REVIEW OF:
Syed Babar Ali, Learning from Others (Private publication, 2015).
Dr Parvez Hassan, Stories of Gratitude (Pakistan Law House, 2016)
Omar Khan, Sawdust Castles (BBCL Publications, 2016)
The famous Victorian biographer Lytton Strachey held that ‘it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.’ Pakistani auto-biographers 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 explain also 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, Mr Babar Ali needs no introduction. For most of the past ninety years of his life, he has served his family, his businesses, his commercial associates, international bodies (such as IUCN and World Wild Life), 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.
His 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 victualing Italian prisoners of war held in India. The independence of Pakistan in 1947 saw the family business of Syed A & M Wazir Ali expand beyond the dreams of its founders, but it was due to the sagacity and self-discipline of Syed 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.
Had Syed Babar Ali (Syed Maratib Ali’s youngest son) made wrong business decisions all his life, he would still have had some change left over from his inheritance. He recovered from early ones to establish such commercial showpieces as Packages Ltd, Nestle-Milk-Pak, 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, he agreed to serve as the Chairman of the National Fertiliser Corporation of Pakistan, establishing during that three year tenure three fertiliser complexes at Multan, Mirpur Mathelo and at Haripur. In the NFC, he ostentatiously used an orange Volkwagen as his official car, challenging his subordinates to ask for a bigger car. He could afford to: he had a personal BMW at home.
Those years as a servant of Mr Bhutto’s government taught him how to handle serpentine coils in the snake-pit 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 General Pervez Musharraf.
Had Syed Babar Ali done nothing else in his life than create the Lahore University of Management Sciences, he would have been applauded as having led a fulfilled one. However, his devotion to every humanitarian cause - whether education, health, the preservation of wild-life, the dissemination of poetry and literature, the neglected art of calligraphy, and a host of other dimensions that constitute civilisation – occupied twenty-four days of his every day, and yet he has had time to spare for family, friends, and innumerable benefactions.
Inevitably, when reviewing his own life, Syed 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 learnt 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 and a Doctorate in law from Harvard, 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 speeches he made to mark his various endowments – the Dr Parvez Hassan Environment Law Centre at his alma mater Punjab University, 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 Parvez Hassan radiates through every mention of their names.
Interestingly, the mentorship provided by the Swedish billionaire entrepreneur Reuben Rausing to Syed Babar Ali was mirrored in Dr Parvez Hassan’s time at Yale by Professor Dr Mryes 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 twenty-five. 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 as ruthless description of his years as a mini-aristocrat mohajir 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, Mr Khan emerges into adulthood an irascible but not irresponsible person, seemingly unscathed and surprisingly charitable. Mr Khan’s may nurse no grudges, but he does harbour a novelist within him. His eye for the telling detail, the deft delineation of characters, a masterly command of his material make one regret that he does not have a national awareness of his talents as a writer. The chapter for example he has written on his cousin Yasoob is extraordinarily moving, a modern Greek tragedy and with the inevitably bitter, predictable ending. Yasoob died a paranoid failure, but he relives as the hero in Mr Khan’s book.
None of these three volumes of autobiography will rival Harry Potter as best sellers. 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 Syed Babar Ali and Dr Parvez 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.
F.S. AIJAZUDDIN |
