KARACHI: For Nasir Khan (not his real name) a life of crime is easier than staying on the right side of the law.

Thirty-six-year-old Khan has a master’s degree in business, a qualification that has helped him in his current line of trade: the mastermind behind a truck-hijacking business. Khan’s ‘business’ involves organising the ambush of trucks carrying merchandise from cloths and threads, to medicines. His professional attitude belies his true trade.

However, Khan is an exception. According to police sources, most petty criminals are uneducated and are aged between 16 and 25.

While in police custody, Khan described how he came from a respectable middle-class family, and how his father – who had been in the air force – had ensured that all his six children received a good education.

Khan’s illicit trade began in 2001, after it “became increasingly difficult to earn a living through honest means”. He was drawn further and further into crime as “the line between what is right and wrong blurred”.

After completing his education, he applied to join the air force, but was rejected due to poor eyesight. He then started his own business picking up leftover material from a towel factory and selling it.

The crime rate in Karachi has increased rapidly in recent years. Car and cellphone theft are among the most common crimes committed. According to the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), cellphone theft rose 60 percent in 2006, and car thefts rose nearly 18 percent in the same period.

These crimes are committed by young offenders.

“They are usually between 16-21 years of age, from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, usually school drop-outs,” says Sharfuddin Memon, chief of the CPLC.

This rise in crime is being blamed on the increasing gap between rich and poor.

“It is blatantly obvious wherever you turn. Within the confines of your home there is that disparity. What your domestic help earns in a month are your tailor’s charges, or the amount you spend buying toys for children, or on throwing a dinner party. Do you think they cannot see or feel the deprivation?” asked Memon.

“Most young people turn from petty criminals to hardened, more professionally sound ones, once they have spent time in jail and come out. I learnt the tricks of the trade and how to pre-empt police during my prison stints,” revealed Khan, describing prison as a “university of crime”.

The same is echoed by senior police superintendent, Abdul Khaliq Sheikh, in charge of Karachi’s car theft division: “In the case of car theft, most are repeat offenders. They need connections to be able to take the stolen vehicle to another province where it won’t be easy to identify… An individual can’t do it alone. These contacts are usually made during their stay in prison. And once you are a member of a gang, it’s difficult to break away.” Economist Kaiser Bengali attributes the rise in crime to the extreme “wealth gap” found in Pakistan’s larger cities: “When the level of economic activity is insufficient, it can lead to unemployment and naturally inequality.”

This in turn may lead to an acute sense of deprivation, creating resentment and a feeling of hopelessness. Joblessness triggers crime and youth are the most affected.

According to the latest figures from Pakistan’s Ministry of Youth Affairs, 36 percent of the country’s youth (15-29 years) live in urban areas. The literacy rate is just 49 percent.

Police experts say that the combination of poverty and unemployment has allowed gangs and organisations to target young people and steer then towards a life of crime.

Khan added: “They usually have many siblings, are neglected by parents, and have this innate feeling that they have been deprived and wronged by society.”

“In all honesty tell me, can a boy from a peela (government-run) school background ever compete for a job with one who has studied in a private school?” commented Khan.

An observation backed by Bengali: “I agree, there are no chances or opportunities for such a student.” The two-tier education system “has split Pakistan into two -- one for the rich and the other for the poor, and created conflict in society.”

“There are very few who have even passed tenth grade. Most have never tried to find employment. They look for ways to make money fast so they can buy the luxuries they see advertised all over town,” said a police inspector. “They have no right to feel hatred for people who are better off than them when they have not even tried to do an honest day’s work themselves,” he added.

The inspector says he has seen how these youngsters have become so hardened that they think nothing of taking a life. “As many as 50 people in Karachi alone have lost their lives standing up to cellphone thieves over the past two years.”

However, not all underprivileged youth turn to crime. The majority of youngsters with little financial support and few connections suffer setbacks on graduating from university.

Naveed Nazim, 25, holds a Master’s degree in International Relations from Karachi University, and is looking for a position as a researcher. He has sent many application letters but has not managed to secure a position despite being a ‘straight A’ student.

The problem he and many like him face is that they do not seem to have the right contacts. “I don’t want someone to find me a job; I just want them to take a look at my CV, call me for an interview and then decide my fate on merit,” said Nazim.

The same is true for Sarah Khalid, 22, an electronics engineer who has just graduated from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Karachi. “Getting a job purely on merit is a distant dream,” she said. “Those with connections get the job even before our CVs are looked at!”

While he waits for his big break, Nazim is giving private tuitions. “I feel I should contribute to the household expenses so I’ve had to compromise on the choice of my job.”

He added that where you went to school counts as much as having the right contacts: “These labels on your CV count. In such cases we are rejected even before we apply.”

He said that this continual rejection often forces graduates to turn to crime.

Nazim also rued the demise of the university student unions, saying that where students had been channelled into doing productive work for the unions, they were now forced to join organisations with ethical, linguistic and political roots. Students, “get paid for doing party work and influencing other students to join the organisations”, he said.

Khan had a similar experience: “Perhaps my biggest mistake was joining a political party’s student wing while a student.”

LOS ANGELES: As everyone who is not locked in a dungeon knows, the story of Anna Nicole Smith has received overwhelming attention in recent weeks. The mainstream American press, in fact, has taken a good deal of stick from its more highbrow readers for devoting so many inches to the unfolding narrative of this woman, her lovers and her child.

But how could it be otherwise? This story was destined from the outset to take over Page 1 — precisely because it is a classic, a melodrama with exactly the kind of plot that has fascinated people as long as there’s been literature and stories to tell. Following its twists and turns, it’s impossible not to get the blurry feeling that one is reading a good old-fashioned novel.

Does this, for instance, sound familiar? In 1878, Anthony Trollope (that greatest of Victorian storytellers) offered his loyal readers “Is He Popenjoy?” It’s my favourite of the 47 novels he published, and it has an irresistible, hook-in-the-jaw story. A British aristocrat, fabulously wealthy, goes off to Italy and is trapped into marriage by a scheming foreign Delilah. He has a son and heir — thus disowning the thoroughly decent, and somewhat distant, English relative who had expected to inherit. But did the Marquis of Brotherton actually marry his foreign floozy? Is this young son indeed the heir, or is he illegitimate? Can the lawyers save the day? A title, a vast fortune, a great country house hang in the balance.

That fundamental plot — the child without clear parentage who ultimately stands (when his identity is finally revealed) to inherit a vast fortune — was a favourite of the Victorian era. Think of Dickens’ “Great Expectations” or “Oliver Twist.” Earlier this month, on the British reality TV show “Celebrity Big Brother” (which had nine million viewers glued to their sets), one bimbo-ish celebrity inquired of the other what she was looking for in a husband.

“Oil,” replied Bimbo 2, going on to explain, “Old, ill and loaded.”

Old, ill and loaded — that’s the Anna Nicole Smith story. But it also is another favourite plot of the Victorians; 19th century fiction is as rich in “oil” as Kirkuk. In Trollope’s “The Eustace Diamonds,” for instance, Lizzie Greystock’s problems begin when she marries an old, ill and very loaded aristocrat, Sir Florian Eustace. Can Lizzie, after he’s done his marital duty and died on her, hold on to the family diamonds? Or will the Eustace family break the will and disinherit the shameless gold-digger?

You’ll strike oil everywhere in Victorian fiction. Trollope used the plot many times. But there also are big oil stains across the plot surface of William Makepeace Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” (Becky Sharp’s relationship with the Marquess of Steyne) and even in starchy George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” (Gwendolen Harleth’s cynical marriage to Henleigh Grandcourt).

The plots and story lines that fascinated us in the past aren’t likely to diminish in appeal anytime soon. Even on the USS Enterprise, Kirk and Spock are both antiquarian book lovers. You’ll remember (if you don’t, shame on you) that at the beginning of “The Wrath of Khan,” the half-Vulcan gives his commander a copy of Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” (a plot detail that has driven Trekkies to frenzies of exegesis).

In “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” the two of them have travelled back in time and are sitting in a cable car in 1990s San Francisco, embarked on a mission to save the whales (it would take too long to explain why). When Kirk comes out with some street talk — cunningly camouflaging their identities as denizens of the far future — Spock asks where his commander picked up the lingo. “Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins,” Kirk replies. “Ah,” sighs Spock, “the giants.”

I’ve always thought that the American lit-crit professions have criminally underrated the genius of Susann and Robbins (and, while we’re at it, Judith Krantz and the recently deceased “world’s master storyteller,” as his website labels him, Sidney Sheldon). Susann and Robbins, time and again, foretell the trials, tribulation and tragedy of Anna Nicole Smith. What is her life and death other than a sequel to “Valley of the Dolls”?

There is a lot of snobbery about our addictive love of all kinds of stories — whether those stories appear in newspapers or trashy potboilers or even in the great Victorian novels. The fact is, we need them as much as we need oxygenated air. By my estimate, at least three-quarters of network prime-time TV is fictional narrative. Bookstores, walk-in and web-based, sell more fiction than any other kind of book. The vast, vast portion of what is shown in our film theaters and on the cable movie channels is fiction. Stories, that is.

Nonetheless, we persist in being reflexively snooty about storytelling. The best books, according to some critics, are those with the least amount of plot. There are more important issues, we’re told, than Anna Nicole Smith, just as there are better writers than Jaqueline Susann. Why waste the space on Smith, they want to know? Answer: because she satisfies our need for a good story.

Why are we so hung up on stories? Because of the truth their falsehoods tell us. It’s the paradox that Aristotle noted, 2,500 years ago, in the Poetics. A fiction like “Oedipus Rex,” Aristotle asserted, was “truer” than history. Why? Because fiction can deal with the essence of our human condition, unlike history, which is tied to what actually happened.

What truth, then, does the Anna Nicole Smith story tell us? Take your pick:

“What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”

“The American dream is just that; a dream.”

“Love of money is the root of all evil.”

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

And, finally, that truth of truths, given classic expression in Anita Loos’s title for her perennially readable story — “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service