SRINAGAR: Incessant pouring of adulations seem to have tired Shah Faesal, the first IAS topper from the valley but certainly not his mother, Mubeena Begum - who enters the modest room beaming with the new found pride and hugs all the women correspondents with warmth.
As her eager neighbours and relatives take over the job of traditional mehman nawazi (looking after guests) and Faesal prepares for yet another set of interviews, Mubeena reveals - much before taking IAS exam Faesal had created an email address of -- kingshahfaesal-doctor@yahoo.
com. “I wanted Faesal to be a doctor, he became a king instead.
But I want my daughter to become a doctor. It is good to have a doctor in the family,” says Mubeena.
Unlike today’s youth, cricket or films do not interest Faesal, his heart and mind lie in poetry and philosophy. His love for poetry and languages took root when his father, Ghulam Rasool Shah, a scholar of Persian language, was alive before being gunned down by the militants in 2002. His love for Urdu poetry made him choose Urdu literature as the subject in the civil services mains exams.
Faesal’s favourite poets are of different genre - the revolutionary Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the spiritual Dr Allama Iqbal.
Despite knowing the coming deluge of expectations, the MBBS doctor is still hungry for knowledge and wants to do doctorate in philosophy. “We have excellent contemporary thinkers like Wittgenstein and Noam Chomsky but after Marx the world has not seen a thinker capable of offering a new paradigm,” he says.