Proud to be a Pakistani?

**************************************************************
Indeed, we have an army to be proud of, but unfortunately little else...
**************************************************************

Here`s an article on the Kakul kleptocrats:

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20041210.htm

DAWN, Karachi, Pakistan
10 December 2004 Friday 27 Shawwal 1425

Realtors` paradise
By Ayaz Amir

Army housing, and the real estate business in general, is an industry like no other in Pakistan. The fastest bucks are turned here which explains why so many ex-army officers are distinguished realtors. So many indeed that the time may have come to consider teaching real estate as a separate subject in the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul.

We may be begging the Americans for F-16s and there may be more admirals than ships in the navy - and, come to think of it, more air marshals than fighter squadrons in the air force - but when it comes to creating comfy nest eggs for senior military officers, patriotic hearts and minds can rest assured we beat other militaries hollow.

At an Indo-Pak talking shop in Islamabad a couple of summers ago, I met a Lt Gen Oberoi from the Indian army (I forget his first name) who told me that when he was director-general, military operations, in Delhi, his counterpart in `Pindi was Lt Gen Pervez Musharraf.

I couldn`t help saying that this just went to show how much better off we were than India. In India, DG, Mily Ops, usually remained just that. In Pakistan they had the option of becoming presidents of the republic.

The connection between military upper mobility and the gigantic strides taken by defence housing is obvious. The military`s commanding position on the national horizon is the key factor pushing military privilege.

Just a month ago while on a freebie trip to Sri Lanka, for one of those inevitable seminars on Indo-Pak relations, I asked Lt Gen Sarabjeet Chahal who had just retired from the Indian army - his last posting commandant of the National Defence College - whether he had a house given him by the army. No, but on his own he had bought a house in Gurgaon, South Delhi, for good measure adding that their housing policy was lousy.

It set me thinking about the great progress in this sector on our side of the border. A retiring general not only has a house, if he`s worth his salt, he has several, besides residential plots in cities here and there and the obligatory 50 acres of agricultural land which every general, admiral and air marshal thinks it his birthright to be gifted with in Bahawalpur.

Unless born unlucky, he`ll also have a job in Fauji Foundation, Army Welfare Trust, or the hundred other avenues for employment now open to the fighting senior ranks of the Pakistani military.

Gen McArthur could have had no idea what his famous observation would mean in Pakistan: soldiers don`t die, they fade away. We`ve done a variation on this theme, senior soldiers, in one form or another, sticking around forever.

And we are worried about the president`s uniform. As if his taking it off would usher in the democratic revolution we all await. Parliamentary democracy is now in such a state, call it mauled, that it seems no better than an adjunct or extension of General Headquarters. There is a directorate-general for everything in GHQ. Why not, in the fullness of time, a DG Democracy?

But to return to defence housing. As you approach `Pindi from the south along the Grand Trunk Road, in the fork formed by the road to `Pindi and the road to Islamabad a massive defence housing project is coming up, its scale so impressive that it appears to dwarf all other national endeavours.

A more effective recruiting poster for PMA, Kakul, would be hard to imagine. For this great adventure in housing tells you two things at once: where real power lies and which is the surest ladder to success in this country established, as we never tire of reminding ourselves, for the greater glory of Islam.

Defence housing societies in Karachi and Lahore are tucked away in relatively far-off corners. This one hits you smack in the eye for it guards the approaches to `Pindi, a defence housing colony with its camouflage off, so to speak.

Gen Musharraf said some time ago in Karachi that the army did housing schemes better than anyone else, which was the reason why houses or plots in them fetched such handsome prices - excellence, in other words, earning its just rewards.

Truer words were never spoken. For housing colonies threaten to become the military`s leading speciality, quite beyond anything to do with tanks, artillery or other aspects of military professionalism: the one field mastered above all others. .....

#175 by Romair on December 13, 2004 2:41pm PT

Romair:

Enough is Enough. Just quit making such arguments. Take it from someone who has been to the best institutions in the world, including Harvard Business School and BTW turned down the opportunity to study at IIT-K, and someone who has built India`s largest exporter of computer hardware products out of brown and dusty fields of India when it was not a fahion, and some one who chose to support empowring of girls and women in Pakistan, while not even a Pakistain.

If you really are what you are, JUST HELP THIS PERSON Ahmad Sadozai, he has more courage and greater vision and less balony than you. Obviously this boy has guts, love and is real. Are you? After a while your arguments are simply disgusting to read?

Ahmad, if you have a vision and want any help in High Tech, to build on your dream, please send me an email at: anilkapuria@yahoo.com. I will give you my phone number later . I enjoy working with people who have an ability to go against the common belief. It will be my pleasure to help introduce you to the people who are truly trying to do things in Pakistan.

Anil

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Sodazai #173: ``IITs and IIMs are definitely better institutions than LUMS and UET. GIK and NUST are a bit better but still not up to the mark, but you cannot really compare indian institutions with the IVY league schools``

We help companies set up and augment their IT departments, so I take a lot of interest in the various educational institutions, from different countries. While I personally, do not consider the educational institution one comes out of, to be of too much importance, many of the clients seem to.

I have worked with numerous IIT and Ivy League grads, I am still trying to get my hands around the capabilities of the graduates of Pakistani institutes. The only objective assessments I have seen are the ones in leading magazines, which I printed in detail in two prevoius replies, where LUMS and SZABIST are rated as two of the top 17 Business schools in all of Asia (alongwith three Indian schools).

You seem to have made an authoratative statements disagreeing with such research. Are you shooting from the hip, or do you have experience in working with individuals from various institutes of the world, in different capacities. If it is the later, I would be interested in any info you have...........

Thank You everyone for reading and criticising my article, there are a few things I would like to clear out.

1. When I wrote this article a while back, the indian forex reserves were actually $75 Billion, so it is not a mistake on my part, the chowk ppl put this piece up there after quite a long time.

2. This article is not meant to prove my liberalism to my indian friends, as somebody implied, i`m sure they know where my priorities lie.

3. This is not an Out-of-frustration whine resulting from a `morally dead ambition`, because I do have most of the goodies i suggested in the end, but i would be more than happy to give up my guccis if all of my ppl can have adequate food, shelter, education and employment. I really mean it. It breaks my heart to see that a woman in my village works from 8 in the morning till 6 in the evening in the fields planting rice or something in the july heat for only 50 cents a day while my laptop is worth more than ten ppl`s life savings. Most of the 12 year old children in my village eat ROTI with chillies or sugar and have never tasted curry in there lives.

4. IITs and IIMs are definitely better institutions than LUMS and UET. GIK and NUST are a bit better but still not up to the mark, but you cannot really compare indian institutions with the IVY league schools, that is ludicrous.


An interesting fact is that for my new factory, I gave the contract for the building design to a UET graduate civil engineer who happened to be my childhood friend as well. He had passed his engineering with excellent grades so i had complete faith in him, but when we started the construction i sensed something was wrong, when i got the design cross-examined by other engineers they all agreed that it was a complete failure and there was no way that the structure could hold itself. In fact it was not even close to the right design. I was very disappointed and fired the UET graduate engineer, so no one can convinve me that UET is a world class engineering university.

Thanks to everyone again for taking interest in my article.

Ahmed J. Sadozai

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

guys iits are great, the teachers and students there are very smart and with pedigree. but let us not be silly, iiits dont do premier research yet. the environment does not exist. few of iit undergrads are inspired to hang-around to do post-grad research. some beharis do hang around so they can get the stipend while they appear for civil-services (IAS) exams. A bulk of post grads are from the zillions of colleges in mysore and andhra and are there to get the IIT stamp..good for career and marriage.

iits will become more reseatchy with better environment. big important thing in us schools is the darpa, nsf and the NIH. Caltech would not be caltech without the jet-propulsion labs and mit would not be mit without the draper, licoln labs, bbn etc. now, iit-m did have a nice little wireless radio project with Analog Devices collaberation, but the massive govt fundng and initiatives are just dont exist. the scale difference is enormous. Aroun Shoutie recently gave all of his developemntal budget to IIT-K for materials research.

offcourse competetion also matters. private colleges in the us are very competative and their is stiff rat-race to get more journal articles and citations and getting a tenure is only available to those survivors who spend years without seeing the daylight. the image then brings in better endowements and funding campaigns. iits being already relatively well-endowed and did not need to compete (thigs are changing, now iits have funding campaigns, an old classmates giving upwards of $1 mil). bottomline-no serious market pressure in the past to improve refereed articles.

so, ok, let us be proud of our achievement of having nurtured a clean, non-corrupt institution. and pls we dont need to compete with NUST or GIKI, try Tel Aviv univ.

Nobel prizes are given for work after approx 30 years, once the work has proven to be important enough for the humanity. So dont hold your breath, in the meanwhile, focus on increasing citations is noble enough for IITs. Offcourse, an improved bicycle rikshaw or bullock-cart once in a while is not bad either.

``Our leaders do not even seem to be interested in educating the people of Pakistan.``

If they did, how would they go around the world making speeches telling the West, ``either give us money for our poverty and illiteracy or suffer terrorism``?

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

One good that came out of this article for me is that I got movitated to check more details on Indian and Pakistani educational institutes.

I notice a significant lack of qualified faculty in NUST, GIK and other institutions being quoted by Pakistani chowkies. IITR for example, has 49 PhD qualified faculty members for Civil Engineering and about 30 in Earth Quake engineering. And this is only one of the institutes in India. There are dozens like that. Computer science department in IITD has 30+ PhD+ qualified faculty members.

NUST and GIK appear to have no more than 6 or 7 faculty members in each department. Pakistan really needs to improve its educational structure.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

yeah and india suffers from chronic communal strife where human beings are chopped up into pieces and unborn babies are ripped out of their mothers bellies and butchered, and the government acts as if nothing has happened. hush, hush. they were only muslims.

``Indeed, we have an army to be proud of, but unfortunately little else... ``

What a misplaced sense of achievement!!

As I said earlier army is at best a rogue institution..........

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

yasirz #157

`` So you`re top university just regurgitates information year after year.Yes that will get you places.keep it up.

wait for the apple to fall on your head.Actually i hope its a watermelon. :)``

Every institution has a mission. I do not know what the original mission of the IITs was. The current de facto mission is to place talented Indian undergrads into elite Western institutions and corporations. They did their job quite well for three decades despite all the drawbacks of Indian society and culture. IIT grads have a choice now. They can work for top notch companies in India.

I would contend that the current outsourcing boom is a function of the excellent impression IIT/BITS/non-IIT grads created among upper management in American companies. While they are talented Pakistanis they are far fewer in numbers to Indians (much less than the 7:1 ratio in population). Pakistan suffers from lower literacy rate, political instability and Islamic militancy.

We can sit and debate if the ``de facto mission`` can be improved or changed for the better in society. That is a whole separate discussion.

AhmadBilal #156

`` The most recent Microsoft full-time hires from GIKI alumni joined in 2003, followed by some interns in 2004. There are still many job openings in Microsoft and product teams have a tough time finding the right candidates. I would encourage anyone with the right skills and aptitude to apply. Thanks.``

What you are telling me is that Microsoft can get 5 talented engineers. If they want 5000 talented engineers can Pakistan supply it ? To put things in perspective India has a hard time supplying quality labor with all the outsourcing.

Currently Pakistani IT industry lacks the critical mass. I do not know if they can reach critical mass in the future without peace with India.