NON-FICTION: Writing as Catharsis

The famous Victorian biographer Lytton Strachey held that “it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.” Pakistani autobiographers would have us believe that they not only led good lives, but have written ones that were as good. Using a pen from which flows smoothly the ink of self-esteem, they tend to ignore Strachey’s subsequent advice: “It is not [the biographer’s] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them [...] dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.” This might also explain why so many persons of note choose to self-publish their autobiographies.

Three autobiographies would belong to this self-descriptive genre. The heftiest of them is Learning From Others by Syed Babar Ali. As unctuous comperes say when introducing celebrities, Babar Ali needs no introduction. For most of the past 90 years of his life he has served his family, his businesses, his commercial associates, international bodies (such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the World Wide Fund for Nature), and his own country with unique distinction. There is no country in the world that he has not been to — and that, too, on a Pakistani passport. Such is his stature across the globe that denying him a visa would be a slur on that inconsiderate country, not on him. It would be like spitting at the moon.

Babar Ali’s family came from humble beginnings. His father Syed Maratib Ali and uncle Syed Ahsan Ali built up a business contracting for the British army, supplying stores and victualling Italian prisoners of war held in India. The Independence of Pakistan in 1947 saw the family business of Syed Ahsan and Maratib Wazir Ali expand beyond the dreams of its founders, but it was due to the sagacity and self-discipline of Maratib Ali that their Croesean wealth was productively re-employed in industrial assets that generated yet more wealth. Overflows were invested in landed property, alliances with landed families secured by strategic marriages. Four of his five daughters married Punjabi landlords and the fifth married her cousin, Ahsan Ali’s only son.

Memoirs that deserve to be shared with more people

Had Babar Ali (Maratib Ali’s youngest son) made the wrong business decisions all his life, he would still have had some change left over from his inheritance. He recovered from early mistakes to establish such commercial showpieces as Packages Ltd, Nestle MilkPak, and Tetra-Pak. His management philosophy was simple: establish joint ventures with foreign business houses that are leaders in their field and then leave the management to them — whatever the cost. He used them as training grounds for generations of Pakistani professionals, but he preferred to see their feathers trimmed regularly.

Between 1974 and 1977, Babar Ali agreed to serve as the chairman of the National Fertiliser Corporation (NFC) of Pakistan, establishing during that three-year tenure three fertiliser complexes at Multan, Mirpur Mathelo and Haripur. In the NFC, he ostentatiously used an orange Volkswagen as his official car, challenging his subordinates to ask for a bigger car. He could afford to do so: he had a personal BMW at home.

The years as a servant of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government taught him how to handle serpentine coils in the snakepit known as Islamabad. That explains why he accepted with reluctance the finance minister-ship under Moeen Qureshi’s interim government in 1993, and later in 1997 refused a post in the National Security Council hastily formed and equally hastily disbanded by Gen Pervez Musharraf.

Had Babar Ali done nothing else in his life than create the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums), he would have been applauded as having led a fulfilled one. However, his devotion to every humanitarian cause — whether education, health, the preservation of wildlife, the dissemination of poetry and literature, the neglected art of calligraphy, and a host of other dimensions that constitute civilisation — occupied 24 hours of every day of his, and yet he had time to spare for family, friends, and innumerable benefactions.

Inevitably, when reviewing his own life, Babar Ali has been selective in his memories, sparing the rod rather than spoil the blushes of his friends and enemies. To those who know him in the round, his moon undoubtedly has a darker side, but let that discovery be revealed by a future biographer. Until then, his autobiography is in the way of teacher’s notes to lessons he learned from his mentors, aimed at a readership which could never afford such an expensive education.

His legal advisor — and in many ways, disciple — was Dr Parvez Hassan. With a Masters of Law from Yale University and a Doctorate in law from Harvard University, his qualifications attracted those clients who sought both the yin and yang of legal expertise. Dr Hassan’s memoirs, Stories of Gratitude, are in fact a compilation of various speeches he made to mark his various endowments — the Dr Parvez Hassan Environment Law Centre at his alma mater, the University of the Punjab, the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law at Lums, and the Razia Hassan School of Architecture at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. The latter two are in honour of his parents, whose influence on Dr Hassan radiates through every mention of their names.

Interestingly, the mentorship provided by the Swedish billionaire entrepreneur Ruben Rausing to Babar Ali was mirrored in Dr Hassan’s time at Yale by Professor Dr Myres McDougal. Their mentors were generous with their time, and their illustrious students have reciprocated with fulsome praise.

By comparison, Omar Khan’s memoirs Sawdust Castles are Proustian. His stream-of-consciousness recollections flow over 325 pages, and by their end he has still only reached the age of 25. At this rate he has at least two more volumes in him. If they are as soul-searching and searing as this one, they will be an invaluable chronicle of the admixture of the people who made sacrifices for Pakistan. He excels in a ruthless description of his years as a mini-aristocrat Muhajir from Bareilly, transplanted into the claustrophobic Punjabiat of Gowalmandi (Lahore).

The rebellious child of emotionally refrigerated parents who knew how to strike but not hug, Khan emerges into adulthood an irascible, but not irresponsible, person, seemingly unscathed and surprisingly charitable. Khan may nurse no grudges, but he does harbour a novelist within him. His eye for telling detail, the deft delineation of characters, and masterly command of his material make one regret that there is not a national awareness for his talents as a writer. The chapter he has written on his cousin Yasoob, for example, is extraordinarily moving — a modern Greek tragedy with the inevitably bitter, predictable ending. Yasoob died a paranoid failure, but he lives again as the hero in Khan’s book.

None of these three volumes of autobiography will rival Harry Potter as bestsellers. They are cathartic, written for personal gratification. If they have a defect, it is a shared one: these books are intended for a restricted circulation, among a horizontal class of friends and contacts. A younger vertical generation of Pakistanis who could benefit from the wisdom and experience of such notable Pakistanis as Babar Ali and Dr Hassan will be denied the moments of epiphany these two received from their own mentors. These three autobiographies remind us acutely that Pakistan sorely needs a public pantheon, not just private shrines.

The reviewer is an art historian