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IN October 1968, Robin Knox-Johnston had almost reached Australia on his solo voyage around the world when his 32-foot boat Suhaili (the smallest vessel to attempt such a daunting trip) was so battered by the inclement gales and savage waves that he thought of giving up. Preparing an escape in his lifeboat, he suddenly recalled the lines of Robert Service’s ballad The Quitter: ‘In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow/It’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.’
For Knox-Johnston, failure was not an option, even after his publishers assured him before he set out that they would be handling his book if he made it, and his log books if he did not.
Navigating single-handed, he steered his boat south along the west coast of Africa, past the Cape of Good Hope, skirted the south coast of Australia, and after a fleeting glimpse of Cape Horn, he sped northwards parallel to South America until he reached the port of Falmouth (UK) and won the Sunday Times’ Golden Globe trophy. He had left the same port 313 days earlier. He returned to it, a year older at 30, having covered over 30,000 nautical miles.
His narrative of that epic journey — A World of My Own (1969) — is a chronicle of his determination, his endurance and his ineffable courage, a quality John Kennedy once defined as “grace under pressure”. When he ran out of books to read (he had taken with him such weighty tomes as Tolstoy’s voluminous novel War and Peace, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Shakespeare’s Complete Works), he exercised his mind by learning poetry which he recited aloud to “a wondering audience of albatross and petrels”.
It is not in the interest of any party to deconstruct the economy.
Alone but not lonely, he had his journal as a companion. Reading his entries from it is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation between him and himself. It occasionally borders on the poetic: “We sailed ten yards ahead of a wall of hail for close to a minute. It was a weird experience. Suhaili was sailing quietly and yet the air was full of the explosive noise of the hailstones hitting the sea all round.”
Knox-Johnston’s solo voyage around the globe contrasted dramatically with another manned journey, this one made at the same time as his, in 1968, when Mission Apollo 8 encircled the moon.
Pakistan’s equivalent of Knox-Johnston’s solitary journey is Imran Khan’s lone-wolf mission to circumnavigate our own, petty, unsettled world of politics. He too has set out on what others would consider a hazardous journey fraught with danger. Like Knox-Johnston, Imran Khan navigates by taking his readings from the stars, and his firmament tells him that he is on the right course. His Falmouth is Islamabad, his prize a gilt-plated trophy inscribed the prime ministership of Pakistan.
Imran Khan’s demands for a citywide strike in the major provincial capitals of Karachi and Lahore and then, if they fail in ousting Nawaz Sharif, a nationwide shutdown are short-term plans rather than long-term, sage strategies. The very fact that his Plan C envisages a fallback to a nationwide strike anticipates the failure of the Lahore and Karachi strikes. Political power is not wrested on presumptive ifs.
One does not need to be a captain of business or industry to predict that bringing the country to a halt even for a day will hamstring our faltering economy. This cannot be wise politics or sensible economics. It cannot be in the interest of any party, especially one like the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf that has not exercised governance at the national level, to deconstruct the economy with an immature hope of reconstructing it.
That was done once before in our history. Between 1972 and 1977, Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto wrought five years of havoc. He emasculated private entrepreneurship, nationalised anything that needed a man or motor to move, pillaged life insurance funds, demoralised the bureaucracy, and spayed the judiciary. Having dismantled the grandfather clock of Pakistan’s machinery of governance, he sought re-election in the 1977 general elections without any plan on how he proposed to reassemble it. Its parts are still scattered about our landscape, rusting from neglect, dulled from misuse, and like the Pakistan Steel Mills unfit for productive service.
Mr Bhutto, at the end of his political career, had the misfortune of being friendless. Those who had befriended him he alienated; those whom he had befriended betrayed him.
Imran Khan, at the beginning of his political career, has the luxury of youth on his side — if not his own, then of a generation of young Pakistanis. He is their Apollo. To the sycophantic television channels and his own mirror, he is Narcissus.
His musical jamborees serve as an effervescent alternative to a Pakistani public tired of a fare of hell served for breakfast and brimstone served as a nightcap.
The writer is an author and art historian.
Published in Dawn December 4th , 2014
