FEBRUARY 14

The Secret of Success

In a letter published in the Daily Qaumi Awaz (April 21, 1991), Mr. Mushtaq Ahmad, an advocate of the Supreme Court of India, comments on ‘minority’ attitudes: “In the days when I was a student at the Aligarh Muslim University, Mr. Iftikhar Ahmad Khan, Head of the Department of History, told me of an incident which had taken place in his student days at Cambridge University. It was at the time when the Jews, persecuted all over Europe, had been forced to flee from Germany. Iftikhar Ahmad noticed a group of students on the university campus who stood out from the others. They would always rush through their meals then immediately go back to their studies or other related matters. One day

Mr. Ahmad asked them why they were working at such a frenzied pace. One of the students replied, “You see, we are Jews. Our people are being exterminated in Germany. Here, we are in a minority, so that if our rivals are fair, we have to be good, and if they are good, we have to be excellent.”

The secret of the Jews’ success lies in their having made excellence their way of life and in working harder than their competitors. To have the peace and concentration which real, hard work requires, one has to stay away from all strife, whether serious or trifling, from all protest campaigns and slogan raising, and refrain from all attempts to blame others for one’s own weaknesses. The Jews realised that, being in a minority, they had to shoulder a great social and historical responsibility. And that meant working twice as hard as the majority. (p. 3)

This is a world of competition. The secret of success lies solely in hard work and wisdom, whether one is a Jew or not, and no matter whether the community to which one belongs has any special features which make it stand out from other communities. Everyone has to go through the mill. There is no exception to this rule.

The Jews are so particular about this that they make no concessions to their young people, even in their own institutions, so that their incentive to work hard is never dampened.

I once asked an acquaintance of mine who was educated at an American university, and who is now working in an American academic institution, whether he had met any Jews there. He said he had. There were some Jews working in the same institution, and even its director was a Jew, I asked him the secret of the Jews’ success in America, where they form a tiny minority. He said it was due to their notion of excellence. They made excellence their target, and once they had earned distinction in their work and qualified themselves for their careers in a superlative manner, no one could stand in the way of their success.

He said, moreover, that the academic institutions set up by the Jews in the U.S.A. observed what seems to us to be a very strange principle. That is, they awarded scholarships to non-Jewish applicants with even as few as 40 per cent marks, while making the criterion for Jewish applicants much more strict. To be eligible for a scholarship, Jews had to have 75 per cent marks. If they failed to come up to this high standard, their applications were simply not considered.

Why do Jews follow this principle in their institutions? This appears to be a very unjustified procedure but, in actual fact, it is of the greatest benefit to their own young people, because it encourages them to work really hard, it inspires them to forge ahead, leaving all others behind.

Here, in this competitive world of today, those who want concessions will always find themselves in the back seat. It is only those who make every effort to earn excellent qualifications who will ever come to the fore.