Pune-based finance professor Asad Zafir has been invited by several foreign universities including Fachhochschulle Nordhausen, Germany; University of Twente, Amsterdam and Leopold Business School, Paris, to anchor summer workshops in Europe.
An alumnus of Pune University, Zafir often wishes he could use the blackboard to draw up illustrative profit and loss statements and balance sheets. But he can’t, for the simple reason that he is a tetraplegic, with his body paralysed from neck downwards. However, even though confined to a wheelchair, Zafir goes about discharging his duties as adjunct faculty at Pune’s Allana Institute of Management (estb:2000), which has an aggregate enrollment of 120 students, just like any other teacher. He teaches the principles of accountancy verbally. “I do all the calculations in my mind, and my students get used to this pedagogy quickly enough,” he says.
Zafir is excited about the prospect of teaching in Europe when the Allana Institute is closed for the summer vacation. “I’ve signed a long-term contract and teaching abroad is certain to prove challenging,” he says. Certainly, as a core member of the committee that framed the syllabus of Pune University’s MBA finance programme and who also lectures at the city’s Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, Zafir is well qualified to respond to the challenge.
He takes special pride in the fact that he was born on Teacher’s Day (September 5), and that all his progenitors were academics. “Collectively, the Zafir family may have put in 700 years of teaching,” he says, adding that his mother Bilquis is a well known Urdu poet, and his father was a teacher at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, Delhi.
In 1988, while swimming in the backwaters of the River Mulshi near Pune, Zafir suffered an accident that injured his spinal cord, as a result of which he lost the use of his arms and legs. “I have been confined to a wheelchair since then,” he says.
Nevertheless, he hasn’t permitted this setback to come in the way of discharging his duties in the family vocation of education. Apart from teaching at the Allana and Symbiosis B-schools in Pune, Zafir is also a co-promoter of Tandav, an NGO which stages concerts of eminent musicians such as Zakir Hussain, Rajan and Sajan Mishra, Shahid Pervez, Lucky Ali and Remo Fernandez, among others in the city. He is also an avid theatre buff and loves Shakespeare. “If it had not been finance, I would have loved to teach English literature, especially the works of William Shakespeare,” he says.
A profile in courage and commitment.
Huned Contractor (Pune)