If Indians can reel in big fish by doing everything from reading the X-rays done by big American hospitals to accounting firms now using Indian accountants for taxes, what’s wrong with Pakistan getting a piece of the pie?
Let’s clone Tom Friedman and beget a mouthpiece. Pakistan needs one badly. The New York Times foreign affairs’ czar is truly bowled over by Bangalore, devoting five, yes five, mushy columns on what a whale of a job the Indians are doing as suppliers for American outsourcing. The undisguised Indophile has fire in his belly when he holds forth on prime TV, flashing his bumper stickers: “Bangalore is one hot town producing a lot of energy and it’s going to be a real challenge to American workers.”
Few Pakistanis will ever catch on to the mischief being spread by the NYT. While it sends a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Friedman to India to film a flattering documentary on Bangalore for its TV channel, it sends — now hear this — a fledgling Sharmeen Obaid, the Pakistani graduate student at Stanford — to rake up all things noxious that the 26-year-old can rustle on Pakistan for the same TV channel.
Devilish? er ... maybe not, but definitely troubling.
The story is not done. NYT-christened Ms Obaid, whose documentary, Reinventing the Taliban got aired last month, is noodling around for more negativity, presenting herself to American media, naive enough to elect her half-baked, recycled pedestrian footage for their own TV channels. The respected Channel 13 was gulled into airing Pakistan on a razor’s edge last week, where the starlet discovers that Dr A.Q. Khan can speak English on TV! Wow, what a piece of alley-cat journalism!
Loonier still is her repeatedly calling him “Kahn” — the way Indians do — with schmaltzy music in the background as her prop.
In stark contrast is Friedman: who raves and writes about Indian computer programmers. “Zippies” he calls them. “You can work all day in America, then outsource all the stuff you need done overnight to India. They (zippies) work all day in India, and send it back the next day,” he swoons.
Remember Y2K that bugged the hell out of Americans? Running scared they were. Wrinkling out their fears, the Indian computer engineers preempted everyone else by securing an antidote and putting it in place with their software. A few years into the new millennium, now they have come back to their old clients — the American corporate giants — with folded hands offering: “We want to do your taxes.”
Americans disdain doing business with foreigners who don’t speak like them. So to overcome this ‘speaking disorder’ for the thousands of Indians, accent neutralization classes are going like hot chapattis. The zippies at the call centres, whether selling credit cards or tracing lost luggage on Delta Airlines or providing tech support for IBM to Microsoft, are learning to ape the American accent!
So now when you pick up the phone and dial that tech number, a young Indian will answer like an American because the agent has learnt to roll his R’s and to soften his T’s.
Why, oh why can’t we pull an American or two to our side of the border? For assist, Tom Friedman prototype is needed to plug for Pakistan just as Friedman shamelessly is sale-pitching for India — more aggressively than the Indian Chamber of Commerce itself. What’s the moolah for his media blitz, one wonders.
“Jeez, the Indians, they’re doing well at this. And what are we? We’re just like them, too.” And who is “We”? Us Pakistanis, who else? Friedman condescends to comment, only to disparage us. Like Obaid, Friedman’s ideological agenda is NYT generic. It has an anti-Pakistan patent! “They — zippies at call centres in India — talk to the world, while in Pakistan, the madressah populace talks to God!” is his vacuous comment.
Xenophobic, we tend to be as a nation. Surely, Musharraf’s men in America living at our expense can duplicate Friedman and pack the hired gun on a schmoozefest to Pakistan for a media carpet-bombing on return. Surely, it’s doable, only if we care to try.
While our zippies are zipping around North America earning truckloads of dollars as talented physicians, they are living lives still trapped in the vortex of 9/11. Could someone please explain to these people with close-fisted brains to jettison the past and get cracking with the new century.
APPNA (Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America) assembled recently in a nice Manhattan hotel to discuss ‘Freedom, Liberty, Justice and Preservation of Civil Rights’ for their Spring session.
Give me a break!
These fine souls are slouches when it comes to thinking outside the box and seeing Pakistan in a new tech light. Instead of inviting bloated mouths to heap their mixty-masty trash on the audience — caged and angry — it would have been more rewarding instead for these zealots to brainstorm, say, on how to seduce the Yanks to drop their blinkers and cast a look at Pakistan for outsourcing jobs?
If Indians can reel in big fish by doing everything from reading the X-rays done by big American hospitals to accounting firms now using Indian accountants for taxes, to cartoons and game companies that now have Indian artists drawing for American games and cartoons — hey what’s wrong with Pakistan getting a piece of the pie?
But these gentlemen doctors and lady doctors — bless their petty hearts — preferred holding corner meeting during tea breaks to spike their colleagues instead. Politics was rife. APPNA has been around for 25 years — when will it become Pakistan’s flagship and get its physicians to put their money where their mouth is.
And that includes APPNA’s founder member, Dr Nasim Ashraf, too! By pushing the right buttons, the upwardly mobile kidney doctor moved back to Pakistan to found yet another (he must have a way with it!) organization, the Human Development Foundation, by convincing President Musharraf and friend Shaukat Aziz that he was the right man for the job.
It’s audit time. Dr Ashraf must open up his closed-door foundation and allowed to be X-rayed for his performance, examined and rated. Doctrinaire beliefs aside, what has the good doctor gotten on the ground is our primary sphere of interest.
He manoeuvred the job because he claimed to have contacts in high places when he lived and worked in the US. The moment of reckoning is here — go get those contacts, Doc!
Pakistan needs new ideas. It’s the 21st century folks — if two young Stanford doctoral dropouts in six short years can turn a simple idea into a billion-dollar verb to ‘Google’ the Internet by creating a search engine comprising 6 billion Web pages, why can’t we, the Pakistanis living in America, some outstandingly brilliant individuals, also hit the money trail, not for ourselves but for the greater good of our countrymen?
If billionaire Azim Premji, the Bill Gates of India and a Muslim (as Friedman never tires of pointing out) can transform his family-owned vegetable ghee business into Wipro, one of the biggest outsourcing firms in the world, why can’t our physicians here and more importantly Dr Ashraf in Pakistan, change the destiny of our talented youth through networking? For starters, go get the American hospitals to let our radiologists read their X-rays as India is doing.
While Pakistan may have lost the war to Wipro, we can still dare to dream of whipping up Wipro and an Azim Premji of Pakistan who can yet attract corporate America in offshoring its legal work to Pakistani lawyers at a fraction of what attorneys charge here in America — $600 an hour!
Pakistani legal eagles — it’s time to soar ... the sky is the limit, as Wayne Dyer puts it.
Spring is here and it’s time to clean out our closet, folks. Let’s dare to dream.
If Indians can reel in big fish by doing everything from reading the X-rays done by big American hospitals to accounting firms now using Indian accountants for taxes, what’s wrong with Pakistan getting a piece of the pie? 
