My Son! Never Sell Your Fortune
By Engr Najib Izhar
The park was deserted. He took an empty bench. It was his 62nd birthday. He opened a wish card and started to read it; “….Teach him that a dollar earned is of for more value than five found… Try to give my son the strength not to follow the crowd when everyone is getting on the bandwagon. Teach him always to have sublime faith in himself, because then he will always sublime faith in mankind. Teach him to beware of too much sweetness…Teach him to sell his brawn and brain to highest bidders, but never to put a price tag on his heart and soul… Teach him to close his ears to a howling mob and to stand and fight if he thinks he is right.“, words that Abraham Lincoln had written to his son’s Headmaster. His heavy grey eyebrows lowered and took his gaze toward distant trees.
He was 9 when still was out of school. His poor father managed to taught him in his little mud house. He was sent to a distant town for matriculation and inters studies by erasing more options of his family’s bare survival. Economic muscles of his father were exhausted when the stage of his higher studies approached. His studies halted for three years and resumed only when his father’s last income and hope_ his pension was released. Throughout his hard career, he firmly went forward in thins and thicks and stood everywhere with clear distinction. Unfortunately, the day when he became a gold medalist graduate, his father was not among them. Based upon the energies consumed in building him, he comes out, beyond doubt, a self made person _ “a true dollar earned”.
Now comes the juncture at which he owned long bleeding wounds. It is no less than a dreadful nightmare for him. He is of the view that he had got into the “bandwagon” without believing in his own capabilities. He was an energetic, ambitious and honest young man. He had dreamt to lead. He became a member of a political organization and eventually, a part of the “howling mob”. He shown “too much sweetness” and worked day and night to materialize his dream. At lower levels he quickly ascended the ladder. But, there came a stage when he felt an existence of certain glass ceiling __ a limit beyond which only a special creed can survive. They were like “little masters” having bonds of blood with their “bigger” ones. In the words of Lincoln they were the “dollar found”.
Years passed by. Instead of melting down of this glass ceiling, more knots and bolts were adding strength and rigidity towards it. In serene palaces, the younger feuds were smoothly replacing their aging ones while the mobs, outside in the dark streets were still howling in the name of democracy. The tragedy was that when the time this situation became unbearable for him, he had already turned 50 with his new party leader entering 33. He was still an ordinary office bearer at a district level. Disheartened enough; he left both, the political career and his scattered dream.
The mounting tears in his eyes slowly blurred the scene of the distant trees. He relaxed his eyebrows and closed the eyes. He thought again, “How a ‘hard earned dollar’ has sold his heart and soul along with his brawn and brain to a ‘dollar found’. A common man always musters his courage to build a fortune for himself and then he himself allows a feud to scrap his own product. The blame is upon us; we the common men always provide the generations of feudals with lifeblood that afterwards block our own talent and abilities. We sublime faith in ourselves by erecting our capabilities upon our own muscles but we fail to collect its fruit when we are faced with a challenge to break a barrier of a certain glass ceiling.”
He again looked into the lines of wish card __ “teach him there is no shame in tears.” He smiled gently; wiped off his tears and said, “I will give this letter to my only child on his coming birthday.”
He took out a pen and highlighted the starting paragraph. It reads that, “he will have to learn, I know, that all men are not just, all men are not true, but teach him also that for every scoundrel there is a hero; that for every selfish politician there is a dedicated leader… Teach him that for every enemy there is a friend”. He wrote beneath the signature line of the letter, “Abraham Lincoln had a true will and power which could steer a dream to her reality. He left this glaring legacy for other fathers to make them observe their own intensities of darkness. Today, he made a dad cry to make his child smile. My fine little fellow, my son, the border between deserving and undeserving is very thin: it is a shatterable glass ceiling. Contract your muscles to lift your own burden. My son, sell not your fortune.”
He pressed the folded wish card into his pocket; left the bench and disappeared in the dancing yellow dust of dusk.
From our Print Edition
