The Prophetic Imagination: From Godot to the Classroom

MUFTI JAMEEL FAROOQ
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27 Apr 2026

A creative mind is rare to find, but the rarest mind of all is the one that executes what it observes and feels

One may repeat, with the solemnity of a funeral dirge, that April is the cruellest month. This famous opening of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ suggests a painful stirring of memory and desire, but I would venture to say it is not so. To me, April is the month of foliage, the time that brings the greenery that resurrects life from winter’s slumber.

I may not be an ardent, disciplined follower of Mahatma Buddha, nor a scholar of Geoffrey Chaucer to be precise, but it is true to the best of my knowledge that I hold a place for both in my heart—a heart that has remained ailing for years and yearning for a decade for someone. You may ask me at liberty: who is that someone?

My reply would be a literary one. Jameel is no less than a character in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’; he misses and one who yearns. Whether "Godot" is a person, a state of being, or a dream could be a subject of endless debate, but perhaps I want to end it on an open ending. After all, that is what literature students and literature itself are all about.

My friends often look at me with a mix of pity and confusion and say, “Jameel, you people are nuts.” By "they," they mean the people who study literature. Why is that so? Perhaps it is because those of us who dwell in the world have a tendency to romanticise everything. We take ideas and abstract concepts and elevate them to such a degree that they begin to appear real and truthful in our eyes. O, Francis Bacon! How right you were when you wrote, “A lie doth ever add pleasure.”

I recall a memory from 2016 involving a teacher of mine, a man well-versed in Arabic literature with a degree in the same, who was then working as an Assistant Professor of English at the North Campus of the University of Kashmir. He uttered a phrase from the pulpit a decade ago that has stuck with me: he claimed that poets and writers are fools and liars.

To be more precise, and to use a word I find more comfortable, he viewed them as "nincompoops." What he meant was that they are mere liars who take the basic provisions of natural rudiments and use them to make unreal things appear real, exaggerating them so wildly that they appear achievable to the common man.

While he may have held that cynical view, I believe quite the opposite. I believe that writers and poets are the truly gifted ones of our species. It is because of their imagination that the cosmos of human thought advances. They are the beings who transform the unreal and the abstract into a tangible reality. They think beyond the mere intellect of an ordinary man. For the ordinary person, life is a matter of sustenance and the survival of the fittest—a biological grind. But for poets and writers, life exists beyond the horizons of such a limited intellect.

Consider the concept of the ‘Panopticon.’ It was initially a structural idea used by Samuel Bentham in 1785-1786 and later incorporated by his brother, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in works concerning social control. This idea of "all-seeing" power later allowed thinkers like Michel Foucault to interpret it in their own way, showing how literature and theory can prophecy the structures of our world.

I contemplate at times that writers are like blessed beings who can prophecy. Even if they are not prophets in the religious sense, they possess a vision that sees through time. This is perhaps why Aristotle fortified the position of poets in his Poetics, defending their role in society against Plato’s famous banishment of them in the Republic.

I remember a time long ago when I was teaching Grade 9. I encountered a chapter titled The ‘Fun They Had’ by Isaac Asimov. This science fiction story, written all the way back in 1951, takes us to the year 2157. In 1951, there was no concept of modern digital technology or even the internet as we know it.

Yet, Asimov prophesied about "A.I." Zoom-style classes and mechanical teachers. While the author placed his story in 2157, the advancement actually happened much sooner. Considering these facts, I can deduce that writers possess a unique ability to predict future happenings through the sheer power of their deduction and creative foresight.

These philosophical reflections came rushing back into my mind recently when I went to observe the class of Ms. Mehlika. She was teaching Grade 10 (Lotus), and the poem on the agenda was ‘Miracles’ by Walt Whitman. I had observed Ms. Mehlika’s teaching before, but this time, the class completely mesmerised me. It blew my mind to the point where I wanted to be a student sitting in those rows once again.

I do not know what was in the mind of Walt Whitman when he originally penned those lines, nor do I strictly care for the interpretations of the scholars who explained it later. I believe that every elucidation of a poem is a personal one. When a writer creates a piece of work, they write it out of their personal experience. Consequently, when an interpreter explains it, they do so based on their own life experiences. To limit a piece of literary work to a single, "correct" interpretation is to perform a carnage upon that art.

In Ms. Mehlika’s class, I was taken aback by her pedagogical grace. She did not thrust her own interpretation on the students. She did not act like a traditional teacher who barges into a room and insists that her way of seeing is the only right way. Instead, she acted as a "resource manager." She empowered the students and asked them to explain the stanzas as they understood them, using their own unique intellect.

The result was stunning. Each student came forward with a different explanation, and the classroom atmosphere became so innovative, informative, and creative that I felt even the most renowned critics in the world would have stood and applauded. Her class taught me a vital lesson: we ought to empower our students. We must enhance their creativity and encourage them to think beyond the horizon so that tomorrow, they shall have the courage to change the world by thinking out of the box.

However, I also believe that one must not be purely impractical. One should not start building castles in the air without giving a concrete shape to the idea. Ideas are only as good as the work we put into them to make them tangible; otherwise, they have no value and shall die with the passing of that person.

A creative mind is rare to find, but the rarest mind of all is the one that executes what it observes and feels. As the adage says, " Action speaks louder than words. We must not only dream; we must do”.

( The Author is a columnist )