Professor N.N. – the snapshots
One of my friends remarked after reading my previous piece that I appear to be somewhat vindictive while characterizing Dr. Naqvi’s shenanigans.
Perhaps.
Another friend remarked that I appear to be jealous of Nadeem’s success with women and that’s why I am trashing him
Perhaps.
But the main reason I am fascinated with him is that my mind is boggled as to how far a human being can stray from the beaten path without facing any serious repercussion. We all have heard of Karma, which appears to have skipped him.
I have created snapshots of Naqvi, at different times, in different contexts. Please keep in mind that upto May 2015, I did not know him very well, nor was I comfortable with my own surroundings in Almaty.
Can working and befriending a serious drug addict be entertaining? You decide!
Naqvi and females : Professor N is handsome, skinny, eloquent, charismatic and articulate. After talking to him about social, political or economic issues, you will form the impression that you met a truly cultured person, a scholar of social sciences.
As I indicated before, these qualities attracted females, which is normal. What is somewhat of an outlier is that many professional females, younger and very attractive, will casually sleep with him, knowing fully well that he is married and he has a wild lifestyle The set included a couple of Associate Deans in their early forties, a very hot Journalism professor and many others. After going to dinner with Nadeem, the females will find that he is willing to offer them cocaine, hashish or other narcotics, which are very hard to find in Almaty. Many of them will be tempted to experiment. Nadeem also provided help in writing petitions or applications or even grant proposals for these women. These have to be precise and English was not the native language of these women. All these induced the women to succumb to him. Or was there something else?
You can probably investigate these Nadeem phenomena in Almaty by hiring a trained sociologist, or you can form your own hypothesis. I will talk about Gulshan, the Journalism professor. I heard her speak fluent Russian, English and German. She also claimed she had working knowledge of Arabic, Turkish and Farsi. She had a Ph.D. in media studies. She was slender and generally stunning.
I was totally intimidated by Gulshan. We went to lunch once, but I was way too polite and professional with her. Then I found Nadeem casually hanging out with her on campus , and going to dinner in nearby restaurants. She was married to this Iranian guy who lived in Tehran, by the way. Later, when Nadeem and I hung out a lot, I would visit Nadeem’s apartment and Gulshan would show up, to discuss about writing a petition or something. Hmmm.
The three of us went to dinner once. When Nadeem went out to smoke, Gulshan shook her head ruefully ,“Too, bad” she said “he smokes too much. But he is alive. Most of you are dead!”
I don’t exactly know what she meant by the above remark!
The venerable Dean Jaundice: Dean Jaundice was actually not the Dean of Academic Affairs, but the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, actually his new job was still in the process of being approved, so he was Acting Associate Dean of Academic affairs only. He liked to be addressed as Dean Jaundice, and everyone complied, except Nadeem! Jaundice was Nadeem’s nemesis and he drew a lot of his wrath over time!!
Poor Dean Jaundice did not have a degree in Business or Economics, but he had a doctorate in Education and used to teach high school in USA before coming to Almaty. Surrounded by people who did not think much about his educational background, he developed some sort of inferiority complex. As Kazakhstan was part of Soviet Russia, there were a lot of obscure rules and regulations still on the books. His mission was to find these rules and try to enforce them seriously. This did not go very well with the faculty, he was met with casual non-compliance from most of us. But Professor Nadeem got furious at this nincompoop’s efforts to control his actions. He really went to war on Jaundice!!
Professors in all universities are supposed to keep “office hours”, three or four hours a week when they are going to be in their offices, doors open and ready to talk to the students about whatever questions they have. In reality. most professors stay in their offices a lot longer and meet students whenever the students want.
Dean Jaundice wanted to enforce the “office hours” rules!. He would pick some professors at random, and call their landlines in their offices during their office hours. At the end of the week, emails will be sent to all seventy people at the faculty about the professors who did not answer the call from Dean Jaundice.
This was too petty and too invasive, and we did not like it. Nadeem and a Geography professor, Dr. Whitman, absolutely hated it. Their names showed up on the list of absentees almost every week. They started playing games with Dean Janudice. Dr. Whitman would email him :
“ Dear Jaundice, I am in my office at my office hours, but nature calls. Please allow me to take a break. I measured myself doing this activity before and it should not take me more than four and a half minutes. I will wait for your approval. Please hurry!” This will be cc-ed to 70 people. Nadeem would also write emails to Jaundice saying that he is too gassy today and he will need to go to the University health center, get some medicine and wait for a while before actually coming to his office, otherwise students in his office will be inconvenienced. All this will provide free entertainment for all of us, except professor Jaundice.
Jaundice went to town big time regarding our vacation breaks. There were three vacation breaks, one week in March, one week in Winter, and two and a half months in summer. There were lots and lots of protocols. If the vacation started from the following Monday, you could not leave on the previous Friday , even if you had no classes or meetings on that day! You have to return to campus one day before the classes resume for the short breaks and about seven days prior to when classes begin after summer. If you have a titular position , like department chair or director of graduate program, then you have to find your substitute for the time that you are going to be away for 48 hours or longer! . Fortunately, we had Kazakh colleagues who often did not travel anywhere during the break and they could substitute for us. There were many other protocols, all equally pointless. All the arrangements will have to be documented on an application form for leave of absence before every break and will need to be pre-approved by the college Dean, before being submitted to Dean Jaundice before his deadline. The whole set of regulations were redundant because the students were all gone during the short breaks, there were no classes to teach as well. In USA, you can do anything you want during the break as long as you return even five minutes before your classes begin! But not here, and Dean Jaundice cracked the whip on us. We all suffered, but Nadeem’s plans got spectacularly destroyed His proposed trip to Germany to visit his family would be rejected by Jaundice sometimes even after his application being revised and resubmitted. Angry emails in flowery language will float around with many copies sent to others –I always got cc-ed. Many times, Nadeem will take an “unauthorized leave” and he will be threatened with losing his “vacation days” and all hell would break loose on the e-mail server.
A political science professor, Dr. Zar, finally found a way to break the fangs of Dean Jaundice. He suggested this: Let Jaundice take away “vacation days” for not following the protocols properly. Suppose he takes away seven days from you during winter break. Then you, the faculty member, ask for seven less days of leave during summer. That will make you return to campus in August seven days before others. Do not return, but email to Jaundice, saying you are back in Almaty, in your home, since you have no duties on campus – which is closed anyways . If he asks to meet him, you tell him you are not feeling well, but you will be happy to answer his queries online. He can not force you to come to campus because it is closed, and you have no responsibility to be there. He can not call a meeting of only the people that are present on campus (the local Kazakhs) because more than half of the faculty are absent. So your annual salary will remain the same (one extra week of “paid vacation” in winter, but one less week of “paid vacation” in summer).
I do not know how many people actually followed this, but one semester after Dr. Zar revealed this plan to us privately, Dean Jaundice was fired by the President of the University for an unrelated infraction, so we never got a chance to test Zar’s idea on a large scale. Jaundice is currently back in the States.
Love in the office: Then there were two young people, in love (lust?). One was Dastan the Mastan, the handsome son of a network scion (not computer network but goon network!), who drove a brand new Audi at the age of 22. The other was beautiful Miss Molotova, daughter of an even bigger network scion, she drove a new Mercedes at a tender age of 21. Both were Nadeem’s teaching Assistants. Molotova was the head Assistant and hence had the task of entering students’ assessment scores in Nadeem’s own spreadsheet. When I taught courses like this in USA, I entered the students’ scores myself because of possible security breach and fraud if I let my Assistants even look at the official spreadsheet. However, having been fired from a regular faculty job around 1999, Nadeem never really learned how to use computers (or maybe he was too lazy to learn), although his job required a lot of computer use. He usually relied on his colleagues and Teaching Assistants, notwithstanding the security problem.
So Miss Molotova worked in Nadeem’s office for a few hours everyday, entering students’ scores, and Dastan the Mastan started visiting her. She claimed she was a virgin, which Dastan was not. She wanted to lose her virginity to Dastan, but the office was not a good place for such an act. They kept on messing around, but before Miss Molotova could successfully lose her cherry Nadeem caught them red-handed. At this point a flustered Dastan asked for Nadeem’s help. Apparently, cars could not be parked at secluded places in Almaty for romantic purposes, there were too many cops around. The parents of both kids strictly monitored the number of kilometers the cars were being driven so they could not drive out of town. And Miss Molotova did not want to go to a cheap hotel, she would only go to Hotel Kazakhstan or a classier place which Dastan the Mastan could not pay for – his father did not give him much cash!
So, you guessed it, Nadeem’s apartment was right on campus, a key for which was given to Dastan the Mastan, and he made sure (when Nadeem was gone) that Miss Molotova was a virgin no more! He even repeated the act a few times just to confirm this!
A cute story, but I was the department Chair and it violated many Departmental rules, too numerous to mention. But I did not report Dastan, or Molotova or Nadeem to anyone. My logic was that the whole thing was a classic victimless crime – both Dastan and Molotova were willing participants, and Nadeem was clearly complicit and irresponsible but otherwise not guilty. If I was Nadeem, I would have given Dastan enough money for a room in Hotel Kazakhstan!!
Computers and security breaches: Using Nadeem’s TA’s for computer work led to some serious potential problems. Apart from entering Midterm exam scores or interim assessment scores or homework scores, Nadeem also let the TA’s calculate the students’ final course grades as a weighted combination of all these scores. Also, he would pick questions from a question bank and ask the Teaching Assistants to construct an exam from these. The Teaching Assistants were young people, they had friends who were students of the class which Nadeem was teaching, and they would want to see their own grades and change them if possible. Worse yet, some of the Teaching Assistants were Masters students from foreign countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan etc.. They were not rich people’s kids, they were on scholarships and financially strained. Inevitably, at one time, a TA from Uzbekistan, Sarav, started selling the exam questions to students at $50 per piece. Nadeem found out, and lo and behold he verbally abused Sarav, calling him a motherfucker, a cocksucker (which is a huge insult to a Muslim from Uzbekistan or anywhere else) and other things in front of everyone else, before firing him. Because he abused him in public so badly, I as a department chair could not take any further action against Sarav. After this incident, Nadeem still used Teaching Assistants for entering scores and compiling exams, but he now used students like Miss Molotova, who were supposedly wealthy enough not to be tempted by a mere $50 per question!! So lazy and stupid!
During this time, once Dastan the Mastan and his two friends requested recommendation letters from me because they were applying for admission to masters programs in European Universities. When I said I will write and send the letters online, the students were very disappointed.
“But professor”, they said “ this is hard, it requires use of a password and coding each letter. You are so busy, why don’t you let us do it? Professor Nadeem allows us to send the letters ourselves, he even gives us his own password”!
I started laughing “ If I let you do it, you can change the content of my letters, that’s fraud. And in USA, I have sent at least two-hundred letters like this to different universities. Listen you boys, unlike professor Nadeem, I learned to use computers when you were in Kindergarten”.
“Of course, sir, sorry sir. We will never think about altering the letters or anything like that, ha ha”, they also laughed and left my office.
The iconic Naqvi
Sometime in December 2017, I was going to India. Nadeem’s mother in India was very sick so he decided to visit Delhi as well, instead of going to Germany to visit his wife and kids. We were both booked on the same Air Astana flight at 7:30 AM from Almaty. We needed to leave around 5 AM from our houses. Our apartments were on campus in adjacent buildings, so Nadeem took the responsibility of calling a taxi on time. By the time I was almost ready, early in the morning, Nadeem called, his voice was filled with excitement.
“Dude, come over, I am having a lot of fun here.” It was 4:30 AM when I went over to his place with my luggage, somewhat alarmed at this sudden invitation.
It turned out that my trepidation was justified. Nadeem was not ready to go to the airport in an hour. For him the night was not over yet! He was all naked, covered with a bed sheet. One skinny leg was poking out. A young woman was giving him a massage. Nadeem already had his drugs and sex. He was relaxing now, getting a massage and explaining Amartya Sen’s social choice concepts to the masseuse! I am not kidding!. Sen’s Social Choice was one of his favorite books, gave him a lot of research ideas. The woman, of course, spoke only a few words of English, so Nadeem’s eloquent discourse was going way over her head – she was merely nodding from time to time!
I sat down in the living room, Nadeem greeted me with a big grin from the bedroom – the door was ajar. He seemed to be in his own world, oblivious to the upcoming trip to the airport in a few minutes.
Wait, there were other people in the apartment. There was Najaf, Nadeem’s student, about twenty-one years old, and a very young girl about sixteen or seventeen. Apparently Najaf procured these two women for Nadeem, the younger girl was given to him as a reward for his services. They were both in the living room/kitchen area, shuffling about nervously. Every five minutes, Nadeem would shout at Najaf, “Pack my bags, you stupid fool” and Nadaf will get some random shirts and pants from the closet and put them in a suitcase. So Nadeem did not totally forget about the trip after all.
I had enough – it was 4:55 AM. It was my turn to shout at Nadaf. I told him to get a taxi for me pronto because I was not going to wait for Nadeem- he was going to miss the flight anyways. I could not call a radio taxi by myself because my Russian was not good enough.
Seeing my dismay, Nadaf called a taxi, I took it at 5:15 AM and went to the airport on time. Nadeem missed that flight, shelled out twice as much money to catch the flight the next morning and lost one full day out of a four day vacation – all for a few tender moments of lecturing on social choice while getting a massage in the nude! When it happened I was righteously annoyed, but now I burst out laughing when I think about it.
This is our iconic Nadeem living his favorite lifestyle!