The second reason that makes Shamim irresistible is his courage. He took on any absurdity upheld in the name of religion, custom, tradition, culture or sect. His appeal was contemporary and his subjects fresh. Writings like Naak ka sawal, bakray ki behchan, Main na shia hoon na sunni, are satirical for their seriousness. The man explodes the myth of all the social, the sectarian or the traditional. He unveils the faces masked behind religion and pedigree and like a true humanist doesn’t use faith as cover to cover the ugliness of human soul. That’s the hallmark of a genuine thinker and Shamim fits the slot.
The third unavoidable feature of Shamim’s personality was his sense of humour and how he employed humour as a technique in his writings. Shamim’s writing – and his person – had fun as an inseparable element. And there are instances galore. In oratorial art, they say you should learn to deflate your rival’s seriousness with a jest and his jest with seriousness. How dull the subject, he would knock you off with his stroke of humour.
The fourth facet of his persona and perhaps the most overwhelming of the first three was his character. It explains my point of irreverence towards Shamim. Like all brilliant minds Shamim was full of contradictions. I don’t mean existential or philosophical contradiction which even saints and prophets have grappled with, I mean contradiction in his character which he himself confesses with shameless honesty. An essay titled `Shamim Sahab’ is a treat to read. Woh bada be eeman hai, voh eik number ka fraud hai, voh batoon ka soudagar hai, voh mun phatt aour gustakh hai. Thus begins Shamim on Shamim. His ever shifting loyalty towards people show us the unpleasant side of his person. The man who once adored Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah was then out to strip him naked. (Sheikh deserved it much earlier when Shamim haloed him as a hero. If Shamim was unsparingly truthful, I wonder how could a liberated mind like him spare an ugly character like Sheikh. Sheikh is a book whose details are too dirty to be given a clean expression. Addicted to adulation, if Sheikh Abdullah would have been shown the mirror, our story might have been different. Like many others who lionised this self-promoted `lion’, Shamim too carries the blot which no student of history and journalism can wash out from him. Shamim abused his own genius by first canonising his leaders as gods and then demolishing them as devils. He was like a zookeeper committed to guard the things with the same gun which he later trained on them as a poacher. Opinions are relative, but principal is absolute.
Shamim died young and stayed young for ever. With age exuberance is replaced by maturity. By dying young, he didn’t let his fans know as to how would he have been in the maturest stage of his life. But for that you blame the one who does it all.
Kya tera bigadta jo na marta koyi din aour