Sartorial elegance and the rage over nuts

In Pakistan, rich & powerful get away with almost anything and the worst cases inevitably occur during democratic rule

Last week there were a couple of delightful stories that came down the pike. One was about Narendra Modi’s controversial jacket which was ultimately put up for auction. And the other was the Korean ‘nut rage’ case which landed the offender Heather Choo, daughter of the owner of the airline in which she travelled, in a one-year jail sentence. It was a simple case of the biter bit and I feel the woman deserved the punishment she received.

In the episode involving the Indian prime minister I feel the comment of the member of the Indian opposition about Modi reaching unparalleled levels of megalomania and narcissism was a little excessive. I feel it was just a case of bad taste, especially in a country known for its austerity, at least at the official level. Perhaps, Modi had been bitten by the Nehru bug and was trying to set a trend. President Barack Obama did praise the Indian prime minister’s sartorial elegance when he saw the frightfully expensive pinstriped monogrammed suit; but my friend in Yonkers NY insists the remark was tongue-in-cheek. And then there was this newspaper wag in India who suggested that when Modi’s tailor decided to stitch the prime minister’s full name on the fabric, it was to enable President Obama to identify Modi from among his colleagues!

The nut rage case did remind me of the time when Senator Rehman Malik and the PPP MPA Ramesh Kumar delayed the departure of flight PK 370. As a consequence, one of the protestors, Arjumand Hussain, who worked for Gerry’s Travels, was subsequently dismissed from service. The dismissal, according to what I read in the papers, was conducted ‘on merit’. This was the very first time in Pakistan that I had come across a case where an employee of an organisation was turfed out of his job on the basis of merit. Normally, the phrase is reserved for a promotion or when a junior supersedes somebody who is senior to him in service. Arjumand Hussain took his dismissal lying down, and the inference is that either a threat or an exceptionally large dose of obsequiousness was involved. A friend of mine commented that one has got to hand it to Rehman Malik, because whenever there was any trouble in the country, he was invariably in the midst of the confusion. All I can say is that he and Ramesh Kumar are jolly lucky they pulled rank in Pakistan. If they had tried their stunt in South Korea and a dismissed employee had gone to court, they would have undoubtedly been offered free board and lodging at the Yeongdeungpo Jail in Seoul for at least a year.



In Pakistan, the rich and powerful get away with almost anything and the worst cases of intimidation, bullying and misbehaviour inevitably occur during democratic rule. A few years ago, when I was trying to cash a cheque in a bank off Zamzama Boulevard, I couldn’t get through as the narrow one-way lane was blocked by a small convoy consisting of four large four-wheelers. Three of these battle cruisers had opaque, tinted window panes. And the fourth carried a clutch of scruffy looking bodyguards who looked as if they had just been let out of the zoo. All carried menacing weapons which were aimed at the windscreen of my car. I couldn’t retreat as there were three cars blocking the passage. So I opened the windows, had forty winks, wondering all the time what the oracle would have said about the pen being mightier than the sword had he lived in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 22^nd, 2015.

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