Justice Prevailed Through Wisdom and Words

Growing up, my childhood was mostly scarred by turmoil and conflict. The turbulence of those years made it impossible to rely solely on school for an all-around education - I badly needed someone to guide me through.

- Sama Zehra

The guidance finally came from my uncle, Raja Tasleem Abbass. When I was in sixth grade, my uncle started taking regular two-hour classes for my cousins and I, where he helped us brush up on our writing skills and taught us the basics of English Grammar. These teaching duties he placed upon himself beyond his long and exhausting hours at court.

My uncle was deeply passionate about teaching and equally worried about our education. He considered education to be a formative part of one's moral compass and principles. Naturally, the lessons were often centred on ethics and values. Every day at 8:30 at night, he began each class with a 30-minute lecture on moral virtues. Thereafter, we were instructed to write our opinions and takeaways from it. That was when I first began to write.

I remember when I was once asked by a school teacher to prepare an essay on 'responsibility'. Instinctively, I rushed to my uncle to take his immediate and “urgent” help (It did feel very urgent then). He started the essay with the sentence, “Sense of responsibility has a paramount role in our lives”. From that day on, for an entire year, I devised a shortcut method from that sentence - I used to replace the word “responsibility” with whatever topic my teacher would me to write an essay on. Be it loyalty, sincerity or any other virtue, the shortcut method always worked - it was a little trick up my sleeve that helped me excel in my writing. Did it make any sense? Perhaps not. But did the teachers absolutely adore my essays? Of course! I was so proud of what my uncle taught me once that I kept using it everywhere.