In a previous blog, I used a poem by Robert Frost called ‘The Road Not Taken’ to illustrate the point that in our lives, many of us are forced to make a choice between taking a conventional path or a less familiar one.  I also declared that in my early adult life, I chose the less conventional route or, the road less traveled.  As a matter of fact, to this day, I still have a tendency to choose the road less traveled.

I often wondered why I am that way inclined.  There was not a single moment of ‘Eureka’ or an epiphany.  It has been a slow progress, maybe accelerated in the last couple of years as I have had more time for introspection.  So, here is my rationale for choosing the road less traveled.

I have three brothers and two sisters.  I love them all dearly and have a different relationship with each of them, which, I suppose, is unsurprising.  In this blog however, I am going to focus on one of them as he is the reason why my decision-making leans towards the less conventional selection.  I can tell you his name and stop here.  As a matter of fact, his name is Tawfik, who is 4 years older than me and still highly active on a number of fronts.

You can stop reading here, because I’ve given you enough information to draw your own conclusions.  Or, you can carry on reading and learn more about this exceptional human being.

Why is Tawfik an exceptional human being?  Well, because he is a polymath, autodidact, opsimath, and occasional raconteur.  If that does not make him exceptional, I don’t know what does!  I used obscure words to describe him so, before you rush to your dictionary, I will explain each adjective and, in the process, prove my claim that Tawfik is an exceptional person.

Tawfik is a ‘polymath’ because he knows a hell of a lot about a wide range of subjects from literature to the sciences to the arts. Not only that, but he has proved to be very competent in all of the subjects he mastered.  A qualified civil engineer, he could pass for an architect and a mechanical engineer.  He is a prolific painter, portrait sketcher and illustrator.  He writes poetry in the classic Arabic language, which is extremely challenging and, apart from being an art form, it must follow a very strict set of rules, which deters most literary qualified people from attempting this creative endeavour.

Tawfik is an ‘autodidact’ because he was never content with knowledge acquired at school, getting the necessary grades and then going on to study civil engineering.  He had the capacity and interest in more topics; many more.  While still at school, he taught himself calligraphy, offered his services as a sign writer and made enough money to dress better than his contemporaries with more cash at his disposal than a fully employed adult.  Immediately after graduation, he got a job at Nablus City Municipality in Palestine.  In his spare time, he taught himself architecture and opened a practice for his services designing buildings from residential to public schools.  While at university, he set up a profitable business importing quality luxury goods which he curated at his rented house (no other student could afford such extravagance) and had clients from far and wide visiting him to purchase his imports.  I could go on for pages but, you get my point.

Tawfik is an ‘opsimath’ who to this day, in his seventies, still has the thirst and appetite for learning and getting better.  On the way, he has mastered computer programming, spreadsheet design, landscape and portrait drawing and then poetry.  If you are talking with Tawfik and you say something like: there are more wild camels in Australia than the entire Arabian Peninsula, and the statement arouses his curiosity, the next time he sees you, he will expand on the subject, giving you chapter and verse on the migration of the camel, how it became wild and reel out factual stats and references.  It is like he finds himself in a knife fight, goes home and returns with an automatic machine gun.

Tawfik is an ‘occasional raconteur’ who can effortlessly engage a roomful of people with his stories, personal anecdotes and unique analysis of current topics from geopolitical events, to scientific discoveries.  No matter what topic you bring up, the chances are, he knows more about it than you do.  Tawfik always had this ability to demand and keep your attention, a talent he inherited from our father.  However, he didn’t always behave like that.  Some days you meet Tawfik the extrovert and sometimes his alter ego, the introvert, will turn up instead and occupy a corner in the room, keeping himself to himself.  This is why I describe him as an occasional raconteur.

There are many, many other enviable attributes about Tawfik that I can add such as being suave, an accomplished flirt, competent cook, and analyst of international politics.  So, did this exceptional personality affect me as his younger sibling?  Did he have a positive or negative impact on my growing up?  Was I proud of him or did I resent him?  Did I love or hate him?

I will answer these questions at the end, I promise.

From my narrow and immature perspective, I spent my entire youth trying to work out how to live, and compete with, a polymath.  The other three adjectives (autodidact, opsimath and raconteur) didn’t come into play for a while yet so, my objective was to deal with the polymath bit.  It seemed I was dedicating all my energies trying to step out from under his shadow; saying things that are worth saying, more eloquently and profoundly than he did, so my voice could be heard.  Trying to accomplish things with more ease and flair than he did.  Demanding and getting the respect and affection of others beyond what Tawfik had been able to achieve.

In normal sibling rivalry, a four-year gap is a big enough advantage for the older sibling.  But, when you add the capacity to be curious about many subjects, and the natural determination to master each of these subjects, my challenge of competing with Tawfik was elevated from ‘extremely difficult’ to ‘borderline impossible’.  Why I kept on trying is beyond me; I should have just accepted the reality of our situation and moved on.  Now as we both are in the winter of our lives; I am glad I tried.

As Tawfik and I grew up, I felt the gap of knowledge and mastery of subjects between us widening by the day.  Not content with being excellent at mathematics, engineering, arts, sciences, literature, and sports, he cultivated a winsome personality that appealed to his peer group and adults alike, thus showing early signs of the raconteur in the making.  He was always immaculately dressed, not a single hair on his head was ever out of place, his manners were impeccable, his charm genuine and attractive and his ability to flirt with girls and women were a sight to behold.

And here is the kick in the teeth: he genuinely cared for me and about me.  It’s a universal fact that an average boy would delight in beating the crap out of his younger brother. But Tawfik was not an average boy.  He was always kind, gentle and helpful to me.  He was the one (not my parents), who took me to school on my first day, told me which class to go to, how to conduct myself and where to meet him at breaks.  He helped me with my homework, defended me against bullies and let me hang out with his ‘cool friends’ who would normally ignore me as a non-entity but, they accepted me because I was Tawfik’s brother.  In short, he took me under his wing and opened my eyes to so much about life as he understood it at a young age and handed it to me on a plate, for free.  Who does that?  What brother would forgo beating the crap out of his younger, irritating brother and instead treating him almost as an equal?

On the whole, I was set such a high bar to jump over, I did not stand a chance!  At best, I could only try and emulate him.  At worst, which was more often the case with me, I fantasised about him failing publicly and spectacularly to the extent that my star would rise as his dimmed.

As if to prove that he was just a human being, albeit a super-human being, he fell short of perfection on a few occasions when he was in the throes of teenagehood.  Sometimes, he didn’t get the high academic marks expected of him, he got into boys-fights when he would normally negotiate the dispute to a peaceful outcome, he would shop me to my parents for some infraction I committed, and on one infamous occasion, my father had decided to discipline me for the millionth time and asked a roomful of people for someone to give him a belt and my brother supplied the instrument of punishment he happened to have had on, to keep his immaculate trousers up.   I felt betrayed by him and did not speak to him for a couple of days until he charmed me out of my dark self-pity hole by taking me to the cinema and a meal, paying for everything himself.  However, he eventually emerged from his teenage sojourn even more accomplished, knowledgeable and generous in spirit.

As if my awareness of his superiority over me was not enough, I had third party observers reminding me of my shortcomings.  I over-heard my father on a number of occasions telling friends and relatives that my brother was dependable, reliable, more likely to succeed while I was a lazy, big mouth who would not survive for a day on his own.  My father meant it because he gave Tawfik a lot of slack, allowing him to travel alone at the young age of eleven or twelve.  He would not allow me to leave home to visit family and friends in different towns or villages, unless I was accompanied by someone who would be there, to deal with the mess I created wherever I went.  My father found the time and patience to show Tawfik how to drive and by the age of 15, he was an accomplished driver.  I left home for good around the age of 18 without having had a single driving lesson from my father, because he did not think I was ready but, I secretly learnt how to drive anyway.

I had any number of teachers, who upon meeting me for the first time, told me that if I accomplished half of what my brother had four years earlier, then I should consider myself lucky.  Sometimes, they even threatened to keep a close watch over me because they were certain I was nowhere near as good as my older brother.

But the part that really hurt me the deepest came from none other than my loving, gentle and forever forgiving mother.  I once went to her to complain about Tawfik doing something wrong and asking if he would be punished like I would if I had done something similar.  Her reply was short, final and shocking.  She said: ‘I don’t believe you; your brother is your master and the crown on your head, now go out and play’.

Any man, or boy in my case, would be excused for going to the kitchen seeking the sharpest knife to kill his perfect brother with.  I seriously thought about this option but did not think I had the necessary technique to carry out this very justifiable and reasonable act of homicide.  However, I knew he would talk me out of it and suggest we go back to the kitchen and use the knife to prepare an afternoon snack with whatever we could find.

So, I applied my mind to the dilemma I had and instinctively, rather than consciously, came up with a plan.  A plan that had the potential to go on for the rest of our lives.  I would take every aspect of his knowledge base and apply myself to exceed his achievements.  I would also emulate and improve on his manners, charm, sartorial elegance, eloquence, flirtation and general winsome persona.

The trouble with plans is that they are easy to conceive on paper or in one’s mind but, when it comes to implementation, reality comes along on a regular basis and bites you so hard on your backside, you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a while by which time, reality returns to take out another chunk of your seriously damaged butt.  What I came to realise is this: the topics I focused on to beat or exceed him were split into two categories: topics which were extremely hard to master to a level that I could honestly say I was better than him.  The other category had all the topics which were ‘impossible’ to come within a light year of him as they required God-given talent like calligraphy, sketching, drawing and so on.  So, I focused on the first category and accepted defeat on the other, hoping I might discover one day that I had my own God-given talent which I would put up against his own.

Being naïve and ill-prepared, my plan overlooked the fact that one day, Tawfik would finish school and head to university, thus leaving the coast clear for me to stamp my personality on the family and friends left behind at my mercy.  So, when the time came for him to leave for Egypt, I felt bereft and abandoned, without any idea of what to do with myself, let alone stamping my personality on anyone, including our pet cat.

It was during Tawfik’s absence from my life that I decided to stop trying to emulate his accomplishments.  Against my father’s expressed wishes, I refused to follow a similar academic route to Tawfik’s.  I also suggested I went to the USA or the UK to complete my studies and my father would not entertain the idea, insisting I went to Egypt too by saying: if it is good enough for your clever brother, it is good enough for you, if you are lucky enough to be accepted by one of the universities there.  That argument went on for almost two years before I finally won and left for England and I could see in my father’s eyes, that I would mess things up and be back home within a year, having failed to cope with a foreign and unfamiliar culture. I don’t know if my father looked in my eyes and sensed that I was determined to ‘do or die’ to prove I was capable of surviving on my own.  I doubt he did.

I have to be honest and admit that my father was almost right on a number of occasions.  In my early days in England, I found life very tough to deal with but, I was determined to plough my own furrow, motivated by the overwhelming desire to prove my father wrong and to excel at something that was not in emulation of Tawfik.

Somehow, I survived the early days of my self-imposed exile in England, did well at my A-Levels and went on to study aeronautical engineering, which I chose because it perplexed my father and was very different from Tawfik’s qualification as a civil engineer.  It also meant that there was little or no prospect of gaining employment anywhere in the Middle East.

As young adults and then growing up to have our own nuclear families, Tawfik and I moved in different orbits; he working and living in Saudi Arabia and me in England.  We met infrequently but every time we met, we re-connected instantaneously as though we had seen each other the day before.  It was always a delight to spend quality time with him either in the Middle East or in England.  I watched him grow up with pride, without feeling I needed to compete with him.  I am sure he always had, and still has to this day, a sense of guardianship over me which, whether I need it or not, I cherish and appreciate.

Now, going back to the questions of how, as a young person, was I affected by Tawfik’s exceptional personality, was his impact on my life a positive or negative one, was I proud of him or resent him, and did I love or hate him.  I think you can deduce the answers already but, let me put it on the record:

Tawfik has been a godsend for me, to motivate me to take life more seriously than I might have done without him.  Even through the narrow lens of a child, I can honestly say, he was a positive influence on my formative years.  More often than not, I was proud of him but only resented it when others chose to compare us by setting him as a standard of excellence and me as the one who must aspire to his standards but, that’s not his fault.  As for my feelings towards him, they were nothing but love and affection.

Above all, Tawfik’s most important influence over me has been to make me determined to be the best version of myself instead of an average version.  That desire to do the best I can has never left me and I am so thankful to him for making this aspect of my character one of my abiding principles in life.

Now, when I remember my mother’s words: ‘Tawfik is your master and the crown on your head’ I no longer feel anger or resentment, I am amused by it and in fact, I like it.

Thank you Tawfik for being my older brother.  I love you.