No Shame in Deceit?

I went to see my mother’s aunt over Eid – a frail, tiny woman, over a hundred years old by my estimate, but spritely and alert in her old age – and we inevitably talked about days gone by, and her memories of her brother (my grandfather). Her son, sitting next to her, was counting members of our family who had served for Ayub Khan’s government, and she remembered my grandfather’s pride in the reputation of honesty and integrity that each member brought to the family as a whole. My grandfather himself served as Joint Secretary of Defence under Ayub Khan, from which he eventually retired with a spotless record. Brigadiers, Judges, State Secretaries – I, too, am proud to be associated with this family (by which I mean to include all aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and cousins – the extended family).

Among the majority of my extended family, even today, bribing a traffic cop, or failing to pay our taxes, or cheating on our exam papers, or even swearing, is still considered shameful. For a long time, when I was in school, I was the butt of many jokes for my clean language – unlike my classmates, I didn’t use profanity at all in my every day life (beyond the occasional “damn”, that is). Unfortunately, that is a state I have to find again, maybe when I stop driving in Karachi!

In an earlier post, I mention the things Pakistanis as a nation fail to teach their children, things like honesty, fairness, or courtesy. Well, it struck me the other day, as I watched our former Prime Minister and resident thief Benazir Bhutto give an interview on GEO, that I forgot to mention the lack of shame that has permeated our people. While Ms. Bhutto continues to proclaim her innocence, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she does so without a tremor in her voice, no inflection or raised blood pressure to betray her, and certainly no remorse for the rape and plunder of 150 million Pakistanis during her two terms in office. And because corruption and bribery are now so acceptable, so is Ms. Bhutto. I am almost resigned to her return to power, and should perhaps be prepared for a quick get-away. I don’t think the country will be ours for very long with her at the helm; I do think she would sell it off to the highest bidder at the first opportunity.

The thing is, as the world watches, perhaps you should know that her actions are not exceptional, at least, not any more. Our leaders, after all, are born from among us, and are a reflection of who we are. If our leaders have gotten progressively worse over the years, we should look to ourselves, because they aren’t aliens, nor are they imports from another country. They are Pakistanis who espouse the same values as you or I do.

Outside the political arena: when my husband and I decided to start our own business, we were warned that we would be unable to do business without resorting to bribery or currying favours for everything, from tax returns to getting contracts – the voices of doom were right, mostly. It has taken us about three times longer than it should have, but we have avoided bribery completely, though I will confess to some strongarm tactics to make sure that we get paid for our work (a HUGE problem with consultancy and design work, because Pakistanis have not yet put a value on ideas). By my calculations, if we had followed the normal route of under-the-table bribes, and some serious courting of company decision-makers (this includes supplying them with women and alchohol, incredible as that sounds), we would be billionaires by now.

I had a contract once, design work for a real estate firm organizing an off-road event in Balochistan. My friend’s boyfriend was in charge of the event, and ten days before the event he realised he was floundering. His contestants had no maps, no instructions, no collateral on the event – nothing for which advertisers might get their return, not even posters. We negotiated a deal, highly lucrative for the boyfriend (Omar Salim), and we shook hands on it. I didn’t get anything in writing, since he was, after all, my best friend’s boyfriend, and was over at my place almost every night. BIG, BIG mistake. Not only did he relay a much lower price to his bosses (the paymasters), he gave them the impression that the lower price included the design and production of ALL merchandise for the event (though this was not the case, and while I had some proof in the form of a final list of items to be designed, his bosses took the easy way out – they had all the collateral for the event, and weren’t too worried about the merchandise). Needless to say, when it came to pay day, I was left with a debt to the printer I had employed, death threats from Omar towards my husband (he suggested our prices were over-inflated, even with the unrealistic deadlines, and that we owed him money that he had already advanced to us, about 50% of the amount we had agreed upon! His ‘decency’ mandated that he threaten a male, though the threat was said to me, over the phone –“I’ll make you a widow”). Perhaps worse of all, my best friend preferred to believe whatever warped version he told her. I haven’t spoken to or seen her in 2 years.

With values like this in the private sector, there seems to be little hope for Pakistan because the next generation of businessmen will be the offspring of these same business leaders. For instance, one of the first contracts my husband landed was with a local cable internet company desperately in need of reforming their customer care department. One of their products is an online forum, normally populated by teenage kids exchanging files, and information, and some ranting (normally about company’s pathetic service). In the course of revamping their customer care, he found a user whose language was unbelievably vile, especially towards women, and as a matter of course, he banned him from the forum. The user is a teenage kid, with powerful parents. One day, at dinner, my husband got a call from an irate woman, threatening to have him fired if he didn’t reinstate her son on the forum. Despite being told why her son was banned from the forum, her tirade continued. Not one to back down, my husband disconnected the family’s connection and invited them to take their business elsewhere.

Now, the cable service is part of a much larger conglomerate, which includes a fledgling newspaper, heavily dependent on advertising revenues. The irate mother turned out to be Nighat Mir, owner of one of Karachi’s oldest advertising agencies, Circuit. She contacted the newspaper’s editor, the conglomerate’s owner and a number of influential personalities, and had her connection restored. Her son, however, didn’t make it back to the forum, at least for another year, mostly because my husband faxed over 65 pages of evidence to the various people who called him up demanding he restore the boy’s rights to access the forum. When Mrs. Mir was shown her son’s various posts, she suggested that such language was “to be expected” from a teenage boy, and threw her own colourful expletives at my husband. You know the phrase “Do you know who I am, young man?” – she used it liberally.

Her son will be the CEO of Circuit one day. As a microcosm of the Pakistani business, Circuit is an excellent example of the kind of people we are. And the values we believe in. Nighat’s husband Imran is a prominent artist and designer – a man involved in many pioneering activities in the country, including founding a leading Art College in Karachi, building two high-quality analytical magazines, besides starting up and sustaining an award-winning advertising agency.

Nighat and Imran rub shoulders, and values, with educationists, artistes, architects, designers, writers… people who in any other country would be considered the conscience of the nation.

My husband and I have since considered closing down shop and taking up salaried jobs, but despite an initial 2 years of almost complete poverty, recent successes (not least of which is a growing international client base) have changed our minds. There are people in Pakistan who still believe in the straight path, others like us whose parents’ values reflect another age, though you really, really have to look hard for them.