KARACHI: Prominent educationist Professor Anita Ghulam Ali passed away in a local hospital on Friday at the age of 75.

She was being treated for respiratory disorder at Karachi’s South City hospital for the past three months.

Her funeral prayer was offered after Maghrib, which was attended by the relatives and people from different segments of life. She was laid to rest at DHA graveyard.

Professor Ali was a recipient of the Sitara-e-Imtiaz and Benazir Excellence award. She represented Pakistan at various international forums of education and development.

She remained associated with Radio Pakistan as an English newscaster and also served as education minister of Sindh and chief executive of Sindh Education Foundation. She also served in an advisory role on education to the Governor Sindh.

Flashback: The friendly professor

The article below was published in Dawn, August 18 2012. It has been reproduced in its entirety below.

Most people remember their childhood for the tales from the land far away, teachers that always seemed too strict, good old grandmas and grandpas, and the proverbial kaghaz ki kashti and baarish ka pani. For Professor Anita Ghulam Ali, childhood personified the menagerie of sorts that her family possessed.

“Our house in Garden East, Karachi, was full of animals. We had chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys and, of course, dogs. Since we had a Victoria carriage we also had horses,” she recalls.

“We kept two otters as well in a big tank — Tommy and Lommy, we used to call them. They loved to frolic, and loved our company but at night, when alone, they used to cry like babies. Ultimately we had to give them away to the zoological garden. They were put in a tank with other otters, and I remember, we liked to pretend that we recognised our otters on our visits to the zoo.”

Ironically, for someone so closely associated with the education sector for decades, school was nothing less than drudgery for Ali. Riding to the school on donkeys was perhaps the only fun part, and with two servants and an aayah as escorts, this was Ali’s mode of commuting everyday. But that did not stop her from playing truant.

“Around noon, my friend, Austin Martin, and I used to leave school, climb on to the donkeys and have nice riding sessions,” she says, “By one o’clock, we would return to the school, because this was when lunch was served and our servant used to bring food from home. But the minute the servant left, we would leave the school again.”

Matters would have continued like this, had the absence not been spotted. Parents were called and complained to, and Ali was sent packing to live with her maternal grandmother in Panjgani, a hill station in Maharashtra, India in the Western Ghats.

“My grandmother had a beautiful house with acres and acres of gardens. She was part British and so was a very strict disciplinarian and my mother thought she would be a good influence on me. I went to St Joseph’s convent there which was pretty good, but I was never really interested in studies,” she reminisces.

With Queen Sirikit of Thailand In the ’50s Ali began working as an English newscaster at Radio Pakistan which she remained associated with for around two decades. She, along with Jahan Ara Saeed (who came from All India Radio), Anees Ghulam Ali, Khatija Naqvi, Aslam Azhar and Rizwan Wasti were household names, who took their job quite seriously. Reading news in those days required intensive training, coupled with determination, commitment and a mind sharp enough to spot errors.

“The organisation had arranged a tutor for us — one of the BBC newsreaders — who taught us pronunciation and diction among other things for six months. We also had an Englishman called Eric Warner, who used to read the news. Warner would sit outside the studio, and the minute we came out he would point out all the words we had mispronounced while reading the bulletin. The details included where to stop for a comma and where we had to emphasise on words. Nowadays when we hear the news we see the newsreaders emphasising certain words that we were told to play down. Any foreign name or phrase had to be pronounced correctly as well.”

Like every other form of communication, radio under Gen Ayub Khan’s regime was under strict surveillance. Copies were censored before they were read on air and an official was forever present to monitor the content.

“The night Ayub Khan’s martial law was announced, we were sitting at the radio station at three in the morning, when suddenly soldiers jumped in from the window with bayonets and stood behind us. They ordered us to stay in our places and not make any noise,” remembers Ali, “And then they cleared off all the papers on the table and threw them on the ground and ordered us to read from a paper which was the proclamation.”

In 1961 Ali began teaching microbiology at Sindh Muslim College. In those days, the college catered to just boys, and most of them belonged to the under-privileged class.

Distributing prizes at a debate competition at Islamia College “The boys came from nearby places like Landhi, Malir and Lyari and the old bazaar. Some were working with their fathers, others were either sons of labourers or themselves labourers who worked at night in a factory and attended college in the morning. So one had to be really sensitive about a lot of issues; what they went through, the problems they used to face,” she says.

“One night around midnight, the police called to inform me that they had arrested one of my students, and that they were not accepting his bail. They had been in an accident. I went to the station to resolve the matter. However, the police refused to accept my bail since according to them a woman’s bail was not acceptable. Their argument was that when women are asked to appear in court, they refuse. Eventually I rattled off the conditions to sign a bail and assured them that I would be at the court.”

The students were just as protective. Ali recalls an incident when a uniformed policeman came to see her at the college for a personal favour. Since she was the president of the College Teachers’ Association at that time and was leading demonstrations and processions, the students thought that the police had come to arrest her.

“One student came running up to warn me, and assured that if the policeman even dared as much as touch me, ‘hum us ka bhurkas nikaaldenge’ (we will make mincemeat out of him). By the time the policeman came up to the third floor where I sat, he was shivering like jelly,” laughs Ali.

Having taught at the SMC from 1960 to 1985, Ali had a vantage view of the scenario when academic institutions were nationalised. At that time most of the owners of the private colleges — there were 72 private colleges and 10 government colleges — did not give regular salaries. At times the teachers did not receive their salaries for six months in a row, and even after that they were given just about half of it. There were no terms and conditions of service and nothing was documented.

“Our argument was that while the government should take over the salaries of the teachers, they should allow the private schools and colleges to maintain the characteristics of their institutions,” says Ali, “In the beginning they agreed, but after a few months, their intentions changed, and they started appointing their own people in these colleges. As a result, the standard fell. The quality of education also suffered.

“As a part of the College Teachers’ Association our goal was to protect the teachers of first private and then government colleges. It was only after nationalisation that we began negotiating with the government and they started to take our proposals seriously. As a result, in 1974 a few rules were introduced for the teachers of private colleges and schools.”

But this was not without its set of problems. When the government agreed to absorb the faculties of private colleges in government institutions, the senior teachers of private colleges were put into a slot, as though they had joined in 1972. This meant that their students who had been working in the government colleges before them became their seniors. This led to a lot of heart-burn, bribery and corruption.

The Sindh Education Foundation came into existence around 20 years ago, with Ali at the helm of it. The Education Foundation came through as an act of parliament in all the four provinces. The then chief minister Muzaffar Hussain asked Ali to take charge as managing director of the Sindh chapter. It took the government 18 months to work out the finer points of the organisation. In the meanwhile, Ali found the premises for the office with just a table and a chair to begin with.

“I had a gentleman to help me out — one of the older people who knew how to type, and the two of us began,” she says, “The mandate of the SEF was passed by the parliament, and included everything that could possibly have to do with education. We could help any marginalised community by setting up centres, etc. We started getting grants and aid, which we could use for upcoming schools for their improvement. And that’s how we started looking for communities and helping them.”