Ph.D. holder jobless after eight years in prison

[email protected] (Meena Menon for The Hindu )
May 1, 2013

DR__ANWAR_ALIThere have been some famous prison memoirs, but Dr. Anwar Ali Javed Ali Khan's took an educational tack. His book “Learn Urdu in 30 days,” now into its third edition, is quite popular and he gets requests from as far as the U.S. for this primer of sorts. If Dr. Khan didn't pour out grim reminiscences of his eight years in prison after his arrest on terror charges, that's because he's the man he is. He completed his PhD while in jail by getting a court order to give his viva at the University of Pune under police escort and helped fellow under-trials draft their bail and other applications.

“I helped so many people with my drafting skills and they were released on bail,” says Dr. Khan, 47, a former lecturer in Urdu at the National Defence Academy (NDA), which terminated his services a day after his arrest on May 11, 2003, for his suspected involvement in the Mulund bomb blast in March in Mumbai. He was later charged with the Ghatkopar and Vile Parle blasts too.

He was discharged, along with eight others, from the Ghatkopar case on March 4, 2004, by the special judge to try cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) for want of sufficient grounds to proceed against them. The prosecutor submitted that they “could not be connected with sufficient material so as to furnish sufficient ground to prosecute them.”

However, Dr. Khan says as soon as he was released from jail, he was re-arrested for the Mulund and Vile Parle bomb blasts case which has been dragging on. He managed to secure bail only in February 28, 2011, after eight bail applications which he drafted himself. “I knew my case, it was so easy to prove how baseless it was,” he points out.

Despite an unforgettable stay in prison, he still has faith in the judiciary, but his chances of getting a job are dim. He was denied one as an Urdu lecturer due to his “terror” connections and he has little hope now that he will ever be employed. He and his family, including three children and his mother, subsist on proceeds from his bestselling book, tuitions and odd jobs. “Teaching is a passion for me; even in jail I missed it so much. I like to teach in a classroom environment,” he says.

He was appointed as a lecturer in Urdu in the NDA in 1996, but on a temporary basis. All was well till 2003. “Some policemen came to my house and left a message asking me report to Mumbai — I went on May 9 and they questioned me for many hours. They asked my advocate to leave and formally arrested me on May 11,” he says. Dr. Khan and another suspect Saqib Nachen, who was released after 10 years in jail, had decided to form a legal aid cell — the Muslim Legal Aid and Welfare Foundation in 2002 and it was in the initial stages of planning. “We wanted a board of patrons and had three meetings. During the initial questioning, the police wanted to know about the meetings. I told them we didn't plan any bomb blast,” Dr. Khan says. Obviously the police thought otherwise.

Dr. Khan says the police accused him under the Arms Act as well because they recovered “a pistol from his flat in Pune.”

“That flat was locked for over a year and they took the keys from my mother who was living with me after my father died. They claim the pistol was in the kitchen,” he says.

After writing his book, he got permission from the court to get it published in 2009. His PhD thesis, a critical analysis of Allama Mehvi Siddiqui — a poet from Lucknow — was ready in 2002. “I was only waiting for the viva and that was a struggle too. The University of Pune refused to conduct it till I wrote to the Minority Commission. They didn't give me bail — finally I went with police escort,” he says.

It was in 2007 that he was awarded his doctorate and he was permitted to attend the convocation. “Lord Meghnad Desai was the chief guest,” he recalls. While the police say the three meetings of the Foundation were linked to the blasts, they haven't been able to produce evidence as yet to link Dr. Khan to the conspiracy.

He says the NDA terminated his services for absenteeism. “I didn't have an opportunity to explain,” he adds.

When he went to jail, Dr. Khan remembers that no one believed the police and people were very supportive. “In fact, one policeman told me that since I had a lot of respect in Pune, I should be paraded on the streets with handcuffs,” he says.

“I wasn't expecting to be arrested and arraigned. It took time for me to adjust and I tried to mentally prepare myself for the ordeal. Jail is a life of deprivation. I missed everything — my family, teaching…” he says. But the one thing he did catch up on was reading fiction. They were allowed newspapers and he would mark the top fiction books and ask his wife to bring them. His favourite author is Dan Brown and now he reads thrillers when he gets time. He still has to report to the local police station every 15 days but for one and a half years, he used to mark daily attendance.

After his release on bail, Dr. Khan and others filed for Rs. five lakh compensation each, but the POTA judge told them to approach the State government. He has to get around to doing that. The NDA has not yet responded to emailed questions seeking clarification on the issue.

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Agencies
January 20,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 20: An American bride asked for money from her invitees so that they can be on the 'exclusive guest list'.

Weddings can be surely expensive. But is it feasible for one to charge the guests to make up for the expenses?

According to Fox News, that is exactly what happened in a recent American wedding. A 19-year-old shared on Reddit that her cousin was getting married on Sunday and announced that she would charge 50 dollars to those who wanted to attend her wedding.

"She said that they can Venmo her money so there won't be no [sic] problems and everyone who paid will be added onto the 'exclusive guest list' which basically means you won't have to wait in line while other guests pay," wrote the user named DaintySheep.

While she refused to pay for entry into her cousin's wedding the bride-to-be contacted the elders in the family which ended up in an embarrassing situation.

"She wanted to get the money she spent on her special day back. I told her I wouldn't be able to come because this was outrageous and that I wish her well on her special day. She contacted my aunt and my aunt called me cheap and rude. My parents offered to pay for my entry, but I refused," continued the disheartened girl.

While in almost every nook and cranny of the world gifting the bride-groom with money is a tradition, asking for money from friends and family to replenish the money spent on a wedding is can be said to be a rare scenario.

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Agencies
January 12,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 12: A recent study has claimed that people end up wasting almost an entire day when they take a vacation.

This can happen while standing in a queue or searching for places to visit, people do not keep a count of the time they have actually utilised during the trip. As a result, they end up doing much lesser activities than they originally had planned.

According to a recent report in Fox News, the study has also shared the fact that people try to justify time waste with planning and scheduling activities whereas the truth is that these things can be done well ahead to save time during the trip.

The average time waste according to the study commissioned by Sykes Holiday Cottages also said the people taking a seven days' trip waste a minimum of 17-and-a-half hours to figure out various factors.

But there are other causes involved as well. When one visits any crowded location, the real-time spent to enjoy the location is lesser than the time spent on reaching and trying to get involved. For instance, if one visits an amusement park, the activities take lesser time than the preparatory and other phases.

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Agencies
July 2,2020

Leiden, Jul 2: Astronomers have discovered a luminous galaxy caught in the act of reionizing its surrounding gas only 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The research, led by Romain Meyer, PhD student at UCL in London, UK, has been presented at the virtual annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS).

Studying the first galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago is essential to understanding our cosmic origins. One of the current hot topics in extragalactic astronomy is 'cosmic reionization,' the process in which the intergalactic gas was ionized (atoms stripped of their electrons).

Cosmic reionization is similar to an unsolved murder: We have clear evidence for it, but who did it, how and when? We now have strong evidence that hydrogen reionization was completed about 13 billion years ago, in the first billion years of the universe, with bubbles of ionized gas slowly growing and overlapping.

The objects capable of creating such ionized hydrogen bubbles have however remained mysterious until now: the discovery of a luminous galaxy in which 60-100 percent of ionizing photons escape, is likely responsible for ionizing its local bubble. This suggests the case is closer to being solved.

The two main suspects for cosmic reionization are usually 1) a population of numerous faint galaxies leaking ~10 percent of their energetic photons, and 2) an 'oligarchy' of luminous galaxies with a much larger percentage (>50 percent) of photons escaping each galaxy.

In either case, these first galaxies were very different from those today: galaxies in the local universe are very inefficient leakers, with only <2-3 percent of ionizing photons escaping their host. To understand which galaxies governed cosmic reionization, astronomers must measure the so-called escape fractions of galaxies in the reionization era.

The detection of light from excited hydrogen atoms (the so-called Lyman-alpha line) can be used to infer the fraction of escaping photons. On the one hand, such detections are rare because reionization-era galaxies are surrounded by neutral gas which absorbs that signature hydrogen emission.

On the other hand, if this hydrogen signal is detected it represents a 'smoking gun' for a large ionized bubble, meaning we have caught a galaxy reionizing its surroundings. The size of the bubble and the galaxy's luminosity determines whether it is solely responsible for creating this ionized bubble or if unseen accomplices are necessary.

The discovery of a luminous galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang supports the scenario where an 'oligarchy' of bright leakers emits most of the ionizing photons.

"It is the first time we can point to an object responsible for creating an ionized bubble, without the need for a contribution from unseen galaxies.

Additional observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will enable us to study further what is likely one of the best suspects for the unsolved case of cosmic reionization," said Meyer.

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