What You Can Offer

By Arunima Mishra, "Khusro, Rumi, Faiz and Mahru..." - The Financial Express - India
Sunday, December 7, 2008

Muzaffar Ali Painter and filmmaker

What does success mean to you?
Success means to reach within ...It’s a cycle of reaching deep within oneself. It’s all about exploring within that realm — a deep concern, awareness, sensibility, and meditation — finding what you are all about. What you can offer to the world and the humanity.

What is your biggest strength?
(Thinks) I believe it is silence. To be able to talk to yourself, to listen to your heart, to cut yourself from the world and develop a meditative and introspective nature helps a person. It can be done in many ways — it can be a form of art or it can be one’s daily prayers.

How do you bust stress?
I endeavour to try out things that make me happy. You can walk, dance and pray. It depends on what you love to do when you are stressed. Some forms of art such as dance and music are the best stress busters. Listening to Sufi music does wonders to me. As does reciting the works of Khusro, Rumi, Mahru, Mohiudeen, Faiz. It makes me feel a lot better. I particularly like Abida Parveen. It makes my stress completely vanish.

God to you is...
God to me is someone I have been conditioned to believe and something I have evolved to love. God is a source of love and joy, faith and submission and all the qualities that make you rise beyond the material and the mundane. God is a way to reach out to all his creations and see his reflection in oneself and others.

[Picture from Muzaffar Ali's website http://www.muzaffarali.com/html/index.htm].