had that trick.
He knows what to say, when to say
and how much to say.
And he used his English colleagues.
David Goldberg is an example.
Francis Creed is an example.
Other colleagues, psychologists, English colleagues, Richard Gator is
an example.
An endless list of British psychiatrists that Mubasher
Saab would invite.
He would hold the meetings with the Ministry
of Health.
And David Goldberg would be told or would
be advised by Mubasher Saab to tell specific
words to the concerned authority so that our
elders can understand what the foreigners say easily
in English.
But Professor Mubasher knew that what David Goldberg
can do for him, it will take him
twice as much time.
So he would use David Goldberg in that
loop and get his job done.
And I think these two men are geniuses
in their own right.
And when I used to see them at
work, I used to imagine 10 years ahead
of what I would do when I was
there.
So learning them, role modeling these people was
a big experience for me.
So Goldberg is an ardent admirer of Mubasher
Saab.
And I think both of them had worked
together for a very long period of time
and they had phenomenally delivered programs that nobody
had done before.
And one such program that David Goldberg and
Mubasher Saab delivered was the Psychiatrist from Overseas,
where people from Pakistan were sent to United
Kingdom for training and they were given diplomas.
And the plan was that they will come
back and serve the country.
Many of them came, many of them are
still there, but they've been serving from United
Kingdom, the Pakistani problems, and they are doing
a wonderful job.
But I was one of those who decided
to come back and fall into the footsteps
that Professor Mubasher had trained me for.
And I was so pleased.
There were some problems, there were discrepancies, digressions
and attractions for me that I could stay
in England, I could go to the United
States of America, I could make a different
kind of living.
But then Mubasher Saab used to say one
very interesting Fikra, Farid Saab, Pakistan is not
a jungle.
Farid Saab, this is the place to come
back.
And since his and my visions coincided for
different reasons, I thought his Jungle Mein Mohr
Nacha was very appealing.
And therefore, I made that journey.
I don't regret some members of my family
may not be very happy with this decision
because I blocked their passion and their visions
and their aspirations.
But then, yes, we are all selfish in
different ways in our lives.
I was selfish and I came and I
did whatever I was able to do.
I have no regrets.
People around me may have some regrets about
it, but I think God has been very
kind that I was able to deliver the
vision and the responsibility that Mubasher Saab handed
over to me.
You have been speaking very highly of your
teacher and your mentor.
And you are speaking of him with a
lot of respect.
And you also talked about the salesmanship of
psychiatry, which Dr. Mubasher Saab had in him.
So, there are at least two things.
First of all, the way you transformed the
FCPS training when you became the dean of
CPSP.
You were the first and I would say
the last dean of CPSP.
You were the first and I would say
the last dean of CPSP.
You were the first and I would say
the last dean of CPSP.
I don't want to talk about myself
when I'm remembering my teacher.
So, please excuse my total block that I
have about what I have done in life.
Now, the question that you've asked is a
very important question and that relates to Mubasher
Saab.
Mental health ordinance is another very important contribution
of his that Mental Health Act of 2001
was passed through him in 2001.
Now, when I went into psychiatry way back
in 1981-82, I used to drive Mubasher
Saab to the Ministry of Health.
And I was a common driver driving these
four people to the Ministry of Health in
Islamabad.
Now, the things that I'm going to share
with you are very personal and very private
and not many people outside the Institute of
Psychiatry know about them.
So, I can speak from the bottom of
my heart and the audience can also hear
this.
In 2000, we were organizing an international psychiatric
conference.
I was the chairman of the organizing committee.
Mubasher Saab had given me that task because
I had organized one conference for him in
1982 and then in 2001, he asked me
to be the chairman of the organizing committee.
And the rule was that every morning for
the last six months before the conference, there
was a morning meeting about the conference arrangements.
Now, those were lethal moments of our life
when we would enter after eight and Mubasher
Saab would look at his watch and look
at you and say most of the time
nothing.
So, anyway, I went into the room and
there was a bell and I knew that
this bell is for me.
So, I was stunned.
I know you are the right person to
do that.
Now, he knew that I was connected to
very important influential people in the government set
up at that point for my own professional
reasons.
Mubasher Saab knew about that.
So, I wouldn't take the names of those
people, but he said go to him and
he will talk to this person and this
person will talk to the president and the
job would be done.
So, Farid Saab had an agenda.
Farid Saab sat in the car, went to
meet this man.
Exactly the roadmap that Mubasher Saab had conceived,
I delivered that roadmap and Mental Health Ordinance
General Misharraf
and
Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf
and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and Misharraf and
bureaucratic set up the President Musharraf passed the
Mental Health Act at that point.
Now I think that was a phenomenal achievement
by Mubasher Saab to have gotten that done
and the sad story that I want to
tell you.
For me as the chairman of the organizing
committee that conference was the ultimate conference and
I had made up my mind that I
will never become the chairman of the organizing
committee of any international conference.
Though for my tenure of 15 years I
could have organized two international conferences from the
Institute of Psychiatry but I did not.
Why?
Because that was a team that Mubasher Saab
was the in charge.
There was no personal glory for me to
become the organizer of a conference.
Which we have collectively in Pakistan's history international
psychiatric conference that I I thought I had
done my role and my job and as
a respect for my teacher I said I'll
never do any other conference.
I never did.
So that that's the Mental Health Ordinance that
Mubasher Saab passed.
I can't hear you Azam.
Thank you so much for sharing my experience.
So there was a little internet issue.
Thank you so much for sharing so much
inspiration with us that Mubasher Saab embodied in
his person and his entire life.
Sir jate jate wo jo aapne bola tha
ek cheez jisse wo naraaz ho gaye the
wo aap batayenge.
You know by the time I was leaving
he said who is going to be your
successor?
I told him a name and he said
why don't you consider another another name he
gave me.
I said sir for my understanding, for my
knowledge, for my thinking what I am doing
is the right thing that I want to
do.
And he wasn't very happy about the decision
that I had made.
He had advised me for somebody else.
I did not follow his advice and I
think within three years I have come to
realize that my teacher was right.
I regret that I didn't follow his instincts
and the lesson is very clear that if
I had followed him all his life and
I had done something he wasn't very happy
with me about this and so true he
was that the events that took place after
I retired are so irritating, so troublesome and
so annoying that the department that Mubasher Saab
had organized, the department that I had cherished
and that I call my Mecca, my battlefield,
my soul, I decided that I would never
go back to that department ever again.
So that's the sadness and that's the bitterness
in me that I did not follow his
advice and I learned the lesson of my
life not having followed my teacher.
We have so much more to learn from
you about Mubasher Saab, about your life, about
psychiatry, but unfortunately we do have fondest or
fascinating memories of Mubasher Saab if you can
share with us and then we conclude.
I think you remember that this man came
in like a movement, he lived like a
movement and he delivered like a lion and
he had his ways and we haven't had
time to talk about his family life but
I think there are so many things that
which were unimpossible to do, he made them
possible and I think he left behind a
lovely family, a family of psychiatrists, boys and
girls.
If I start talking about his family life
it will take me another hour or so
to describe that, the depth, the magnitude and
the intensity that he had for his family
is absolutely phenomenal, you can't imagine that.
So I think his sentence that I very
often use in my lectures, whenever I get
the opportunity to speak I would fail if
I don't repeat that sentence and I learned
from him and he said, eyes do not
see what mind does not know.
It was so true that when you know,
your mind knows about whom you want to
be in psychiatry, you find those people very
easily and when your mind knows what to
do about psychiatry, nothing stops you and that's
the name of the game Mubasher Saab was.
Thank you so much, we're able to live
in the foot of
Mubasher
Saab.
May Allah keep his family together in this
difficult time and may they find the courage
that their father and their husband can't do
the work of a common man and may
Allah elevate their ranks and give peace to
the family.
JazakAllah Khair.
JazakAllah Khair.
Allahumma salli wa sallim ala nabijina Muhammad wa
ala alihi wa ashabihi ajma'in.
Ameen.