In 1954, Dr. Muhammad Zaheer of King Edward Medical College, Lahore, set a new record for the highest score in Punjab University MBBS exams. His record is still unbroken. His father was also a doctor, and he could afford to stay in one of the finest hotels in Lahore at that time during his college studies. He wanted a quiet and calm environment for studies and hostel students kept the hostel noisy. He was awarded the most prestigious Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University. At Oxford, he also made a record by completing his Ph.D work in pathology within the shortest time period. The British press highlighted his success. The British Prime Minister at that time, Mr. Macmillan, hosted a dinner in his honour with his family at his home. Four members of the British PM’s family had a photograph with Dr. Muhammad Zaheer and which was sent to Zaheer’s mother with Macmillan’s bold signs and remarks, “I salute the mother who birthed such a child.” Dr. Muhammad Zaheer returned to Pakistan with this honour and met the principal of his old King Edward Medical College for a teacher’s job. The principal was very happy to see him and told him that there was a vacancy for an Assistant Professor but an appointment would be made from the Secretariat of the Punjab Government.
The principal wrote a letter about this vacancy and Dr. Zaheer’s qualifications and recommended his appointment for the vacancy. Dr. Muhammad Zaheer took the letter along with his application to the secretariat. He visited the concerned department many times but there was no one to listen to him. He reported back to the principal and came again to the secretariat. After all, they denied his appointment on different excuses. It took six months for him to shuttle between the KE college and the Secretariat. In the meantime, he got an offer from an American university for a full professorship in pathology through USIS. He joined American University and there he did second Ph.D in Pathology. Then he got an even better chance in Canada, where he did his third Ph.D in pathology. He wrote hundreds of research papers and books on the subject, some of which remained the most popular books in American and European universities for many years. He was elected as president of the Canadian Pathologists Association for many tenures.
I met Dr. Muhammad Zaheer in 1980 when he visited Pakistan. I asked him for a short interview about health care in Pakistan. He happily accepted my suggestion. My first question was about his suggestions to improve the health facilities in public sector hospitals without any considerable extra expenses. He said that, in his opinion, “no one is serious here in health affairs. I have been watching your TV for the last few weeks, but I couldn’t see any programmes on health. You know that in America and Canada there are more than one health TV channels that offer health advice and education in a very advanced manner with the help of their top experts in the field. They run their programmes 24 hours a day. Many ordinary people who spend long periods of time in front of the television become so knowledgeable that you cannot tell whether they are doctors or laymen after speaking with them. But in Pakistan, it looks like all of your people are doctors themselves, and nobody needs to know anything about health matters. He said that personal and environmental hygiene are the first things for one’s health. But our people, especially the low-income classes, never care about keeping themselves and their environment neat and clean.
Due to your traffic, your weather remains smoky. The poisonous effects of the smoke and lead in the air are always ignored. In developed countries, people are aware of such things. If the lead ratio in the air touches the risk point, a holiday in the schools for small kids is immediately declared and the senior citizens are advised to stay at home till the second announcement. But in our big cities, there are no carbon measuring instruments, and no one is there to inform the citizens about these hazards. If we go out on the roads, Almighty God forgives us. Your muddled traffic is so indisciplined, dangerously unpredictable, and fussy that it can raise the accident ratio to the maximum. If I go on the road in someone’s car, I would start feeling suffocation and getting dizzy. We must recognise that roads are the face of any nation. One can only tell about the mentality and social position of any nation by observing its traffic. I would like to suggest that your television stop all of its broadcasting for the next six months and run programmes for education and training people to use the roads and obey traffic laws. You started the TV station much ahead of India. Its production of programs, transmission, and reception is 100 times more expensive than radio. But TV has one edge over the radio, and that is its visual aspect.
This is the thing that we can exploit to train our people and enhance their common sense and general knowledge. Unfortunately, we are ignoring it. I have seen the newscaster reading news from the papers all the time, and there is no on-the-spot coverage of the incidents. There are qawalis, songs, discussions, and lectures. All of this belongs to the words only. We can communicate these music-related things for 1% more than we spend on TV. For songs and discussions, we are unnecessarily spending so much on TV. We can bring revolution to society by bringing genuine knowledge of the world into our homes. Think about the potential of the visuals on TV and exploit it. There is everything in it that you want to teach your commoners. I tried to convey these thoughts of a Pakistani genius to the media people through the media in those days. When Dr. Zaheer was talking to me, he asked me whether a particular habit of the commoners is still the same or if there has been a change. I told him during such pauses in the interview that change in nations like ours is not so easy. We are all like in the past, exactly when he was here in Pakistan. I cannot reach Dr. Muhammad Zaheer in Canada, otherwise, I would like to tell him that we are still the same as we were at the time of independence.
