If Pakistan can’t even figure out the livery of its national carrier, what is one to make of the prevalent confusion permeating the political, social, economic strata of society?
Small measures can move mountains. Go tell this to our leaders and they think you’re from Venus! All one is saying is that Pakistan International Airlines flight from New York to Islamabad badly requires the services of a janitor on board! Is that asking for the moon?
Seriously ... the lavatories leave a lot to be desired.
Moms with toddlers have no place to change their babies. PIA biggies, perhaps, don’t know what a changing table is or they have never had to change diapers, considering it unmanly. Whatever, some careless mothers decided to dump their kids soiled pampers into the toilet, choking the flush system and rendering it unusable for the rest of the unfortunate fliers jam-packed sardine-style in the Economy Class, wanting to relieve themselves!
And on the return flight, the taps suddenly went dry. A plumber, that’s PIA’s need of the air, not a $-guzzling Sabre Airline Solutions firm to advise PIA in customer services.
Despite booking almost three months in advance, my gut feeling left me faithless while queuing at JFK almost four hours before the flight. We were allotted dummy seats by our travel agent — a mere fiction of his mind, I obsessed. The premonition came true. As we sat down in our assigned seats to buckle up, sure enough we were told to move.
PIA is the pits when it comes to overbooking a flight!
Yesterday, PIA’s first Boeing 777 purchased out of Seattle would have landed at Chaklala with 200 passengers — how many flying free as guests of State? Don’t we all know? Freeloaders are never in short supply. And to receive the aircraft personally, we’re informed, will be Gen Musharraf.
What’s our President’s take on the livery of the new planes (eight of them), selected by Ahmed Saeed himself? He may have been smart selecting shoe designs as the owner/operator of a brand of shoes, but the managing director has already changed his mind on the livery (read the following sharp reaction over the Internet) and ordered Boeing to replace “Pakistan” with an “even cheaper looking waving flag” on the tail and on the fuselage.
Who will foot the cost of the change? Pakistan, of course, who else?
“Horrible. It’s so plain ... I thought they would get a green belly and at least a green tail, but what did they take? White, white, white, what a waste ... If this is PIA’s smart idea of saving painting costs by having a plain white aircraft, then I’m sorry because this is the limit of nonsense! That green was the symbol of PIA to the world ... lack of imagination, if you ask me ... looks like a cargo plane or something ... boring ... all white fuselage! Has anyone come up with that idea before? I’m falling asleep just by looking at it.”
If Pakistan can’t even figure out the livery of its national carrier, what is one to make of the prevalent confusion permeating the political, social, economic strata of society?
Enter Omar Noman, the New York-based senior UN official, who cares a whit about political correctness, unlike the rest of his UN tribe lacking candour. Ask the sharp-tongued academic-turned-analyst and there’s no doublespeak from him.
For years now, Noman has been compiling the human development indexes on Pakistan, brandished to the world every summer by his organization, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) — that is Human Development Report, I am talking about.
Having recently returned from a tour of duty at Islamabad, the report card he brings back is truly dispiriting, highly depressive. “Pakistan continues to be gripped by a tantalizing mix of insecurity, humiliation and promise,” says the Pakistani.
Who tried killing Musharraf? The suspects — from Kashmiri militant groups, Al Qaeda, neo-Taliban, to accusations of plots from within security ranks is scary: “These assassination attempts have compounded the insecurity created by the protracted, messy debate on the LFO, leading many to question the viability of the new political structure beyond the incumbent.”
There is little to suggest that Pakistan has evolved into a political system which has been institutionalized. “The emergence of theocratic parties in control over half of the provinces also add to a sense of insecurity about the future.”
And how does this insecurity affect us as Pakistanis? Here’s one small but pointed example: a Pakistan-born American CEO wanted to stop at Islamabad on his way back from the Far East. He wanted to visit his plant and later fly off to Dubai as his security chaps in the US forbade him spending the night in Islamabad. It was too risky for him and his corporate jet, they warned. Needless to say Pakistan was peremptorily bypassed after the latest death attempt on its President.
What’s going wrong? Who is responsible? I ask these questions of Noman after spending a month myself in Pakistan. A change in the wrong direction, is how I feel ... the Pakistan I left behind almost five years ago is cascading downhill ...
“There is a sense of anger and humiliation on the nuclear front. With Pakistan being accused of being involved in North Korea, Iran and Libya, the confidence about safety has eroded. Questioning nuclear scientists has contributed to a sense of humiliation amongst groups who either feel that the scientists are the scapegoats or that Pakistan is losing sovereign control over all key decision-making?”
Losing control elsewhere? Let me count the ways, as I drive around the bumpy roads of Clifton and Bath Island — once the preserve of Karachiites blessed with privilege, and Islamabad’s E-7 Sector (where only fat cats could afford an abode). And guess what I notice? The posh areas — for the lack of any other word — inhabited by the richy rich residents, with their ugly mansions now stand ‘infiltrated’ by hoi polloi — hordes of them, mostly young, aimlessly moving about, some playing cricket, some just loitering and littering.
There are camels in residence along the once-fashionable corniche lined by high-rises, the talk of Karachi. The panorama for which you perhaps paid millions now competes with polluted waves and fecal bacteria from the ship of the desert!
What has all this got to do with poverty and unemployment?
Plenty. While Omar Noman does not doubt progress in implementing development reforms, the Government of Pakistan’s figures confirm a substantial increase in poverty and unemployment over the past decade or so. “There are no indicators to suggest that poverty and unemployment trends have been reversed.”
So, can one blame the teeming thousands — 2nd, 3rd, 4th generations of illiterates — to grab hold of any source of income they can creatively come by and of course bribe the police into being allowed to carry on their petty trades?
If the system has failed the poorest of the poor of Pakistan, they must themselves think of ways of survival.
The spiral effect starts with “employment opportunities for Pakistanis abroad drying up,” says Noman after 9/11, affecting several segments of society — those with manual labour or basic mechanical skills. Doors abroad for them have been shut closed.
“There are significant economic and political implications of the shift in international environment. Labour migration has been an enormous safety valve for Pakistan since the mid-1970s. Now labour is not mobile, while capital can flow across borders more easily. Thus the pressure on domestic job creation, with a high population growth rate, is intense. On the other hand, international capital finds more attractive destinations than Pakistan.”
There is thus a double economic negative — Foreign Direct Investment is not flowing into Pakistan, while labour cannot leave.
Too many people, that’s the first thing to hit me, but the Musharraf government is seized with international fire-fighting, convincing skeptics abroad that all’s well at home. The leadership has no time of the day for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Pakistan wanting to gift us $20 million. A beleaguered Oliver Brasseur opened up his heart to the Islamabad Press corps: “There are enormous difficulties in the way of spending project resources in Pakistan and we are disappointed that we could not disburse the $20 million gift money to Pakistan because of bureaucratic problems.”
We hear you, Monsieur Brasseur. Ordinary Pakistanis want to limit their family size and would never spurn your generous offer, but please go tell the deaf and the blind in Islamabad — too intoxicated with office to notice thousands of unwanted babies born every second.
And here’s a President working overtime to convince the world that Pakistan’s future lies as a liberal, Muslim country. Yet, playing to the theocratic forces, universal education, job generation, women’s rights and population control are squarely not on his radar screen.
The only dream I can pipe up is Pakistan maintaining its number one position as an American ally, always the first to be mentioned by Bush in his State of the Union address since the last three years.
Bush has to get re-elected or the Democrats are going to do us in! Who, then, will rescue Musharraf from his Frankensteins dying to destroy him
If Pakistan can’t even figure out the livery of its national carrier, what is one to make of the prevalent confusion permeating the political, social, economic strata of society? 
