How sad to hear that Zafar Ullah Chaudhary passed away leaving behind a legacy as a medical student, surgeon, teacher, examiner and finally the President CPSP. My acquaintance with Surgeon Zafar Ullah Choudhary came in loop through as an examiner of FCPS Part-I from 1986 to 1993 under the directorship of Surgeon Fazal Ellahi at CPSP. The examining team of the basic science was under the shade of Dr. Naeem Jafry. The examiners of anatomy were Dr. Nadira Qazi, Dr. Zafarullah Choudhary, and Dr. Amir Ali Shoro inter alia. Each discipline narrative and a team of examiners were like petals of a flower and a source of joy for examinees.
I remember meeting Zafar for the first time with the CPSP examiner dinner at his residence in Lahore. Being an expert in abdominal surgery, he narrated his favourite research narrative on the biliary tree and its anomaly. He was emphasizing how a surgeon should be cognitively well prepared when one encounters a biliary anomaly under the forceps. Overlooking it means disaster for the patients in those days when CT and MRI were not available. He was a renowned surgeon, a brilliant teacher, and an examiner. He knew the art of networking humanity with good language and culture. At twilight of his career, when he switched from being the prince of academia to the king of bureaucratic administration as the fourth President of CPSP. He was not the same as there is a difference between a prince and king that I noticed while working with him as Dean Research at CPSP in 2010.
We wanted to renew the charter granted to CPSP in 1983 during the president ship of General WA Burki to acquire the university status to enable upgrading FCPS to PhD in Basic Science. However, HEC did not approve as the charter should have gone through the Assembly Approval to be active. We were advised to reapply to the Ministry of Education. Life waves through with a different shade of colour of reality and virtuality. There is an interesting narrative of Dalip Kumar when the interviewer praised him in advance before the beginning of the interview in UK, Dalip could not tolerate the flowery shower any longer and interrupted. “Sir! The person to whom you are praising, I am not, I was only acting”.
It means how do we know who we are. Bullah Shah would acclaim “I do not know, who I am, and he invites us to join him to a place where all are blinds not able to see us who we are”. Thus, it means we should leave behind humbly the legacy to shine. This is possible when ideas journey to reach to the threshold of predictive maturity to be further experimentally evidenced according to Abdus Salam’s Nobel Laurette Lecture, 1979.
We stand with the family, friends, and CPS fellows at this moment of grief from Zafar Ullah Chaudhary with tears of gratitude for his exemplary service to the nation.
*Author is a faculty at Aga Khan University and can be reached at hrahmad.alrazi@aku.edu
