The Gallup Impulse                                                                                                      Back

How do you take your meal? In front of the TV would probably be the answer with most readers. But that does not really answer the question as posed by Gallup. The focus there relates a little to the style of it : Do you take your meals sitting on 'cots' or eating from a 'dinner-sheet' spread on the floor? To phrase it less clinically, is the nashisht 'farshi' or do you use some sort of 'takht'? And let those who like to assert we have lost touch with our own culture be silenced by the bald statistic (courtesy the same survey) that only 13% categorise themselves as eating at the dining-table. The vast majority according to this particular Gallup poll are more or less evenly divided (but thank heavens not polarised) as 39% cot-eating and 34% farshi. The remainder, fourteen percent if I have  sums right, say they take their meal wherever they find place to eat.  

Now -- and here the interpretation must be ascribed to the writer for Gallup simply provides the statistics and the games we play with them are our own - this last rather laconic statement does suggest some kind of social polarisation. Think of  13% seated at their highly-polished or damask-covered tables. Chandeliers undoubtedly gleam overhead despite the deficiencies of the national electricity grid, for these are automated generator-happy environments. If it is a party, guests are heaping praises on the chef; if it is just the family the ulcerated head of it all is complaining about how inedible the food is considering the astronomical salary lavished on the chef. And then there is the polar opposite 14%, eating wherever they find a place (quite likely also whatever, whenever). Fortunately the two extremes are buffered by the vast majority of the representative sampling, munching away at their cots and dinner-sheets.  

But what is it that drives people into opting for the takht or dastarkhwan, what does the choice signify? Individual caprice or socio-cultural index? The percentage of cot-preference is higher among the rural population. What can one infer? That village homes usually have 'kacha' floors and meal-safety demands a certain elevation? Or that the urbanite is so cramped for living-space that the only cot available is the one for sleep and  best left food-free? But the statistics could simply be sought with a view to the market for textile manufactre: sheets sized for cots to sleep on or eat off: Dastarkhwans, bedsheets or tablecloths? Where is the buying power? Respondents with a monthly income above fifteen thousand usually sit on the floor for meals and those with a monthly income below that bracket use the cot. But which market is pushed about that kind of need? There may be a lot of heads but look at the per capita income. Buying power is with that splendid dining-table minority and they shop imported. So give a sigh for local manufacturing and give foreign investment a new meaning.

(497 words)

Focus on hocus-pocus                                                                                                    Back

If wishes were horses beggars would ride. But just how far can the wish take us? To what lengths is the individual prepared to go in the pursuit of his wish? How irrational does the obsessive desire, the fixation, render a human being: Would he/she turn to magic, white or black?  Or seek out a palmist to read the lines on his hand and foretell the outcome of future hopes and plans in something more than the spirit of a game?  

Fortune-telling and sorcery, the palmist and the necromancer, are rather different. But erstwhile clients approach them both with an implicit belief sceptics would laugh to scorn as epitomising gullibility and ignorance. In despite of all common sense, the black arts, the occult sciences, the cult of the supernatural, have run through the most developed civilisations -- for millennia. They must speak to something deep-seated in the human psyche, for even where there is no belief there is a fascination. People will laugh at a ghost story but almost invariably they will stay to hear it.  

The lore of the arcane has always had its disciples and masters, and not just in the continent of Circe, oft-famed as a home to the mysterious arts. A paradoxically commercial affirmation of this status assails us everywhere. Be it in Karachi's Empress Market, Lahore's Anarkali, or Rawalpindi's Raja Bazaar; along winding roads through rocky mountain passes or muddy lanes culminating in village backwaters; posters, signboards, graffiti, inscriptions on stone and writing in the sand advertise the skills of the Aalim. Seek him out for a customised future! And obviously, people do.  

A Gallup poll put the question baldly: Do you believe in the practices of Taveez Ganda, Kala Jadoo and Palmistry? The scope of the survey was 'National Rural and Urban' and it was a representative sampling comprising a cross-section of age, education, income and linguistic groups. What anthropologists would make of them is another matter; but for a layperson like me the answer charts are a provocative mix of affirmations and negations of subjective assumptions on the topic. For agnostics, it is but a slippery slide from the superstitious to the religious. They probably see a teetering seesaw rather than a sharp dividing line between the two orientations. The medicine-man looking into the future, the majzoob; magic, voodoo, hoodoo, spells, whatever you call it, these are for the primitive-minded. If the Pakistani subscription to Taveez Ganda conflicts with 'enlightenment', the conflict is disturbingly apparent in the equipoise between 52 percent who believe in the magic of Taveez Ganda and 48 percent who do not. This polarity doesn't vanish with the formalities of education. Illiterates record a perceptibly higher percentage of faith in Taveez Ganda (65 who believe in it). However, the figure for those educated beyond the matriculation level remains as high as 42 percent saying, yes, they believe in it, with but 58 percent saying they do not. The pattern is suggestive of cultural dysfunction within an intellectually conflicted society.  

Even the young do not reject aspects of superstition out of hand. From forty-nine to eighteen there is a virtually equal division between 51 percent who believe and 49 who do not. One cannot any longer comfortably presume superstition is traditionally regressive and characterises the older rather than younger person: The percentage of those denying the efficacy of Taveez Ganda actually rises in those above fifty. The whys and wherefores of Taveez Ganda is what social scientists could focus on, for it consistently wins the popularity contest with people. They appear to be more wary of Kala Jadoo (perhaps they find it too malign) and more dismissive of palmistry. Maybe that is too lightweight. Taveez Ganda it seems strikes the golden mean as far as making the average person's dreams come true!  

A disconcerting statistic shows the Pashto-speaking NWFP  as being the most sceptical when it comes to taveez, jadoo and palmistry. And by a considerable margin, comparatively speaking. How would an anthropologist calibrate that finding with the primitive nature of tribal mores? Perhaps fundamentalism and superstition also conflict! The poll factors in literacy, but it doesn't factor in income (read supposedly educated elite). I submit a piece of anecdotal evidence. An ornament of fashionable society, who was having home and family 'de-jinxed' as the buzzword has it, says her shaman consultant inadvertently let fall that his best and most regular customers were in her circle. It was only when they were halfway through the expensive proceedings that she wondered whether he had done the jinxing as well. . . A comprehensive monopoly allowing the profitable variation of supply according to demand.

 Memory -- going, going, gone                                                                                     Back

 Ah memory! Not nostalgia but the faculty. Which of us hasn't wished it was still better when mugging desperately for exams in youth, and worried about its fading strength as time takes its toll?  

Memory has certain stereotypes too. There is the dumb blonde (albeit over here bleached) category, so delightfully feather-headed it would be a pity if the mind were stocked with sound sense. And then there is the absent-minded professor at the other end of the spectrum, whose mind is so well-stocked it has no room for the mundane. Let others remember his daily realities for him. But this his/her, rather than impersonal, neutered gender, is redolent of gender-bias and inexcusable in a nation under marching orders to be politically correct. What to do though when something as trendy as a poll comes up with a distinct gender finding? In Pakistan, moderate and modern though we resolutely are about all things, especially female equality, 70 percent of the male population but only 51 percent of the female, asserts it has no difficulty remembering things. Maybe men just lie more and exaggerate their prowess. But that could be gender bias of another sort. Otherwise though the poll is non-disconcerting.  

As we would all imagine, people testify to forgetting more as they age; and language-wise it makes no difference at all: Whether they are forgetting in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushto, Saraikee, they forget or remember equally well. Parity prevails. But what of that favoured language, English? Presumably, it has churlishly been relegated to that non-descript category of 'other'. Heaven knows, enough of us insist on using it. Now English, whether American or British, in the same category as sundry regional languages and dialects, some of those even from the tribal belt? Would Messrs Bush, Blair and their friend the General rate this a plus or minus? My barometer of political rectitude is in a spin. Provincially speaking we follow a neatly demographic graph. The most advanced (and thus possibly stressed-out) province is where they recall marginally less. Sindh and NWFP remember things equally well; and Balochistan has the cutting edge. They remember there at a rate of 67 percent as compared to Punjab's 61. But let no one call anyone blockhead or conclude he or she has more or less to remember of forget. In the unit All Pakistan comprises, 63 percent can remember daily routine things, and so all our mean provincial averages come close enough to be taken as sound.  

What is it though that makes us forgetful? With so many of us turning forgetful so much sooner than our parents did, it is fashionable to blame the environment in terms both psychological and atmospheric. In the survey, stress takes a heavy lead even  if we do not group together the tension and work pressure figures. And habit is rated higher than disease as contributory to forgetfulness. It is true enough that if the individual makes a sustained conscious effort to be less absent-minded he/she generally improves: But haven't we often commented on how we come across Alzheimer's more and more? And there may well be a correlation between pollution and impaired memory. Lead-levels are known to be often threatening.  

Whatever we choose to blame for causing problems with memory, what do we resort to as aids? This is a helpless society it would seem: 62 percent say they 'just remember'. Only 17 percent use the notebook/diary method, which is a comment perhaps on the limitations of literacy. And there is a percentage shown that asks someone to remind them! Now that is only possible in an over-populated country or where you have biddable lackeys and handmaidens. Or can one reason that it is a sound delegation of responsibility? For those of you who are thinking of gaw zaban, badam, char maghz and the like there was no 'others' column. The only consolation is that leaves zinc supplements out too as an option.

Computers                                                                                                                   Back

Once upon a time, before computers and the age of the electronic media, when people could not divert themselves with computer games and picked up magazines; psychological quizzes crafted to "Know yourself" (or the other person) were very popular. The yes or no sometimes/never table of response, the options chosen, would build up a picture, project a profile. And the better quizzes in the better magazines, apart from stimulating discussion, often provided the base for some fairly solid reflection.  

The questions and responses in the Gallup Pakistan Day-related poll are of course seriously and scientifically designed and treated, and belong to a different category. But, like those quizzes of long ago, they are surprisingly interesting. In the crisis-beset Pakistan we inhabit and love, the findings offer an index and bring some objectivity to the soul-searching over national issues and public sentiment in which we all indulge.  

The most courageous question among those Gallup posed is one we are inhibited about broaching: Suppose you were an adult in 1947 would you have voted for or against the founding of Pakistan? Implicit in the answer is the wisdom of hindsight: was it a mistake? Would we revise our choices if we could travel back in time? And when the question is asked of the young person, today's generation, it also becomes a judgement on those who decided for them. Do they ratify the decision or would they have it different?  

Personally, I don't know how I would have voted had I been asked in 1947. But I know that in 2003 I am convinced that, whether it was a mistake or not, if it had not happened then it would be happening now. The political subculture of the subcontinent makes it inevitable. If Bharat can rightly fling sectarianism in the Muslim homeland's face, Pakistan can rightly sling the mud right back at it with the one word Ayodha. (Though, tragically, the list is much longer.) But what did Gallup establish?  

In the two age-groups ranging between eighteen-thirty-fifty, 95 per cent were positively for it. And goldie-oldies have scarcely wavered in the light of hindsight: 98 per cent reaffirmed the choice. The exceptional thing is that there were no waverers -- everyone had a definite opinion/response. So if belief in itself is important, Pakistan (armchair analysts like me to the contrary) is blessed with it. But could it simply be that most Pakistanis are the ignorant, emotional kind of precisely the sort General Musharraf's NRB targets with roadmaps and the like? For all that AALMs (armchair analysts like me) are given to placing faith in the common sense they insist abounds in the common man, sentiment can be so much hot air. Reassuringly though, over and above the professional pollster's attestations of representative cross-section etcetera, etcetera, samplings, responses to other questions in the poll evince a shrewd common grasp of general realities (in and out of khaki).  

And Pakistanis seem to get wiser as they grow younger. Thus, 49 per cent of those under thirty hailed atomic power as Pakistan's most notable landmark as compared with 67 per cent of those over fifty. The sad thing is that nuclear prowess may be all that our civil and military leaders ever gave the nation to be proud of performance-wise. One can but agree with the pathetically low scale of ratings given to development and functioning in economic, educational, democratic, law and order, foreign policy, sport and infra-structural sectors. And we do not have to worry about being a nation of gullible jingoists: Years of determined mythification following the 1965 war did not succeed in raising the percentage level above 1 in other age groups from the uncompromising zero that those over fifty accord it as Pakistan's most notable landmark.  

Sometimes the finer print in responses to the same question age-wise, province-wise and language-wise sets one wondering. Thus, to the question as to whether Pakistan has progressed since 1947, only 20 per cent All Pakistan-wise say 1947 was better and 79 per cent say it has made progress. Province-wise though, the 'better in '47 slot' reads 33 per cent Sindh; 12 per cent NWFP; 16 per cent Punjab; and 17 per cent Balochistan. 87 per cent in NWFP and 82 per cent in Balochistan opt for 'made progress', matching or outstripping 82 per cent in Punjab. Could it be that NWFP and Balochistan are at last getting more attention now in the changing Afghan context and feel less aggrieved? Sindh's soundings ask for a clearly different interpretation. It had the highest reading for 'better in 1947' at 33 per cent (cf. All Pakistan average at 20 per cent) and the lowest reading for 'made progress' at 66 per cent. Yet, the central military government still thinks Kalabagh Dam an irreplaceably great idea.  

If you really want to put on your thinking-caps try the tables on "What do you anticipate as the most dangerous issue for Pakistan in the next five years?" Consistently, war comes out first and unemployment a rather lagging second; closely tailed by economical, law and order.  But, surprise, or not a surprise? The traditionally martial NWFP fears unemployment almost as much as it fears war. Its fear of unemployment, though, please note, is only a little higher than the All Pakistan level on that score; while its fear of war is almost half that of the anticipatory level of fear recorded in the All Pakistan category. Sindh's fear of war is more than twice that of NWFP's, and also noticeably higher than the level shown in All Pakistan. Balochistan, which we are accustomed to viewing as maverick, gives almost the same readings as All Pakistan does on war and unemployment as the most dangerous issues of the next five years.  

Yet enhancing defence capacities was not offered as a separate category in the response list to the eighth question, "What is the most important issue Pakistan should give attention in next five years?" Did it appear in the "Others" rubric, which yielded 11 per cent in the All Pakistan response range? Education topped as the rightful national priority with 30 per cent, followed by employment at 22. Sensible people we seem to be, after all, in the wider national perspective.  

So, when 87 per cent visualise a secure future for the country over the next twenty-five years, as against 10 per cent who apprehend disintegration, with a dogged 2 per cent keeping mum, do we bury the epithet 'failed' state; or do we just call ourselves ebullient, resilient, optimists? Gallup, please poll. But come to think of it, the criterion depends on who defines our failures and sets the examination syllabus. Are we our own examiners? That is an AALM's question for Pakistan day polls 2003.

Scared silly                                                                                                                  Back

Blush a little. We do not greet the supernatural with sneers of disbelief. When asked whether it was animals/insects, darkness, heights, or devils/ghosts that they feared most; devils/ghosts won the scaring-people-stiff contest hands down, with an All Pakistan rating of 36 percent. Creepy-crawlies and great big monsters came an uncompetitive second with only 28 percent choosing them as pet horrors. And the credulity about 'jin bhoot' has nothing to do with a lack of urban sophistication.  

The urban location finding of 36 percent on the lookout for ghosts only rose by two points in the rural context. Gender too showed an embarrassingly even balance: 36 percent for both men and women in All Pakistan. Education too does not make that much of a difference. Forty-three percent of the illiterate fear ghosts; and those who lay claim to enlightenment beyond the matric-level retain an (un)healthy fear of ghosts at 34 percent.  

Darkness and heights were feared most by only 15 and 17 percent of our doughty population. Perhaps the fear of them is too rational for our temperament! We do not show undue inhibition about acknowledging our fears, whatever form they take: The 'No Response' figure is only 4 percent. I have a complaint though. My favourite phobia - claustrophobia - isn't even offered a chance. Who knows what other popularly cherished phobias may have been overlooked: There is no 'Others' column, which is, otherwise, quite a familiar category in Gallup polls.

 It could of course be that phobias and fears are not the same for psychologists. Fears, connotatively at any rate for the layperson even, are more related to reality than phobias. But where does that fine sort of distinction leave the fear of ghosts? Or do the All Pakistan ghost-fearing 36 percent have convincing ghost stories and 'authenticated' personal encounters with feuding family ghosts to narrate? Something for Lok Virsa to look into.  

Province-wise tabulations show individuality and considerable variation in fear factors. Fifty-six percent in Balochistan fear devils/ghosts. It could be something about those shrieking winds in the unpeopled infinity of the desert wastes. And when only 5 percent of the Baloch fear creepy-crawlies, and those too must come teeming out of the desert sands, it suggests that the Baloch is quite confident about dealing with the actual poisonous scorpion or two. It's those supernatural agencies that disturb him.  

The NWFP turns out least sensitive to ghosts and most sensitive to animals/insects. It is tempting to infer the Punjab generally is a little less troubled than others by fears: It has a marginally higher no response rate. And when heights scare these dwellers in our most fertile plains distinctly less than those in other places, one can't resist asking whether it is because in one sense they find being placed at a pinnacle quite natural. Sindh, is conspicuously more disturbed by heights than all the other provinces.  

But back to ghosts. Belief in them declines with age: down to 19 percent at age fifty and above; from a starting-point of 43 percent in the over-eighteens. Perhaps one can't go through a lifetime of not meeting up with a ghost without some loss of faith in the fearful prospect. Supernatural pragmatism.

Whither away fair rover, what thy quest?                                                                  Back

 Migration. An evocative word. Especially for Pakistanis where the process accompanied the birth of the new state. There is pain in migration but also hope, for whatever its context or its cause, it demands a new beginning.  

When families have uprooted themselves once does it become easier to think of doing it again, always in search of something better? In Pakistan where flux is perhaps the gentlest aspect of chronic turbulence and uncertainty, a Gallup poll yields the inference that 8 percent of urban households have at least one member of the family who is now permanently settled abroad. Migration is a decidedly contemporary phenomenon, not just a historic memory.  

It's a great big wonderful world out there. And the avidity of visa applicants seems to confirm that. The smugness and prosperity of the expatriates (expats us locals now call them, when, like true migrant birds, they seasonally hit town in what used to be home) proclaims a success story. But that success is built over failure or inadequacy of another sort. They were not able to inject what they wanted to into their lives out here. Whatever they made of it, whatever they were offered, it was not enough. So when the visa lines get too long or the migrant-ratio is a little too strong, we need to be doing some thinking about it right here. Be free to rove of course! But also be free to take root.  

Is the failure here simply economic?  

As polled in September 2003, 82 percent flatly tick 'low income' as the factor inducing migration in family members. 'Uncertain future' drove away merely 8 percent, 'law and order' 4 percent, and 6 percent offered a miscellany of other reasons for leaving home and country.  

Forgetting statistics and thinking rather of people, at the cream level: Many parents have had to let their children go away initially because a good education was the crying need. A need that could only be met paradoxically at the plane of luxury. Let us chastise our five-year plans and their implementers. The impact of the vibrant unblocked west can overwhelm impressionable youth, so that even where connections can guarantee lucrative employment there is no motivation to return to what is seen as a stagnant environment. The green card and the green flag.  

The poll classifies household income in the families of those who have a member settled abroad in three slots: Monthly earnings under seven thousand; between seven thousand-and-one and fifteen thousand; and the undoubtedly much happier fifteen and above. But even that is not happy enough. How does any family, however minuscule, survive at all satisfactorily in the region of fifteen thousand let alone seven thousand? What would a poll establish as the average man's idea of an adequately realistic yet somehow honest average income?  

Among the 82 percent where 'low income' is the perceived reason for a relative's migration, two income groups figure fairly evenly with seventy-nine for the lowest earners, and seventy-four for the highest. It is the aspiring middle-class earners who leave native shores in search of a better income most: 90 percent. Now what was it the middle-class is supposed to be the backbone of?  

Within the component reality of the 8 percent that have family permanently settled abroad, 5 percent hail from the lowest income group, 7 from the mid bracket, and with the highest earners the figure leaps to double neatly at 14. Are the ones who go away plain greedy for more, or have their families subsequently got tidy little remittances padding the income? Are standards rising at home because of all those expats? Well, even if they are, it is at an individual level. Our social infrastructure remains as ever: awaiting salvage.  

And how do the migrants and the stay-at-homes usually communicate -- letters, landline phones, Internet phone or e-mail? Poll findings shed an interesting light on literacy, gender and affluence. Audio wins in what is after all a not too literate society: 79 percent use the landline phone, 40 percent write letters. The poll didn't ask whether it was the village scribe or the bureaucrat's clerk who took dictation.  

The Internet phone, as most would expect; is accessed by just 10 percent, with recourse to e-mail showing only one point higher. Women are more prone to use Internet phone than e-mail. It could be the keyboard that puts them off, bad for the fingernails. But computer contact is not limited to the comparatively affluent. Even the lowest income group shows some truck with the Internet phone and e-mail. Before science and technology mandarins congratulate themselves on the IT grid, let us recall this is solely an urban survey.  

And just where did all these urban connections choose to settle? Saudi Arabia leads with 32 percent. Dubai and Kuwait net 11 and 2 percent respectively. The west claims 21 percent for England/London and 6 percent for America. Permission as well as choice may have something to do with it. But then one comes slap-up against the answer to another question.  

When those who were asked whether they would like to settle in any other country than Pakistan answered yes (as 40 percent did this September), 32 percent still named Saudi Arabia as the country they would migrate to; with America capturing 17 percent and England/London appealing to a mere 13 percent.  

And since migration set me musing at the outset, let me leave you that way at the end. Put the poll's comparative table for the migratory urges for May 1985, June 1998, October 2000 and September 2003 in your pipe, and smoke it. Figuratively of course: Smoking is a health hazard.

Food for thought                                                                                                          Back

 Medical scientists may or may not react, but to the lay-person the finding suggests room for research: The diabetes factor shows significantly higher in the NWFP than in other parts of Pakistan. In a Gallup poll about dieting habits, 'due to diabetes' was a reason for dieting that showed up at a percentage of 15 in Sarhad, which was significantly higher than elsewhere in Pakistan. The traditionally gourmandising Punjab logged in at 10 percent, so the incidence of diabetes cannot simply be explained in terms of a Pathan penchant for starch and sugar.  

Cholesterol also ranks rather high as a reason to diet. The NWFP-Punjab graphs follow the same kind of pattern as they made in diabetes, though cholesterol percentage figures are a trifle higher, at 22 and 15. All that red meat and asli ghee does seem to make a difference, alas. It is Balochistan that disconcerts in the cholesterol context.  

For all that it lagged with diabetics, in a 'due to cholesterol' count, Balochistan is virtually on par with the NWFP's 22 at 21 percent. Arid Sindh and Balochistan stayed in single digit numbers of 5 and 3 when it came to watching the diet because of diabetes. Cholesterol it would appear seems to be a common, extensive kind of health problem, for Sindh also enters double digits and records a percentage of 12.  

The interesting thing is that the word did not draw any puzzled frowns. Whether they have high cholesterol or not, it seems most people are familiar with the term. Perhaps the generally appalling functioning of the mass media deserves a compliment here. How else to explain the growing public awareness about health?  

The Gallup questionnaire about dieting habits starts with the classic problem of adiposity. 'Have you ever tried dieting to reduce weight,' pollsters asked of their prey. Now apart from sounding rather rude, this is really a very difficult question to divest of bias and make clinically perfect. Was the individual approached fat or thin in the first place? What would be an average representative level for adiposity in Pakistanis anyway? One man's fat is another man's thin. Despite all the anorexic creatures we see around us at five-star hotel galas in spaghetti straps, 74 percent of the All Pakistan sampling says 'No', they have never tried to diet to lose weight. Of the long-suffering 26 percent who admit to the truth of their travails, it is the middle-aged among them who suffer most and try hardest. Poor things, trying to hold on to illusions of youth and ward off flabby age. Thirty-one percent of them have dieted. People below thirty or over fifty tally in a hopefully aesthetic symmetry of dietary effort at 22 percent.  

There is no gender bias to dieting. One may conclude men and women are equally vain or health-conscious. But what is it about the NWFP?  

The Pashto-speaking diet at a voracious rate of 51 percent (the Punjabi-speaking at only 17); and 45 percent in the Sarhad have tried dieting as compared with a mere 19 percent in Punjab, 28 percent in Balochistan, and 29 in Sindh. Are Pathans obsessed with physical fitness or does the stalwart, hardy frame house an essential hypochondriac?  

If you jump to Question 4, 'On the whole how much are you worried about your health', Pushto and the NWFP again top the 'Very much' side of the scale with marks of language-wise (50 percent) and province-wise (46 percent). To give an idea of the margin of difference, Sindhi comes second language-wise at 39 percent, and Balochistan second province-wise at 32. The Punjabi in his amplitude comes last in the 'Very much' worried listing. No comment.  

No comment either on the Saraiki belt. Frankly, it is hard to make out. One needs to be briefed.

 Question 3 in the poll bluntly asks 'what methods did you adopt for reducing weight'. Driven by obesity one can resort to bizarrely desperate measures. But despite all those individual horror stories that abound when dedicated dieters swap diets and experiences, the All Pakistan response is eminently sensible. Thirty-six percent avoid fatty food; 36 percent lower their food intake; 25 percent take exercise. Only a meagre 4 percent go for intriguing 'Other' options. And the 'Other' factor is highest -- guess -- in Punjab! Think up your own explanations.

Rich man, poor man                                                                                                     Back

 We all want it, but how much do we think about it? Money, I mean. If we really thought about it all that much, we would probably have more of it. Or can one be preoccupied with it passively, in a kind of frustrated rancour at the lack of it, rather than chase after it actively in a healthy, aggressive, vulgarly materialistic spirit of the sort that would send the economy bounding and pounding and delight finance ministers? And not just because that attitude characterises the host-country of the World Bank which has rendered so many of us parasitic, and where, incidentally, so many developing-world finance ministers serve an apprenticeship. 

Whether we find them elsewhere or not, the signs and symptoms of a clash of civilisations may be perceived in oriental and occidental attitudes to money-making. But why pillory the entire orient, let us just speak for ourselves and say Pakistan.  

Hard work and education, effort, is not associated in our minds with the acquisition of money. We do not think of making/earning money so much as just 'having' it or stumbling across it fortuitously.  

When people were asked this October, in Keats' season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, why some had money and some hadn't, education consistently ranked last as an 'enrichment' factor, with hard work competing closely to come second-last! Irrespective of gender, age, education, income, language or province. There are no immediate socio-economic incentives pushing us in the direction of hard work and education. People simply have to believe in them (if at all) as ends in themselves. Understandable, really when we think of the grim employment situation for all those graduates our pathetic system even more pathetically churns out. If you don't have your daily bread already, there seems almost no way of getting it. It is an un-stated philosophy of despair. But hold on!  

When asked whether a child born into a poor family can get rich by dint of hard work in our country, only 7 percent gave an outright 'No'. A wildly optimistic 17 percent even went so far as to think it highly possible. The characteristic response, though, levels at a non-committal kind of polite admission of the possibility. One can almost read a subtext of 'after all the unlikeliest things can happen.' But there is an interesting gender difference. Perhaps, because they are the ones who stay home in the char divari and keep nagging the men to bring in more of the stuff, females give hard work decidedly more value than males do as a factor in making the individual wealthy. And perhaps because they have less access to it, women also value education a little bit more than men do.  

Are we essentially cynics or fatalists? Being born with a silver spoon in the mouth and making 'hush money' vie with each other for first and second place as the reason for a person's being rich. Chance and the overseas-immigrant syndrome also show up as explanatory factors, though they are taken as less operative than birth or dishonesty.  

If you want to have fun and politicise the issue look at the comparative table for the findings of 1987, 2000, October 2003. Although Gallup has maintained a long and tactful silence between '88 and '99, those landmark years when Zia-ul-Haq left and Musharraf came, when Benazir and Nawaz took turns at the till in the hiatus, the really determined speculator can speculate. Between 1987 and 2000 (civil democracy time) the hush money factor actually sinks. It shows a gradual but steady upward trend between 2000 and 2003. Which just goes to show that military regimes are discreet and less open.  

Being born with a silver spoon -- as at the hearth of the feudal lord or industrial magnate -- is marked as 25 percent in 1987; 30 in 2000; and 36 in 2003. Now of course this appreciable rise between 2000 and 2003 in the silver spoon-value scale is a corollary of the remarkable national economic recovery we are told about. Obviously when the economy thrives some people do too along with it. On the other hand, the outdated Bhutto-ist (for this is the age of privatisation and the market diktat) can say that the exploitative class which their hero justly cut to size has been regaining its lost franchise ever since. What are statistics for after all but for twisting to suit your argument?  

But as there are so many more of us who are poor than rich, the important thing is what is the reason for this poverty? We are a happy-go-lucky people at heart for what most of us say is 'just a matter of luck.' Take it as it comes. Recipe for survival in a non-participatory environment.

Should she, shouldn't see?                                                                                            Back

Does any other single thing reveal as much about a society as its attitude to marriage? In Pakistan, where satellite communication keeps us abreast of western developments as to the acceptability of 'gay' marriages among the laity first and the clergy second, what we ourselves debate is how far young people may be justified in making their own decisions about marriage without reference to the preferences of their parents.  

If this seems absurd to the west, the desire to remain a priest while discarding definitive parameters of priesthood seems equally ridiculous here, where -- quite sensibly as it now turns out -- we make no distinction between the secular and the non-secular to begin with. The west is simply proving what we have always maintained!  

Seriously though, how much do we err in confusing conformity and convention with rights and duties? How asphyxiating can the demands of tradition become? Rejecting custom can be a moral duty too. We just have to murmur 'honour killing' and 'karo kari' to establish that. Yet, finding the right balance between compulsive iconoclasm and fossilised orthodoxy sometimes seems a lost cause in the cultural melee of the global village.  

Pakistan itself is so incredibly stratified and crossbred -- so porous in one sense and so impermeable in another. There are such discrepancies in wealth, in education. A person's mental horizons may be wide, yet familial bonds and economic constraints can make it impossible to escape the restrictions reality imposes. One may justifiably expect any poll on marriage values to show strikingly conflicted responses.  

Instead one finds in a poll Gallup took not that long ago - April 2001 - that the urban and rural location -- the one most of us take as the base of a fundamental cultural divide - made virtually no difference at all in moral outlook or the subscription to 'our own' culture. To the question 'In your view whose choice is more important in a girl's marriage: her parents' or her own?' the All Pakistan response had 66 percent giving the parents primacy, and 33 percent favouring the girl's rights to decide. The ratio of the urban-rural location of the respondents and their responses matched: Thus, 67 percent urban and 64 percent rural are found in the favouring parental choice slot; 31 and 36 percent in the girl's own. (A very discriminating one percent answered 'Both.' Such wisdom is evidently rare, and it was exclusive to urbanity!)  

What about factors like gender, education, age and income? Above all, what about tribal norms and mores? Those last show. Only 7 percent in Balochistan thought a girl's own choice mattered more than parental writ. The Punjab, comparatively progressive, had 39 coming out on the girl's side. The fine print of the tables suggests that income first and education second is what aids female emancipation. What good does it do, after all, to have an independent outlook without the economic backup?  

Whether it means that women are more realistic about their limitations or that men are hypocritical and conceal the hidebound MCP within, when answering the question 'should a girl marry the man her parents choose even if she does not like him' females took a dutiful lead over males in saying yes, they should. Income, education and province did not seem to affect calibration all that much. Except that the uniformly heavy inclination to endorse doing as one is told became still heavier in Balochistan. Crushing, one could call it at 93 percent.  

There is an interesting indication that middle age is the time when conservatism peaks in the individual. Should we be sympathising with teen-aged offspring, caught in the corresponding generation gap? Or is heightened parental authoritarianism a defensive reaction to harassment from teenage children?  

And now we come to the crunch. How do we view change and social emancipation; or plain, simple disobedience? 'Should the girl marry her own choice even if her parents do not approve?' An ask-and-run question possibly. Predictably, the All Pakistan response was a fairly resonant 60 percent 'No'. But there is static in the fine-tuning. As they get older, people favour female liberty. Age they say brings wisdom. Or have people learnt empirically that a lifetime of regret is a bad bargain?  

The richer they are the less they think girls should have a free hand. Perhaps, daddy wants to choose where his millions go. But the illiterate and most literate extremes meet, and are both 50 percent in favour of allowing a girl to marry in the teeth of parental opposition. Urban-rural figures here show that it is in the so-called rural backwaters that people feel more strongly that a girl should follow her heart! And so do more men than women think they should. But that seeming broad-mindedness could be because, every man, no matter how old he is, fancies himself as the Romeo in question.