Let’s Talk About Change

Having left youth behind, in the throes of my midlife crisis (per my dear wife), I often ponder: What is change? Why is it needed? Where is it needed (most)? How is it brought about in a sustained manner and by whom?

Before delving into this more, let me introduce you to my two young friends: Alezeh, a 14-year-old 9^th grader, and Mayank, an 18-year-old college student, with whom I conceived ‘Biloongra-Books for Change’, a grass roots effort promoting global child literacy and education. They pondered the above questions along with me at a café, over coffee and kolaches, at Rice village in Houston, on a sweltering summer morning.

The discussion, dialogue and debate were timely. I had struggled with the questions primarily because it was unclear to me why we wanted to do something that might affect ‘change’ in public sector kids’ education in Pakistan. The oft cited ‘there’s a crucial need’, fell by the way side, once the going got tough. Such work from afar, while working on a day job that is completely different from writing kids’ books, becomes a hard sell.

During that single session, I realized that the conventional teacher-student model was defunct. Thus, came the first change: I started looking past assumptions.  I’m the teacher and they the students, being one.

Here, I share a few more realizations from that monumental morning.

• That change is subtle; in thought processes, attitudes and behaviors.  It does not come with whistles blowing and cymbals clanging. It’s that quiet realization that one has changed. You know it! And you feel ready to challenge status quos and create new paradigms.

• That change comes from within. No matter how hard someone else tries to change or alter you, you will resist.

• That change is unlikely to occur unless you acknowledge the need for change and then allow it to completely suffuse you in itself.

• That there is a difference between a want and a need. We want something like an iPhone or an iPad or a diamond, but do we need it? Working towards improving oneself, first and foremost, prior to working towards societal reform, became a need for us…not a want.

• That it is immaterial where you’re from (your ethnic origin / nationality), your religio-political ideology (or lack thereof), or your monetary worth – you could work on yourself and then work sustainably on a socially relevant project in / for Pakistan, that went beyond just being charitable. That it did not restrict us to work only there, but to start there, learn how to go about it, and then utilize that ‘model’ elsewhere. Our outlook changed to a more global one, and thus we started considering ourselves real citizens of an interdependent world.

That meeting and subsequent realizations galvanized us to complete the first Biloongra project: our small team’s first bilingual (Urdu-English) kids’ book, as a modest attempt to generate interesting reading material for kids in Pakistan. Prior to that, we had gone about it in somewhat of a haphazard and lackluster manner. That meeting was probably the tipping point for us.

From that point onwards we went about the project irrespective of outcomes, that is, we would go about our task regardless of it having any impact on child literacy in Pakistan. Removing that conditionality from the equation reduced the stress on us to consider ‘success’ only in terms of macro-level change. What saw us through was the realization that, in the final analysis, we were doing the work for ourselves, and that our growth and evolution were intimately tied into the process, not just the outcome, that is, the book.  

We hope that by sharing our experiences we can influence others to consider approaching change similarly. Not for a moment do we imply enforcing change, because, as discussed above, that would be counter-intuitive!

Change, indeed, has occurred.

The above is what change means to us at this stage. What does change mean to you?

[from Biloongra]

Acknowledgment: First published in the South Asian Chronicle, June 2013. At that time the author, Asad Mian MD, PhD, was a pediatrician-researcher at Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. He acknowledges his young friends Alezeh Rauf, at that time a senior in St. John’s School, Houston, TX and Mayank Aranke, at that time an undergrad in UT-Austin - for helping him put together this essay. All three were working with several others on a global child literacy effort called Biloongra – Books for Change, closely affiliated with Bookgroup, an educational research organization based in Karachi, Pakistan. 

That was then, and this is now: Asad's an Associate Professor at Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan; Alezeh's studying political science at Wellesley College, Boston, MA; Mayank’s a medical student at Texas Tech, Lubbock, TX.