Contours of Naya Pakistan

These are heady times for Pakistan. For the first time since independence, the country managed to carry out a democratic transition from one government to another. It's truly an important milestone for the turmoil-ridden country, often in news for wrong reasons.

Even in the recently concluded elections the electorate had to brave Taliban threat, bomb blasts and other forms of violence. To their credit they turned out in large numbers and it was indeed a resounding setback to militant groups, who had dubbed elections and the democratic process itself as un-Islamic.

In the run up to polls a hung assembly was predicted by many pollsters. However as the elections neared Nawaz Sharif emerged as frontrunner. For this steel tycoon turned politician it is indeed a sweet revenge from being ingloriously ousted from power in a coup in 1999, by the then General Pervez Musharraf. The wily general too had put his hat on the electoral ring, but his dreams got short circuited by the ghosts of his misdeeds as military ruler. The Pakistani Supreme Court ensured that he remained entangled in court cases, rather than court the electorate.

Sharif belongs to a family of steel mill owners and entered politics as a protege of General Zia-ul-Haq. It is said that his main motivation to join politics was nationalisation of steel plants by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Those days nationalisation was considered quite cool; in India too Indira Gandhi had nationalised banks.

His last tenure was marked with the dramatic bus diplomacy with India, which generated lot of euphoria on both sides and was equated with subcontinent's 'Berlin wall' moment. But unfortunately the thaw was short lived and got undone by a war on the icy heights of Kargil. This time around also Sharif has put peace with India a top priority, and one can only hope it does not get scuttled. The sub continent is home to people with one of the lowest per capita income and abysmal social indicators and hence can ill afford fratricidal conflicts.

This election also witnessed the emergence of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan out of fringes to become a major force. He caught the popular imagination of the public, especially the middle class and the youth and drew huge crowds during his public meetings. Though he promised to generate a 'tsunami' during the hustings, his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf failed to reach anywhere near the tally of Sharif's party. However, it will be wrong to dismiss him as 'storm in a teacup' (as some critics had done) because he managed to strongly undercut the ruling PPP's voter base.

Moreover, his PTI managed to emerge as single largest party at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province ridden with Taliban militancy. His strong anti-US stance and promise to end drone attacks has paid rich dividends. But it remains to be seen how his party is going to deliver on such promises.

The biggest loser of this election was the ruling Pakistan People's Party. The anti-incumbency and lack of a charismatic leader like late Benazir Bhutto has cost the party dear. It entered the poll fray with hardly any zest and seemed gripped by a death wish right from the word go. Even many of its prominent leaders had to bite the dust in the elections.

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Mumbai's Gangland Tales

Reading Dongri to Dubai by S Hussain Zaidi was like going through a guided tour of the evolution of organized crime in Mumbai. However my attempt here is not to do any formal review of the book, but recount some of the interesting nuggets in the bygone era.

When the country became independent it had espoused a brand of Fabian socialism, which later came to be known as Nehruvian socialism. The country was to be developed according to five year plans with emphasis on the public sector. The 'blood sucking' capitalists (some of them actually lived up to that reputation) were to be restricted using licence permit raj.

Another major credo of the Indian Government back then was 'self reliance' and hence goods produced by local manufacturers were to be encouraged and protected using prohibitively high customs duty on imported goods. During the Indira Gandhi era it was succinctly expressed in a slogan 'Be Indian, Buy Indian'. To be fair to them the import duty was there even during the British era, but the Indian government honed it as a potent weapon to earn revenue and keep the native manufacturing units ticking.

Hence the Indian middle class had to make do with electronic goods, vehicles and consumer products manufactured within the shores of the country. As for consumer electronic goods such as radio, record players, cassette tape recorders (both reduced to museum pieces in this pen-drive era) and watches the technology used by domestic manufacturers were quite primitive, when compared with their German and Japanese counterparts. There were also many fly-by-night operators who took customers for a ride by pawning of fake versions of globally famous brands like Phillips and later Sony.

All this only whetted the appetite for 'phoren' products and ripened the prospects of a grey market. Smuggling in independent India started off as means of undercutting the import duty. One of the early pioneers who thought on these lines was Haji Mastan. He felt if he can bring in these goods without paying import duty, he can make a huge profit. As a justification for all this he professed that import duty was relic of British India and hence need not be respected. He went on to capture India's imagination and even acted as muse to many of the Bollywood script writers.

Similarly as part of this austerity mantra the import of gold was restricted. But for Indian household the lure of gold has been second nature and cuts across all class barriers and even eras. Even today it is a major bugbear for finance ministry mandarins battling with the country's runaway import bills. So to satiate this craving the smuggling of gold began and soon it proved many times more lucrative than electronic goods.

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Haji Mastan rose to prominence when the organised crime in Mumbai was at its age of innocence - when there was little khoon kharaba and gang wars meant only fisticuffs and knife fights. Mastan himself was too suave for all this and had outsourced this function to guys like Varadarajan Mudaliar and Karim Lala.

But for his stint in jail around Emergency period, this dock-worker-turned-smuggler was fortunate enough to enjoy the riches he had aspired for (had a Merc and lived in plush South Bombay locality) and even got the luxury of retiring from crime. He later went on to give interviews to mainstream newspapers and magazines like any public figure.

This is something none of his successors could achieve. Their lives remained stuck in the mean streets of Dongri and Byculla (or holed up in places like Dubai and Bangkok) and they often gave up the ghost to the bullets of either rival gangs or the police. These gangland wars got meaner and bloody and reached its gory climax during the infamous shootout at Lokhandwala. They also acquired a communal colour after the Babri Masjid demolition riots.

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The day Dawaood's brother Sabir died in a shootout in 1981 he was romancing with his paramour in a Premier Padmini Fiat. It was the same year when Maruti Suzuki rolled out its first car, which later proved to be a game changer and thoroughly overhauled the carscape on Indian streets. Nowadays apart from some rickety old taxis in Mumbai, Premier Padmini has for all purposes been banished from Indian roads.

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Lastly during my stay at Mumbai I had often heard about the Congress House (located near Grant Road station)  and the notoriety associated with it, though never bothered to know how that place got such a name. It seems the place had seen nobler days in the past. During the days of freedom struggle Congress stalwarts had set up base there. However by 1970s it became a haven for modern day slavery - flesh trade. 

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Brorussia Dortmund - The Giant Killer

Brorussia Dortmund - to my two-bit knowledge of football the name sounded as obscure as vuvuzela may have to many soccer fans before the South Africa World Cup happened. At first look I deduced it might be some Russian soccer team! But then I thought Russians are not all that great in football, then what is this team doing at Champions League semi-final.

I assumed maybe the team had an easy outing in preliminary rounds. Did some Google search of the team and was surprised to know it is a German club, and then checked out if there were any well known German stars in it - none that I knew of. So I thought it would be a safe bet to assume that they don't stand a chance against Spanish giant Real Madrid.  

When the first semi-final happened between Bayern Munich and Barcelona, my sympathies were with the German club, though I had an uneasy feeling that Spaniards' tiki-taka (short passes) brand of soccer may choke Bayern, as it happened with German team (after all majority of players are from Bayern) at the World Cup and Euro. Being not a die-hard soccer enthusiast I did not stay awake late to watch the match.

But the news next morning left me surprised (pleasantly of course). The German club had literally overrun the Spaniards. The usually mesmerising Lionel Messi and crafty Xavi Hernandez failed to score even once. For them the second leg will be an uphill battle and the home venue advantage may not be enough.

However, little did I know then that I would be in for a much bigger surprise a day later. Then too I did not watch the match live and went to bed thinking that Cristiano Ronaldo and his men (who also have two big German names Sami Khedira and Mesut Ozil on their side) are luckier than their Catalan cousins to have such an opponent in the semi final.

The next morning I did not even bother to check the results on television. A chance glance at the afternoon bulletin really shook me. Yet another Spanish giant has been put on the mat, and they too will have to display a Mt Everestian feat in the second leg to overcome the deficit.

The TV screens were flashing the name of Robert Lewandowski, the little known Polish striker who had scored all the four goals, a feat not attained by anyone against Real Madrid. The soccer blogosphere was abuzz digging out little known nuggets about his past. Lewandowski would have joined Blackburn three years back, had it not been for cancellation of flights due to volcanic ash from Iceland! Going by his record it appears that his barrage of goals against Real Madrid was no fluke and he has been a prolific goal scorer, both at Dortmund and the Polish national team.

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Hi-tech Jaagir

Political largesse comes with many strings attached, the most common one being return on investment at the electoral stakes. So when the youthful Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav doled out laptops to intermediate students, it was seen as a high tech offering, clothed in feudal era jaagir culture (giving land as patronage) to keep the electorate (in this case probably the first time voters) in good humour.

To be fair to him he had indeed made such a promise during the run-up to state election. But then hardly anyone noticed as election manifestos in our country carry as much value as paper cones provided by vendors to carry peanuts.

However, it looks like Akhilesh is not only serious about it, but his planners are tech savvy enough to ensure that his image building exercise running into thousands of crores, of course at the cost of public exchequer, does not get wiped away at the mere click of a mouse.

These Hewlett Packard laptops come with a pre-loaded screensavers of Akhilesh and his father! Quite predictably for the current MTV Roadies generation it inspires little fascination. But those who went ahead and tried to replace it with a Sunny Leone or Virat Kohli picture were in for a rude shock.

The moment they tried to replace the pre-loaded wallpaper the system crashed. So for UP students there is no question of  the father-son duo fading out of their laptop screens.

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Cheques and (Im)balances

Growing up in pre-liberalisation days a career in one of those PSU banks was considered a consolation prize for those who were not brainy enough to make it to engineering or medical colleges – the two high roads to yuppie-dom. However, with the coming of foreign banks it became on par with the other two. Anyone pursuing anything else was considered a huge burden to the society, worthy of being shot if Pol Pot were ruling our country.

During my student years I too had made some unsuccessful attempts to clear bank tests, though in hindsight I feel relieved that it did not happen - as I often break into cold sweat while dealing with bank related matters such as writing cheques, forms and counting currency notes.
 
Writing a cheque reduces me to a bundle of nerves with checks and re-re … checks. A good old quote (don’t know who said it) comes to my mind – “A banker can write a dozen bad poems and nobody says anything about it, but one poet writes a single bad cheque and he's in trouble.”
 
Often the initial process of tearing the perforated portion of cheque leaf from the book itself goes wrong. The left end of the cheque resembles the spikes and troughs in an ECG reading (a bit of exaggeration, but something on those lines). A couple of times I had to discard the cheque leaf as the spikes were embarrassingly deep.
 
The next hurdle of course is filling in the particulars. With the RBI recently announcing zero-tolerance towards overwriting and counter signing, writing every cheque makes me feel as if I am riding a bicycle with its carrier laden with crates of eggs on a road dotted with potholes.
 
While writing date, amount etc it takes a huge effort to make myself sure that it is indeed correct. Sometimes the mind goes blank and even commonplace spellings seem elusive – how the heck do we spell 12?
 
In my case the main reasons for return of cheques include wrong date (a couple of times ended up writing the succeeding year, instead of the current one!) and then the amount in figures and words were not tallying.  Thankfully the banks never had any issues with my signature, though I have personally felt that they were at times a bit off-track. For many of my friends the signature is the biggest bugbear.
 
After gingerly going through all the check-list regarding the cheque, I still have a few butterflies in my stomach while inserting them in drop boxes. Even after that I keep pondering whether I missed out on something.
 
Counting cash
Sigh! This is something I could never make myself comfortable with, let alone master, and found myself at sixes and sevens.

In the pre-cash counting machine days I used to marvel at the way the nimble fingers of cashiers used to count cash. While performing the task they may even exchange pleasantries with their colleague in the next counter or interact with the peon, but no question of getting distracted.
 
Within seconds they used to perform their task and hand over the money to me to ‘re-check’. My goofy fingers perform the same task at more than double the time and with an error margin of 1-5 currency note denominations. And no points for guessing my conclusion – the cashiers are always right. In fact, it used to give me a big thrill when during one of those rare moments my tally used to match with that of the cashier.
 
Now of course their position has been taken over by cash counting machines, but the verdict remains the same.

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