Rock’n’Roll Everyone!!

I’m about to spill a deep family secret. But only if you promise not to tell anyone. Promise? Sure? Here goes…

My wife and I went for a qinqi ride this morning. It’s pronounced chingchee, not kinky so get that thought out of your minds!!

Thousands of these run around Lahore…they have great air conditioning Photo: Stephen Phillips

Why keep a qinqi (I know it looks strange, but it’s Chinese and it really is pronounced chingchee, I promise!) ride secret? It’s class consciousness, if you ride a qinqi you only do it because you can’t afford anything better, like an auto rickshaw (called took-took elsewhere in the world), motorbike or a car. This being Pakistan, status is VERY important and ‘what will the neighbours think?’ is something that keeps people awake at night.

The ride; yes, the ride. First off, you’re thinking, “what is a qinqi?”. To cut a long story short, it’s a motorbike rickshaw. A motorbike with a lightly built box on wheels at the back instead of a rear wheel. It can carry…livestock, people, large milk churns, chairs, pipes…you name it, it can go by qinqi. Maybe not a herd of elephants. Possibly one or two but not a herd.

Yes, the ride.

The Man and his Qinqi…they help people make a living and others to get around. In Lahore’s breath stifling traffic, the riders have lungs of steel Photo: Stephen Phillips

We sat in the back, which faces the road. It’s only then you realize how small these things are. Sometimes you see three or four people jammed in the back and another three or four jammed in the front. My wife could sit comfortably with about an inch of head room, but I had to be jammed in because the qinqi wallah was unwilling to peal off the roof. I had to tilt my head to one side for the whole journey, it had to be jammed back into place with a hammer.

You feel really exposed because everyone but everyone looks at you. When I’m driving a car, I do it myself, to see who’s there and who’s using it so I can’t complain. So my wife said, ‘be formal, because everyone looks!’.

We eventually got going. Wow! Being open to the road and riding in something that shakes you up even on a nice road can be really fun. The air conditioning is the best yet, and you get a totally immersive experience. Or put another way, you’re utterly open to the elements. If it’s windy and raining, you get soaked like a ship in a heavy swell.

Even on a nice road, my brain felt rattled. Someone once described riding on a qinqi as like being in a liquidizer. Now I know why. The regular auto rickshaws have a modicum of suspension. Not much, but it is there. Even so, going over bumps, unmade roads and dirt tracks stops being fun when your head falls off and rolls around on the floor. The qinqi is happily suspension free so each rise and fall in the fabric of the road, each little piece of tarmac, the vibrations of the engine and the motion of the vehicle goes right through you. It’s bearable on the nicer road we rode over, but on a bumpy, cratered, pounded road it must be hell. Sit on a washing machine in the spin cycle and you’ll get an idea of what I mean.

And have I mentioned the air conditioning? My, it is truly, powerfully impressive. When the box is in motion, you get a thirty mile per hour wind through your hair regardless of the weather conditions. OK, it only works when you’re in motion and sitting in the frequently pointless, interminable traffic jams is not for the faint hearted. But compare that to a car, where the aircon pumps out warm air after 25 minutes of motionless idling.

They’re not boring…every inch of this is decorated in some way Photo: Stephen Phillips

When you ride in a qinqi, you are often riding in a mini artwork. There’s a tradition here of painting trucks and old busses in bright, occasionally gaudy colours with birds, palms, eyes, fish, mountains, falcons and lions & tigers painted on every available surface.

You don’t really see it on auto rickshaws but you do on qinqis…and mine was no exception. See the photos with this post. It was black and painted with spots of red, yellow, blue in wonderfully abstract patterns all over the vehicle.

Colourful…Qinqis are sometimes covered in meticulous paintings Photo: Stephen Phillips

You could put this in a gallery in the West and it would get rave reviews in the media for being so, well ‘ethnic, real, authentic and colourful’.

When we returned to our car, we both said aloud “aaaahhhhhh, proper suspension!” but we didn’t mention the aircon.

Did I tell you about the aircon? Oh and remember, don’t tell anyone that I told you.

A Hole Where the Heart Should Be

An elderly family member, the Patient, has a heart problem; in fact he’s getting over a bypass. An infection has proven pretty stubborn and needed minor surgery to deal with it. Naturally my wife and I took him to Lahore’s premier heart hospital, the Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC for short).

It’s a medium sized, somewhat rambling venue that requires a good map and a GPS system to find your way around. It could have been built fifty years ago, given the architectural style. Even if it was built in the eighties, the scruffy, dim, oppressive nature of the place doesn’t exude modernity.

It’s remarkably impersonal, like a truck driving thru the rain, where people are thrown off the wheels and body of the hospital like rain water. There’s nothing welcoming or even human about it.

I don’t expect hotels and comfortable lounges, just a bit of humanity.

For Americans, Australians, Germans, pretty much anyone visiting the UK one of the big complaints is that the British don’t do customer service. With us, you get what you’re given or go without.

If I thought Britain was bad at public service, then Pakistan is positively medieval. Most people assume the organization they work for exists in a vacuum and the service users are a nuisance that get in the way of the real work; drawing the salary, looking busy and generating tons of pointless paperwork.

You see this in the Punjab Institute of Cardiology. Caring, it isn’t. If you’re there to see a patient or have an appointment with a medic, forget an organized, coherent response. The quality of information depends on who you ask. If you have an appointment you’ll be played like a human pinball sent from this desk to that office to another ward up and down stairs and don’t think about using the lift.

The security guards often talk to people as if they are in a Prisoner of War camp. Entering the surgery ward, prior to the Patient’s appointment, the guard on the door held us back saying ‘only one of you can go through, he (the Patient) can go but you can’t’. As if a heart patient can deal with everything himself.

Later, a second guard sees us in a doctor’s waiting room and pulls my wife and I out of the room to talk to someone senior. ‘You can’t wait here, (he says to the Patient)’. Pointing to me and my wife ‘you have to wait elsewhere’. In Britain we’d call him a little Hitler.

A surgeon carries a little girl to an operating theatre with an attendant in tow. They’re followed by the child’s mother, who is stopped from going anywhere near theatre. She’s clearly worried, heart broken in fact. But she has to wait alone in a corridor.

I first saw the Chief Surgeon in action two days ago. He loudly berated the Patient in angry terms for daring to appear without an appointment and in front of other people; an insult in this culture. He seems to have anger issues, sometimes resembling a medical Incredible Hulk, other times being fairly calm and restrained.

Another thing about organizational culture in Pakistan is that everyone wants to be a boss. Car park attendants will direct you to park in this spot, not that one for no obvious reason. When you switch off the engine they’ll tell you to move forward…when you’ve moved four millimeters they’ll tell you to stop. The key issue here is control. An awful lot of people have no control over their everyday lives so they exercise it in the tiniest of ways where they can.

The Chief Surgeon gave the Patient an appointment for midday telling us to be on time. After waiting in three separate waiting areas for 90 minutes, the Patient had his procedure. It took only ten minutes.

I have in the past sat in a waiting area for four hours for an orthopeadic check up. Whilst it wasn’t fun, at least I knew I was in the right place at the right time and would see the right man. At the Punjab Institute of Cardiology there is no such guarantee. We had no information to say where we had to wait, where we should go or where the procedure would take place.

Perhaps one day in the PIC, an old man will be found who had waited 40 years to be seen, but couldn’t get anyone to tell him where he should go or who he should see. He would be forgotten about and turn up to everyone’s surprise having been living off dead rats and begging from visitors.

Not everyone can be used to paint this picture. There are people who will help you, at the right price. There are even some who will help you for the sake of being good at their jobs or because they really do care, but not many.

This experience is not unique and is not limited to hospitals, Organisations here are generally unresponsive and behave like a blinded rhino waiting in the queue for Disney Land. It illustrates a rather sad fact about Pakistan and it’s attitude toward people. It’s a frequently feudal minded abuse culture where human beings are at the bottom of everyone’s priority list.

Vlad the Impaler does for Ukraine

Russia’s attempted take over of part of Ukraine is remarkably subtle, for an invasion. Time was an army of 100,000 would have done the trick, marching in with tanks and artillery in tow. Now the international situation is far more precarious in the sense that there is 24 hour rolling news, the internet, UN and public opinion to cosy up to. Even dictators don’t want to look like the bad guys.

The beauty of this strategy is that it doesn’t give NATO the excuse to send in the troops in defence of their own interests. Russia gets to have its cake and eat it too.

Indeed that’s what’s so remarkable here, nobody’s interests are served by a weak, chaotic Ukraine, except perhaps Russia’s. But the stealthy nature of this invasion, taking advantage of the power vacuum left in the immediate aftermath of the Yanukovich overthrow has kept Ukraine, Europe and the US off balance and made it harder for the new government in Kiev to consolidate power when part of the country is slipping into Russia.

For a perspective here, Russia is doing what Pakistan has done in Kashmir and Afghanistan for at least the last 30 years. The fact that Pakistan has been ruined by this kind of operation tells you how stealthy and (for the moment) successful Russia’s move is.

Let’s be clear here. This has nothing to do with nationalism. It has nothing to do with defending ethnic Russians from Ukrainian oppression. In fact it probably ensures Ukraine and other ex-Russian colonies in the region will be very wary of the Bear’s motives and intent. If ethnic Russians had it tough before this adventure, they will have it harder from here on.

Why would Russia do this? From what I’ve been reading, it seems this operation was planned some time ago. It’s highly likely that Russia would have a contingency plan should chaos threaten any of it’s former European colonies. No problem with that, it’s what powers do.

A very interesting article in The Independent by Martin Nunn and Martin Foley highlights the economic gains Russia gets from holding the Crimea and the east and south of the country. Gazprom could get its hands on exploration rights in the northern Black Sea for oil and gas. Rerouting any Caspian gas and oil pipelines through Crimea to avoid Russia suddenly becomes a non starter. On top of that, the area is rich in farming, minerals, coal and steel, nuclear power and even solar power.

In taking annexing the Crimea, Putin has given Russia the kind of Black Sea dominance it used to enjoy in the Soviet era, when that sea was all but a Communist lake. Whilst it no longer is that, Russia now has control over the most dominant feature along that coast. Almost akin to the position of the US in the Carribean sea, when it ruled Cuba.

There are two problems on the horizon. Russia’s economy is reliant, not on making things but on digging stuff out of the ground. Other people turn those raw materials into things Russians might want to buy. The money comes in…and flows straight back out again.

For any reader of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson‘s Why Nations Fail, Russia’s economic and political set up will be familiar. They would characterize Russia as an extractive state, where money and power flow upwards effectively stifling any kind of organic political and economic development. The key here is that both go hand in hand; to simplify the argument, it is simply not possible over the long term to create a prosperous economy whilst shutting out the bulk of the population from political power. Growth can be created in an extractive system but it never lasts. Witness Rome, the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia.

The point to be made is that in crushing political rights and siphoning off as much wealth as possible; therefore stifling the widest spread of free thinking and innovation, Russia’s elite are guaranteeing the country’s long term failure.

This action in Ukraine reminds me rather of the ancient and medieval empires that needed a constant flow of booty, tribute and conquest to keep the economy buoyant. When those conquests dried up, so did the economy.

I suspect Putin is taking advantage of the post Iraq world. The US has been clearly weakened by an act designed to demonstrate its power but which only demonstrated the limits of that power. It also damaged the fabric of international law, the idea that you don’t invade other states for the fun of it. After two bruising and ultimately futile wars in Asia, the US is in no mood to take on Russia. Nor, for that matter, is the UK quite apart from London being part owned by Russian oligarchs. It means nobody is willing or able to do anything to oppose Russia’s adventure.

Although Putin likes to pose as a neo-soviet successor to Stalin, in the Russian tradition of so-called strong rulers; with the diversion of so much wealth, the pressing importance of past glories, the importance of the ‘Russian World’, identity politics, crushing gay people and the image of himself as the Strong Man, Vladimir Putin resembles not his old Communist predecessors, but another set of tyrants altogether.

Making money from poverty

I live in Pakistan. Each day I see a lot of poverty, much of it pretty dire. When I first saw it I felt guilty that in my own society we had so much, where this one has so little.

My very first visit here was way back in 2004. On my second or third day I found myself in Karachi for a job interview. At the railway station, the man who would become my brother in law found us a taxi. Inevitably, we had to stop at a traffic lights in the middle of the city.

At this point, we were swamped with beggars, one of whom was bumping the passenger side front window of the car. His arms were unnaturally short and the nail on his right thumb seemed amazingly over sized. Then I realized it wasn’t his thumbnail; it was the bone showing through his skin. Both his arms had been amputated.

This was the first time I had seen such a thing and it left me in tears.

Now, after living here for five or so years, I am hardened to it. There’s something else that I didn’t realize ten years ago that I know now. Begging here is a racket.

It’s easy to think such a statement is hard hearted or callous and it feels callous when you ignore a polio victim waving his shriveled left leg at you. However, I was told this by my family and by other Lahoris. Pakistanis are amongst the most generous people on the planet; so I don’t believe they would say such a thing unless it had a kernel of truth.

I’ve seen groups of beggars gathered on the grass verge beside a traffic lights counting their money with their handler. You know something is going on when you see what looks like a rag tag group of desperately poor people handing over wads of cash to such a well dressed man.

For that matter, when you see 2 fashionably dressed men dropping off an unkempt, filthy old man beside a traffic lights from a nice Honda Civic; you know they’re not doing this from the goodness of their hearts. It isn’t that kind of country.

A regular at a crossroads (or chowk in Urdu) near where I live is an old woman who looks like she must be in her seventies. She walks with stoop. Her age battered face might have been stiffened on one side by a stroke at some point. She’s a regular fixture on the chowk.
One afternoon my wife and I were passing our bank. We saw this old lady marching along the service lane and climbing the steps into the bank. Into the bank!? What would a beggar want a bank for?

Perhaps it had something to do with the mound of notes and coins I’d seen her changing with a security guard at a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) station some months earlier.

And then there are the children, sometimes pushed into it by family members. You see groups of them roaming the streets with their hands out or asking for money to buy food.

Asking for money to buy food?…”why not buy them something?”, I hear you ask. Here’s the catch. They don’t want food. I’ve seen with my own eyes how their expressions change and they lose interest when you give them food; and I’m not the only one.

My wife, work colleagues and pretty much anyone I know will tell you of a beggar rejecting food because they want the money; or where they’ve taken the food back to the shop to return it for a refund.

This isn’t to say all beggars are fleecing the public. Quite plainly, many are. On the other hand we’ve fed others because they seem to be at the end of their tether. Sometimes it’s the story they tell you, more often it’s the look in their eye or the fact they are individuals who turn to you in the street. Professionals are brazen about it, amateurs are not.

The pros really are good at it. They know who to approach and who to ignore, going after well dressed people or foreigners, like me. They only tap the windows of big cars and mostly ignore smaller cars although that depends on the traffic in front of them. They’re very good at reading faces and know if you’re going to shell out or not. Some though are tenacious, tapping your window for an age trying to get your attention.

A few techniques to watch out for.

There’s the ‘I’m selling this, but I need roti (a flat, unleavened bread eaten with salaan, a gravy dish with chicken, vegetables or lentils, the main meal of most people)’. When one or two people tell you this, it might be genuine. When dozens and dozens say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, it sounds more like a sales pitch.

There are the signs carried by others, telling of some family disaster. Usually these are carried by people who cannot read and write.

If you’ve seen “Slumdog Millionaire” you’ll be familiar with the disability scam; where children are deliberately maimed to make them more valuable for begging. People are more likely to pay up for a kid without legs than they are for a fit, healthy 12 year old. Not to mention all the polio victims.

And I haven’t mentioned the door-to-door street beggars that ring your bell and bang your front gate after the heat of the day has passed. Or the eunuchs.

Giving money to people apparently in distress is very easy and it can sooth the conscience for a time, but it’s not always for the best. Some could well be loners, many are run by criminal gangs and so only see a tiny proportion of the money given to them. It’s impossible to tell one from the other.

My default is that I never give to beggars when I am alone. Instead I rely on the antennae of my wife, who’s usually very sharp at telling the wheat from the chaff. She is far more skilled than I am, even though I’ve been here for five years.

What Gabriel Garcia Marquez meant to me

OK…my second post. Hmmm…what to write about? Well I can’t go on like this, wondering what to write day after day or you, poor reader, will have died of boredom; me too probably.

I noticed that Gabriel Garcia Marquez died some two days ago aged 87. There are acres of articles being written about his greatness, his achievement in Latin American letters and what he meant to people living across that region.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez…Changed the way I think about the novel

Instead, here’s what he meant to me.

I’ve read The General in his Labyrinth, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the short story collection Leaf Storm.

What comes across in each of these novels is Marquez’s humanity. He never seems to judge his characters, rather he sets out their behaviour and describes it if not impartially then he leaves the reader to make the judgement. He never sneers at his creations nor does he hide from their squalidity. Marquez seems to understand the inconsistent weakness of people as well as their strengths.

I had never lived abroad, but had always had a fascination for the outside world, especially Latin America and Spain. Marquez took me from my home in the UK with its dull familiarity and remarkable lack of excitement and put me into the steaming jungles of Colombia with Simon Bolivar on his last journey; or the rubbish strewn slums of the unnamed city (probably Cartagena) on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

Leaf Storm grabbed my attention because it’s the only thing I’ve read where the opening scene is told and retold from multiple perspectives, the funeral of the town doctor who never really liked the town – who’s people never really liked him. It was so sad.

Marquez also wrote what I think is the greatest first line ever written. I was working in Borders bookstore in Swansea when a customer asked about the Marquez novels we had in stock. So the customer and I went through the dozen or so novels on our shelves…I opened Chronicle of a Death Foretold and read this first paragraph:

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream.”

Wow! “On the day they were going to kill him,” The finality of that statement knocked me over. There’s no doubt about what is to happen, how the book ends and so on because the first line tells you what’s to happen. In a strange kind of way it makes me think of the story of Christ’s Crucifixion – you know there is no escape, in fact escape is not the intention. It’s like a machine that does what it does from the moment it leaps into life.

But that line never lets you forget that the victim is a living breathing human being who had a life to lead. He’s not just the bull at the corrida, he has options and dreams and they will be snuffed out on this particular day.

All put into the first line of that first paragraph. I was hooked in that moment. I bought the book that day and finished it a week later, savouring each word and each line.

Marquez was the first novelist I took seriously, who’s books I looked out for and absorbed in the way one breathes in the scent of jasmine in the evening. Since that time I have found several other authors who grabbed my attention in different but equally addictive ways.

Writing this has made me realize how much I miss Gabriel Garcia Marquez and how much I need to pick up another novel and read it. Even so, I’m still grateful I found him long before he died.

My very first post…

I’m brand new to blogging. So what do I write about? Hmmm…errr…yes…good question.

When I was a kid (this will tell you how old I am) an American comic called Kelly Monteith had a show on the BBC. I wasn’t allowed to stay up to see this very often (my folks were rather strict with my bedtimes) but I did see some of it. KM was an ‘observational comic’. The set up was that he was at home musing about life, the universe and everything whilst trying to write.

He was faced with the tyranny of the blank page. It sat, untouched in his typewriter (clue, this was the early 80s). He sat in front of it wondering what to do next…cut to Kelly as an Egyptian pharaoh behind his typewriter with the blank page. “What do I write? How can I start?…I know what would look good over there…a pyramid!”

Anything to distract himself from the looming threat of the blank page.

So what is this about? Hmmm….no idea. Here’s what, I will write about life here in Pakistan; what it’s like to be a migrant in a radically different culture; some of my observations of life here; the politics and everyday culture perhaps.

I’m passionate about politics and international relations so I’ll write something about that; I’m a lover of art and culture, so I’ll write about that too.

In short I’ll write about anything that comes to mind. My interests are very wide ranging – from the obsessively irrelevant to the profoundly important. Sometimes I can be An Intellectual, sometimes I can be pretty bloody thick. It’s all grist for the mill.

I’ll try and keep my stuff short and to the point, though I have a habit of rambling. And interesting. Yes…interesting too.

There you go, this is my very first blog post on the web. Ho, hum…is that it? Sort of anti-climactic now. Let’s see what happens.