Teeth Maestro by Dr. Awab Alvi

Reading Nelson Mandela’s ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ welled up my eyes several times. What a team of men! Not only Nelson Mandela, but his comrades who never got all the glory but were still with him in all the hardship they endured. Walter Sisulu…Ahmed Kathrada… people from another planet surely, for they remained in prison for 27 years ‘of their own accord’! They could’ve got out if they had said they are standing by their beliefs no more. But they didn’t, and suffered so much for their people.

And it struck me that these people are still alive, still breathing the same air we are breathing. Books of heros are usually read when they are long gone. But in this case, they are right there, all alive, and I felt a strong desire to meet them as soon as possible. I know I can’t go right away, but meeting these giants is on my agenda from now on.

I call them giants because they looked above and beyond their personal gain, their families and any materialism. They lived for a cause, a just and worthy cause in my view, and defeated oppression by resistance. South Africa got rid of apartheid last of all, but we could well have been experiencing this strange human behaviour even today if these men didn’t do what they did.
Continue Reading