Before I could extol the virtues of a helicopter service, I needed to get on one. I had not flown in a helicopter. Besides, there were many questions that needed answers. Most of all, I wanted to find out how the helicopter would perform in the weather conditions in East Pakistan, particularly in the monsoon when the skies opened up and brought just not rain, but cyclones. It seemed like a good idea to go and see the Sikorsky people in Connecticut.
Bashir Khan (Bash), whose advertising agency, Manhattan, handled our domestic advertising, felt it would be useful if he was to come along. I agreed. The best advertising is done when the client and the agency are on the same wavelength. The agency needs to be as familiar with the product as the client. Bash knew New York well. He had studied there and had imbibed sufficient American culture to call petrol ‘gas’, and a lift, an elevator.
I was always able to find an excuse to visit Rome and I decided to break journey. After Paris, I loved Rome the most, loved its sounds and scents, the anarchy of its traffic jams and watching motorists quarrelling in their road-rage, all hands and arms, as if doing callisthenics. Of course, there was a sublime side to Rome. Not for nothing was it called the “Eternal City.” PlA’s manager was ‘Gulloo’ Kapadia, and I stayed with him. He would not have it otherwise. I had known Gulloo since my pre-Partition Bombay days. He and I had gone to the Ismail Yusuf College, played cricket for the college and the Islam Gymkhana. He was also a badminton champion.
Gulloo had a friend called Nasir, a young Pakistani who was trying to get into Italian films, without any success: but this did not seem to dampen his spirit. He claimed to be a good friend of Gina Lollobrigida and within minutes of meeting him, he told me not to make any appointments for the evening, as he wanted me to meet her. “We’ll have dinner,” he said. It was this kind of adventurous name-dropping that endeared him to me. People who work in films or aspire to do so have the stamina to keep on dreaming and sometimes their dreams do come true, though, not always.
He reminded me a lot of a boyhood friend of mine in Bombay, a Gyan Dutt, who too was screen-struck and his father would routinely throw him out. He would stay with us until his father had recovered his calm and parental responsibility. Gyan never made it in films. He did the next best thing. He married a starlet. But Nasir did know Gina Lollobrigida. Years later, I got a letter from her. She had given up films and become a professional photographer and wanted to visit Pakistan and do a pictorial book. She had given Nasir’s name as a reference. More about this later. Bash and I took a train from the Grand Central Station in New York for the Sikorsky factory in Connecticut. We were met and we spent the day doing the rounds and getting briefings. Late in the afternoon, we were informed that a helicopter had been arranged to take us back to New York.
Although it would be a short ride, the weather conditions were ideal for us to get an idea what it would feel like in East Pakistan, we were told. Although it was not raining, there would be turbulence. “Cheerful,” I told Bash, who felt that a train ride was a better proposition. But helicopter it was.
A helicopter lifts off vertically, but like a camel, rear-first. As promised, it was a bumpy ride and we were tossed about. Bash was seated across from me and I smiled at him and he smiled back, a sort of “it-was-nice-knowing-you smile.” The pilot asked me whether we would like to go sightseeing, see the Statue of Liberty, etc. “Some other time,” I told him. We were safely deposited at the Wall Street helipad. Good old Bash, he was earning his 15 per cent the hard way.
I spent a couple of days in New York with our advertising agency, Fuller Smith & Ross, with George Lyons and Hank Helms and got back to Karachi.
The advertising campaign that we had planned for the helicopter services would be different. Generally, our advertisements, both the concept and the copy, were in English and would then be translated into various languages. This time, I wanted the campaign to be conceived in Bengali. All the thought processes would be in that language. It worked and Manhattan did a fine job.
But in the then East Pakistan, distance was not measured in time saved, the principal virtue of the helicopter services. We needed more than air services to bring the people nearer to each other. To come together, we needed to want to do so. We thought in PIA, that we were doing a great job in bringing the two wings closer together and within East Pakistan, we were opening up the province. But on each trip to East Pakistan, I found the emotional gap widening, the subjective manifestation of belonging to a common group with shared aspirations and ideals getting foggier.
But we were trapped in a colonial mindset. The British, too, had claimed that they had linked Indian cities and towns by providing India with an excellent railways network. Much more than development was needed. In May 1963, Ayub Khan was reported as saying: “You would be surprised how much happiness it (the Rural Works Programme in East Pakistan) has given to the people of East Pakistan and how much they really feel thankful to the Government.... Wherever you go, you get the spontaneous word of thanks from even the ordinary villagers.” This statement or these remarks are a classic or text-book example of over-enthusiastic public relations when it becomes puffery.”How much...happiness it has given...” this was self-deception, believing your own public relations, “really thankful to the Government.” This was inventiveness, the art of the fabulist, a composer of fables, and its sum effect was to put a strain on the credibility of the government’s public relations and more importantly, to mock the common sense of the people of East Pakistan including “the ordinary villagers.”
The advantage that I had was that I had a background of having been a working journalist. I was familiar with press hand-outs and knew their worth. I had attended an IATA Public Relations Conference in Washington DC and I was new to my this profession and did not know any of my counterparts. The editor of a distinguished travel magazine was one of the featured speakers at the conference. He gave a talk on the subject of ‘educating the passenger’. It is universally accepted that education is a self-evident good and his talk was littered with cliches and warmed-over phrases, a mixed grill of trite and tripe. Besides, he kept smiling at his audience as if talking to children.
This was a bit too much for me. I had travelled thousands of miles to attend the conference and I felt that I should make a contribution. I told the speaker that already there was a great deal of anxiety about air travel. But the best passenger was one who knew next to nothing about flying, and I quoted the example of the immigrants that we were carrying to England. On my part, I had been ‘educated’ about flying and knew about metal fatigue, under-carriage trouble, pressurization failures, bird hits, clear air turbulence and flight time limitation of pilots. And it scared the hell out of me. Educating the passenger would be rocking the boat of innocence. The editor of the travel magazine was left speechless.
The problem with a colonial mindset is that it expects gratitude for the benevolence it bestows. The British could never understand why natives were not thankful for the blessings of the Raj. We saw the East Pakistanis in the same light. Many of my East-Pakistani friends would tell me that all the development work that was being carried out was with East Pakistan’s own money and resources. “Why do you subject us to a tirade about Bengali grievances,” they would say. There was no denying that being in East Pakistan, one felt different from being in West Pakistan. Not just physically but emotionally as well. Either one was being patronizing or being too defensive. The point was that, one was not being normal. The East Pakistanis, in turn, attributed all their misfortunes to West Pakistan. Thus, like parallel lines, there was only the illusion that the lines would ultimately meet. Waiting in the wings were those who would exploit these resentments. East Pakistan was beginning to resemble a three-act play and the curtain was beginning to come down on the second act.
