HYDERABAD DIARIES

the Quran and Hadith in answer to questions relating to the Quran and Hadith. Mr Kishan Jaywant Rao Patil, whom I had met before, had come to Hyderabad with some of his companions. I learnt that he had been reading AI-Risala in Urdu right from the beginning and that he had maintained a complete file of all the issues. The surprising thing in all this is that his mother tongue is Marathi, and that before our first meeting, he had not known a single word of Urdu. It seems that when I told him I would be bringing out a monthly magazine in Urdu, he was so impressed by our talks, that he promptly engaged an Urdu tutor so that he would be able to read the magazine as soon as it came out. And he has been faithfully reading AI-Risala in Urdu from that time to the present. A friend of his who had come along with him, Mr Ganga Dhar, did not understand Urdu at all, but liked to have AI-Risala read out to him and explained in Marathi by Mr Kishan Patil. When I asked the latter, what benefit he derived from AI-Risala, he claimed that his whole way of thinking had undergone a tremendous change for the better. He said that formerly he had been thinking of nothing but earning in order to make ends meet. But Al-Risala had changed all that by giving him proper objectives in life. Impressed by the pains he had taken to learn Urdu; and Marathi being quite dissimilar and by the obvious maturity of his thinking, I spent quite some time in conversation with him. Habib Bhai, the Proprietor of Pioneer Dying and Printing Works, related an experience which I feel is worth reproducing here. He had gone to an office, where a picture of a beautiful natural scene hung upon the wall. It bore the caption, “If you don’t understand my silence, you will never understand my words.” What profundity! How true it is that very little of an inner reality can be expressed in words. It is only a man of acute perceptiveness who can go beyond words to the essential message. Habib Bhai’s grandfather used to advise him to learn at least one new thing every day, even if it were only a new way to tie a knot. This was a great piece of sagacity, for life is of such dynamism that one must always be on the alert to keep pace with it. It is possible, with effort, for a man to rise high in life, but it is all too easy to fall far behind. The only way, therefore, to keep on progressing is to remain in perpetual intellectual pursuit of whatever is new in the world around us. How true it is that very little of an inner reality can be expressed in words. It is only a man of acute perceptiveness who can go beyond words to the essential message.