I had the privilege of meeting a group of young people and starting the next ‘Writers of the Future’ group. How fortunate I am; being able to work with such engaging people, surrounded by books (we were in the school library). I so love what I do. I feel a bit of an imposter calling it ‘work’ though. My world today is so far removed from that of my elders. That was WORK. For example, my father used to walk for days with his donkey to different parts of Pakistan, transporting goods for businesses and, later, doing back-breaking shifts in Birmingham factories.
I explained to the students my purpose in being there and then asked them what writers did. Of course they all said: “write”. This was my cue to point out that before writing comes reading. So please would they read, read and read some more. Most of them were used to using their local library.
We talked about how easy it was to write once you get started; how to get inspiration (“from life”, said one) and how to get published using the internet (“make sure you are responsible in what you publish”, I said).
I asked them to do some writing. “Perhaps, you could write about meeting me”, I said. I told them a little about myself and permission to make up the rest. They were off:
- Mr Iqbal told us that he wanted to be a writer ever since he was young…
- The slow and thought out manner in which he spoke showed that … He told us about meeting the man who started Urdu journalism
- I can tell Mr Iqbal has a passion for writing and loves reading. …He is the first person I have met who has his own blog!
- He believes that if he wants to achieve his dream of writing, he can do and do it (publish) for himself.
Rather than stare at them while they were absorbed in their activity, I decided to jot down some notes for my blog entry.
I had promised to share with them, each week, some of my favourite books. So, I read an extract of a speech Mr Jinnah had made (from Stanley Wolpert’s ‘Jinnah’):
Organise yourselves, establish your solidarity and complete unity. Equip yourselves as trained and disciplined soldiers. Create the feeling of an esprit de corps (we discussed what this meant with the help of a student who had done French!) and of comradeship amongst yourselves. Work loyally, honestly, and for the cause of your people and your country. No individual or people can achieve anything without industry, suffering and sacrifice
In the process, there was a history lesson- when Pakistan was founded, who ruled the area before, when Bangladesh came about.
We had time to kill so we talked about bilingualism- one student is doing Urdu GCSE, one spoke Bengali. We then had a group-read of a colleague’s ‘blog’ and learnt about ‘doing foreigners’. I had to explain that this was nothing suspicious but ‘working on the side’. We also talked about ‘eating’ tea. Don’t the English have some strange practices, I thought!
Their homework: to read; to write, if they feel inspired; to look at my blog and, of course, Tim Dowling’s, whose writing gave us the title for my current work.