Livery shots can be seen Here – Here and Here.

There is even the word “Pakistan” inscribed on the under-carriage. I think the new livery is much better than the Euro-White we had going before. Kudos to PIA.

1. Legalize Alcohol – might as well.
2. Invite the Sweedish Bikini Team (Courtesy Coors)
3. Scratching/Grabbing/Massaging your private in Public – will yield to instant flogging!
4. Spit Pan on a Public place and we have the equal right to spit on your face!
5. It will be okay to say WTF – even on official documents. Exclamation marks can be used for emphasis!
6. In order to sit on my Federal Cabinet, you MUST have an IQ of 120+. You must excel in the vertical for the Ministry under your control. You must be fluent in English – yes, we shall ask you to highlight some of the books you’ve read recently. You will have a minimum of a Masters!
7. There will be NO such thing as a Police Escort. Everyone gets the same treatment.
8. I shall induct a special police that will whip everyone and make sure everyone gets in line. On the road, waiting for the elevator, at the ticket counter, in the bank, etc.
9. Horns will be banned. Plain and simple.
10. Establish an Internet Exchange (about time!)

GENERAL IN THE ‘HOOD’

Indrani Bagchi, TOI Crest, Mar 20, 2010, 10.33am IST

Those who know him say he is a brooder. But those who know him well will tell you that’s just one of the layers to the deeply complicated and thinking mind of Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The bluster that marked Musharraf has been dumped for quiet gravitas as the man from Rawalpindi goes about turning friends like the US and Britain into closer allies and outmanoeuvering not-so-friendly neighbours like India and Afghanistan at international fora. In a country brought to its knees by terror, corruption and an inept political system, the former ISI chief is putting up a masterly show as he calls the shots.

Sitting with foreign minister S M Krishna this February, US defence secretary Robert Gates said he was going to Pakistan the next day. So who was he going to meet? Oh, a number of people, said Gates, but his most important conversation would be with Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. “Why not Zardari?” asked Krishna, referring to the Pakistan president. “Because Kayani is the most important man out there,” Gates said matter-of-factly . And Gates should know – in Washington, he’s often described as the most powerful defence secretary Pentagon has had in a long while.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, this low-profile general has emerged from the shadows. The obvious ineptitude of the Pakistan political establishment seems to have finally helped burnish the credentials of the Pakistan Army whose reputation was in tatters in the final days of the last military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. And with its return has emerged its boss Kayani. Compared to Zardari’s gang that just can’t shoot straight, many in Pakistan seem to view the Army chief as a better bargain – although it’s debatable that they’ll want a return to military rule.

As boss of Pakistan’s infamous spy agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Kayani had a reputation for being slightly nervous. It would now appear that he was being circumspect rather than nervous. As the civil government got its knickers in a twist every so often, the general quietly plotted the return of the military to its position of pre-eminence in Pakistan society.

He has since quietly started calling the shots. Remember how Zardari promised to send the ISI chief Shuja Pasha to India after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and how Kayani vetoed him? That was just the beginning of his new assertiveness.

But who is this man really? Is he a bumbling military brass in the mould of Yahya Khan, who lost East Pakistan because of his ham-handed ways, or is he a modern-day version of the suave Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military dictator who introduced the army to the intoxication of political power? Or is Kayani just a product of circumstances, the man who is willy-nilly filling up the political vacuum created by the messy management of Zardari & Co?

Details about the 57-year-old Kayani are somewhat sketchy. He doesn’t have the kind of privileged background that most Pakistan military brass does. His father, Lehrasab, was a naib subedar in the army – in other words, a non-commissioned officer. Born in Rawalpindi in Punjab, Kayani came up the hard way after being commissioned in 1971, the year of the Bangladesh War.

Those who have seen him up close say Kayani is the brooding type. He was given to long, solitary walks until November 2007, when Gen Musharraf named him the army chief – thereafter, it was no longer possible for him to remain unattended. Kayani is a chain smoker – he reportedly lights up every 15 minutes – and is given to long drags on his cigarette as he engages in deep listening during briefings by his trusted commanders. It’s said he interrupts only to seek either a clarification or elucidation of a point.

Kayani’s slightly unnerving silence contrasts strongly with Musharraf’s volubility. But it would be stupid to infer from this that he has little to say. They say Kayani has a lot more going on in his head. He is also a Pakistan army “traditionalist” which means his worldview is India-centric . The eastern neighbour, India, is seen by the army as enemy No1, and policies and responses flow from that basic understanding.

UNFRIENDLY NEIGHBOUR A strategically shrewd army chief, Kayani doesn’t count India among Pakistan’s allies – something that is likely to make him appear in New Delhi to be more dangerous than someone like Musharraf. In any case, since it’s Kayani who holds the reins, New Delhi would do well to sit up and take notice of this man.

It needs to know whether Kayani’s anti-India stance is a strategic move to bind together the army at a time when political parties in Pakistan are slipping fast into an inchoate body of disparate noises, and when the people see the solidity of the army as a source of reassurance. Or is it genetically coded – that come what may, he will be hostile towards India.

Says a top Indian official, “On a scale of 1 to 10 for anti-India sentiment, if Musharraf was at 5, Kayani is at 8.” “And as he is seen increasingly to be in control, it’s bad news for us.”

Kayani started out as an apolitical army chief. Now as he is in the driving seat in Pakistan, he is showing political sense. The way he has latched on to the water issue between India and Pakistan to drum up paranoia about India “starving” Pakistan of water shows he knows how to press the emotive buttons. When India offered foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan, Islamabad took its time to respond, allegedly because Kayani hadn’t given his nod; he wanted a composite dialogue that would include Kashmir, and not just terror. And it was Kayani who gave directions to Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, when he came to New Delhi to meet Nirupama Rao.

Significantly, the day before, Kayani told the defence committee of the National Assembly that the army under him would remain “India-centric” . “India has the capability, intentions can change overnight,” he told legislators.

G Parthasarathy, who was high commissioner to Islamabad, says, “Gen Kayani represents an institutional hostility towards India because promoting it enables the army to dominate Pakistan without responsibility. Given the fact that he is the de facto ruler of Pakistan, India should be prepared for more covert and overt hostility directed at it from Pakistani soil.”

The quiet rise of Kayani hasn’t gone unnoticed in capitals around the world. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton spends more time with Kayani than with the civvies. Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who has had a testy relationship with the Pakistani army, is mending fences with it. Pakistan’s strategic outreach is being managed by Kayani: He made a much talked about power-point presentation at the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) headquarters in Brussels on how he could help the West get out of Afghanistan; he talked turkey with the Turks on keeping control of a key conference in Istanbul on Afghanistan’s future; and he’s assumed the role of the point person on ‘reconciliation’ with Taliban.

This week, Kayani will be the pre-eminent member of the Pakistan delegation at a strategic dialogue with Washington where demand No.1 will be a nuclear deal like the one signed with India, apart from agreements on more mundane matters like trade and agriculture. In preparation for the talks, Kayani presided over a meeting of government secretaries on Tuesday, the first time that top-level bureaucrats have been called to army headquarters in a civilian regime.

WOWING THE WEST It was not always so, even as recently as in 2009. Through most of last year, Pakistan, and its army, were on the back foot. Terrorists in Swat and other parts of FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) were on the rampage and inching towards Islamabad, setting off alarm bells the world over. To make matters worse, there was talk of the army playing fast and loose with the Americans as well as with the Taliban. The US media was awash with CIA leaks on how Kayani had described Afghan Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani as a ‘strategic asset’.

There was little trust between the two sides.

Cut to January 2010, and the scenario had changed dramatically. Pakistan had ‘fixed’ the trust problem with the Americans. In July 2008, when Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha were ‘summoned’ by General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, to be scolded about Islamabad’s misdemeanors, especially the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, it was a low point for a country which had tomtommed its “shared anxieties” with America.

By the end of 2009, Kayani was taking the US joint chief of staff chairman Mike Mullen and US commander in Afghanistan Stanley Mc-Crystal on helicopter rides in Swat and Waziristan to show progress in his battle against the Taliban. Pakistan had effectively re-established itself in the West as a part of the solution, even as it continued to be a part of the problem.

Kayani’s message to the NATO brass in January, made adroitly yet forcefully through a 62-slide presentation, was disarmingly simple: Pakistan had a strategic future in Afghanistan well beyond the US presence and should not be taken lightly. This meant the government in Kabul had to be mindful of Pakistani interests; and India had to be out of Afghanistan, or at the very least, needed to greatly reduce its presence.

Kayani scored another big victory at the January 28 London conference on the future of Afghanistan. The idea promoted by the British and backed by the US, that Pakistan would be the lead player in the Taliban ‘reconciliation’ process, was met with enthusiastic response. The army chief came out smelling of roses, confident in his belief that he had successfully outmanoeuvered India even as New Delhi fumbled in its opposition to the Taliban being accommodated.

This was quite a contrast to Musharraf’s last days, when the army stumbled from one political miscalculation to another and ended up with the disastrous storming of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid where radical imams were threatening the state. Meanwhile, the Tehreek-e-Taliban was growing in strength and firepower with a string of terror attacks throughout Pakistan, leading up to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Worryingly for the hawks, Musharraf had also found a common language with Manmohan Singh and back-channel talks with India hinted at some sort of non-territorial adjustment in Kashmir. His ‘out-of-the-box’ proposals on Kashmir as well as ‘tactical restraint’ on the Kashmir jihad between 2004 and 2007 undermined the traditional mindset. As both Siachen and Sir Creek remained unresolved, there rose many voices within the Pakistan military establishment questioning the wisdom of abandoning the old position of bleeding India.

BACK TO BRASS TACKS Enter Kayani, with a 18-handicap in golf and a Plan. Admiral Mullen recently gushed in Time magazine: “Gen Kayani commands an army with troops fighting in what President Barack Obama has rightly called the ‘most dangerous place in the world.’ He’s lost more than 1,000 soldiers in that fight. He knows the stakes. He’s got a plan.”

Convinced of the centrality of the army as the bulwark of the Pakistan state, Kayani was bringing back to it its robbed glory and quintessential values. He has figured that the only way to regain influence for Pakistan would be to somehow make the Taliban a part of the power structure in Kabul and help the US pack its bags. That would force India to leave Afghanistan and help Pakistan regain control of the region.

Until that happens, Kayani knows the India bogey has to be kept alive and leveraged against Pakistan’s efforts at taming the Taliban. Against the US’s better judgment, but impelled by recession and public opinion, Washington is giving the Kayani worldview more than a nod and a wink. Washington’s approach to Islamabad is old-fashioned bribery: sophisticated military toys are winging their way to Pakistan as ‘incentive’ to fight the Taliban.

It knows full well that these weapons will actually be directed against India. As an Indian official explained, “Kayani is pegging the modernisation of the Pak army on US money.” By end-2010 , Pakistan will get an additional $3.4 billion in military aid from the US, bringing the total up to almost $12 billion since 2003.

IT’S IN HIS BLOOD Kayani cut his teeth in the army during the Bangladesh war. Thirty years later as director-general military operations (DGMO), he directed the 10-month stand-off with the Indian army. He earned his spurs with Musharraf when he conducted, with efficiency and confidentiality, the investigation into the assassination bids on Musharraf in 2003. Musharraf has himself reminisced that until Kayani took over, the investigation was a mess. It led to his appointment as DG-ISI in 2004.

POWER BROKER For all his loyalty to Musharraf, Kayani was an admirer of sorts of Benazir Bhutto, having served as military secretary to her. In 2007, when the Americans started pressuring Musharraf to work out a “reconciliation” with Benazir, he sent Kayani to do the job. On March 9, 2007 when Musharraf’s aides read out the riot act to Justice Chaudhry, demanding he step down, Kayani was part of the team. But presciently, he remained silent through the meeting and refused to present an affidavit to Chaudhry along with the others.

That paid him rich dividends later when he brokered a deal between Zardari and the judiciary during the lawyers’ Long March in 2008 and the most recent constitutional crisis with the judges’ appointment in 2009, which eroded Zardari’s credibility but enhanced Kayani’s . In 2008, Kayani compelled Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani to reinstate Chaudhry as CJ. In December 2009, Kayani once again made Zardari accept a decision by Chaudhry and the Supreme Court overturning the immunity earlier granted to Zardari from prosecution for corruption.

In a previous age, the army chief would have had ample reason by now to take over power, but Kayani seems to prefer playing puppeteer. “From the beginning, Kayani took the civilian leadership into confidence, but the onus of unifying the country was the army’s ,” says Imtiaz Gul of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, Islamabad.

When Zardari assumed office in February 2008, and Musharraf was turfed out, the new army chief declared his intention to stay apolitical even though he reportedly loathed Zardari and others in the corrupt leadership. Although he firmly believed that the army was the mainstay of Pakistan, Kayani was sensitive to the unusually strong public outrage against the army. It needed to go back to the barracks if it had to get back a modicum of its earlier prestige. In one of his early acts, Kayani withdrew hundreds of army officers from civilian jobs in the government, leaving the job of running the country to civilians.

RETURN TO GLORY With the campaign in Swat later in the year, Kayani salvaged a lot of goodwill. Mosharraf Zaidi, political commentator in Islamabad, said, “Kayani’s deft handling of the Swat crisis helped turn the tide in favour of an overarching national narrative of support for a military fighting to protect Pakistanis from the threat of Taliban thugs overrunning the country.”

In the past few weeks, Kayani has closely supervised the consensus to replace the 17th amendment of the Pakistan constitution with the 18th, effectively moving the Pakistani system back to the 1973 constitution and a parliamentary democracy. This means Zardari can’t gather any more powers , having surrendering many in the last year, including the nuclear command authority.

If the constitutional amendment goes through, Gilani will be more relevant than Zardari and Kayani will find it much easier to control the levers of Pakistan. But more significantly , because Kayani is proceeding without the hoopla that accompanied Musharraf’s actions, and is keeping the other generals in the army in the loop, his actions, though just as autocratic, have greater acceptability within Pakistan.

The US, for all its democratic avowals, was the first to read the tea leaves. In March 2008, the Americans ‘selected’ Kayani for the US Army Command and General Staff College’s International Hall of Fame. “The hall honors those officers of United States allies’ militaries who have attained the highest command positions in their national service component or within their nation’s armed forces,” the citation said.

BLEED INDIA But even as Kayani wowed the West, he turned the heat on India. The word was out: India was fair game again, particularly in Afghanistan. The Haqqani network-executed terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008 was a direct result of this and there was little attempt to cover the trail that led back to the Pakistan army. By the time 26/11 happened, it was clear in India that Lashkar-e-Taiba had been blessed by the army. In 2009, the embassy in Kabul was attacked again, and in 2010, Indian civilians in Afghanistan are sitting ducks for Pakistan-supported terror.

In the immediate aftermath of 26/11, when Manmohan Singh made the unprecedented request to Pakistan to send its DG-ISI , Shuja Pasha, Kayani torpedoed it, saying “The Indians will be asking me to go next.” In the present context of resumed talks, top Indian officials say Kayani is not particularly interested in exploring any new engagement; for him maintaining tension is more important.

The jury is still out on how far Kayani will go in allowing groups like LeT and HuJI to carry on their activities against India, with ISI support. Pakistan refuses to acknowledge Indian concerns on LeT, saying instead that the more India focuses on LeT, the more difficult things will get. The US and other countries have read out the riot act to Kayani several times on these groups. But as Kayani said, “Pakistan’s long-term national interests would never be sacrificed for someone else’s short-term interests”.

THE TROUBLE WITH TERROR And yet, nobody possibly knows better than he the intricate connections between these groups and how they’re spawning daily terror in Pakistan itself.

Terrorism is, and will remain, Pakistan’s weak spot, and its encouragement will always be counter-productive . Despite the campaigns against the Pakistan Taliban, the army continues to maintain an ambivalent posture of tolerance towards these groups. If Musharraf was attacked by Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2003, Kayani himself was the target of an assassination plot by Ilyas Kashmiri in May 2009. Even today, HuJI leaders, Kashmiri and Saifullah Akhtar, are operating from South Waziristan and carrying out terror attacks in Punjab with the help of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. But somehow, the Pak army continues to believe these groups can be controlled.

For India, it’s clear that as long as terror groups from Pakistan attack India with help from its military-intelligence complex, it will remain focused on terrorism. With virtually no official engagement between India and the Pakistan army, New Delhi’s in a bizarre situation where Kayani appears to have assumed the role of chief interlocutor for Pakistan with the rest of the world, but not India.

There’s a view that India needs to make a greater public effort to engage the Pakistan army. But the signals are mixed. On the one hand, ISI chief Shuja Pasha’s “dropping in” at the Indian high commissioner, Sharat Sabharwal’s iftaar party, was a potent invite to India. But on the other, the Pakistan army has by and large been reluctant to defreeze relations with its Indian counterparts. India had proposed polo matches between the armies about a year ago, but there was no response from Pakistan.

PLAYING THE AFGHAN CARD It’s with the Taliban that Kayani is playing a high stakes game. Given that he doesn’t want a regime in Kabul that is ‘unfriendly’ to Islamabad, it follows that he will seek to orchestrate and control reconciliation efforts with the Taliban . Karzai too was doing some “reconciliation” himself, negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Omar’s No. 2 in the Quetta Shura (which runs the most powerful arm of the Afghan Taliban), when the ISI “captured” him in Karachi. In the weeks since, Pakistan has captured nine of the 18 members of the Shura. One of the theories doing the rounds is that Kayani didn’t want Karzai to upstage him in negotiating with the Taliban, and the swoop on Baradar was aimed at pre-empting any deal between the Afghan president and the Taliban.

Last week Karzai and Kayani, in reciprocal visits, came to an understanding. Baradar could be handed over to Karzai with an understanding that Pakistan has first dibs at this game. Sirajuddin Haqqani of the Haqqani network is Pakistan’s favourite Taliban leader, and ideally, Kayani would like him to be part of the power sharing arrangement in Kabul. But here too, by killing off Sirajuddin’s brother, Kayani has made it clear as to who’s the boss.

Will Kayani deliver al-Qaeda to the US? And at what price? The British are content to play the Pakistan game, but the Americans are yet to be fully convinced. India is out of this one, but has a strong interest in seeing that the Taliban is not part of Kabul with their ideology intact.

HOW LONG WILL HE BE CHIEF? Kayani has many irons in the fire. But if things go as scheduled , the army chief is set to hang up his gloves in November 2010. Will he? The Obama surge in Afghanistan will be in full bloom and without Pakistani assistance, it is unlikely to work. Kayani has become Washington’s man and to make the same investment in a successor at the height of the battle might be difficult. So they may want to see him stay on.

Pakistan’s politics is notoriously fragile and unlikely to sort itself out, and even if Zardari and Nawaz Sharif stop acting like vicious boys, Kayani has emerged as something of a sheet anchor in Pakistan. Pakistan’s future relevance hangs on whether Kayani can ‘manage’ to successfully influence the Taliban reconciliation programme in Afghanistan to keep Pakistan in play there.

That will need Kayani’s combined skills as soldier and spy, along with American and British cheerleaders, to pull it off. Kayani’s chief task now is to bring about an agreement among his fellow generals that he should stay on – he’s more inclined to go down this road than take the my-way-orthe-highway approach of Musharraf.

In what is seen as a test case, ISI boss Shuja Pasha was given a year’s extension last week. Zardari has let out that he has offered Kayani a two-year extension as well. If Kayani agrees, does that also give Zardari some space? Will it be greeted with a sense of relief in Islamabad and Washington? Most important , will he be able to build some sort of ‘collegiate consensus’ in favour of his continuity, which would mean his colleagues agreeing to sacrifice their chances?

Many within the Indian establishment believe Kayani may be biding his time before he edges out Zardari and take over as president.

But if Kayani does go, who’ll take his place? The name most frequently mentioned is Khalid Shamim Wynne, commander of the Quetta-based 12th Corps, with few ties to extremists, but more experience against India. Others in the running are Mohammed Mustafa Khan, chief of general staff; Nadeem Taj, commander 30thCorps, who preceded Pasha as ISI chief but is considered too close to the Taliban; and Tahir Mehmood, head of 10th Corps.

But for the moment, Kayani-controlled Pakistan is playing a good game with very few cards in hand. India would do well to watch the moves closely

The Supreme Court of Pakistan released the NRO (National Reconciliation Ordinance) 2007 Detailed Judgement in which it struck down the controversial NRO law.

The complete judgement can be downloaded from here (NRO Detailed Judgement)  [6.2MB - PDF File]

I’ve always advocated, that the progress of any nation can be gauged by the efficiency and adaptation of technology by its shipping and courier companies. With the mobile / Internet age now at high-noon, how are our shipping companies fairing up?

Let me start reverse, the best out there is TCS, then perhaps OCS and then everyone else. But that is unfortunately where the good of it all ends.
Even in developing countries (Sri Lanka is an example, Maldives is another), the technology available at the walk-in center of any courier company would outshine its Pakistani counterpart many lumens over.

I still do not understand why consumer based packaging and labeling still not provided to the consumer. First of all, there is a ridiculous requirement at TCS (since I haven’t walked into OCS / Leopard in a long time, I cannot say, but I am assuming they are also playing follow the leader). Coming back to the stupid requirement. They need to see the envelope that I am sending ‘unsealed’ (I understand security concerns but ???)

Everything you bring there has unsealed (read: opened). Once the security guy checks it – only then will they allow you to close it.

Just to play a prank, one of these days, I will send a courier to the CEO of TCS, in a letter filled with talcum powder, which easily could have been anthrax. That would be the ultimate definition of a loophole in security.

Anyways, ask TCS for bubble-packaging sheets – and chances are they will stare blankly at you. The list is quite large…

• Security checks are a joke.
• You cannot transport a laptop – and the insurance premium is 8% (true as of 19th July, 2009, as indicated by TCS Shahrah-e-Faisal branch).
• No courier service offers tapes for sales, various sized boxes, packaging material, strong box material, tear-proof sheets, etc.
• Labeling material is not provided for.
• No courier company offers downloadable software for businesses to generate their own labels for the outgoing mail
• Bulk checking against their system is not offered, i.e. if a business has sent out 100 letters using the courier company’s software (let’s assume it is available), then there is no way to check in bulk from the software itself, the status and delivery confirmation.
• SMS based confirmations still not offered by industry. At time of booking a cell number can be taken, and you can be notified when your parcel/letter is signed for and delivered (this is such a simple application).
• 2D bar codes if generated by the client cannot be read by any courier company, albeit from what I hear Speedex is doing trials on this – rumor? I don’t know. The source is shallow.
• Peanut packaging material is not available.
• Insurance rates for high-value items is very high.
• Delivery updated are far and long.

For small industries to survive or even e-commerce based shops to thrive, sending small (volume sized) pieces of shipments in an effective manner is still something to be achieved.

I personally asked some website owners who are operating fantastic local e-commerce stores, if they had their trust in the courier service. None of them responded positively. They so much so had to rely on stocking in different part of the country and use their own runners, etc. for effective delivery services.

Another thing the courier companies can look into are mobile phone with cameras, and phone that allow 3rd party apps to be written for them. With cellphone cameras, you can take a snapshot of the bar code, have it read by the app written on the phone and then text this in a compressed manner to the central site, this is perhaps the fastest way to acknowledge that a parcel has been picked up or delivered. Even with the unreliability of SMS, apps exist to make sure the full-circle of communication takes place (for example if confirmation code is not received by the phone, it will try again) and vice-versa.

Courier services have been broken down to the basic functionality that of the post man. Try a package delivery and then see the ‘haalat’ in which it arrives at the destination. In FedEx you can get a FedEx envelope, various sizes boxes, tear-proof envelopes, tubes, etc. what does TCS or any other courier company give you in return for your postal needs?

What about 2nd day delivery or low priority delivery? None of it exists sadly. The courier companies sure need to get their act together and innovate, without which, we will see them as simply a replacement of Pakistan Postal Service.

One other point I must mention, as part of the courier companies grooming services, it must ensure that its employees wear deodorant. Because of the running around all day along in the field and sweating, wearing an anti-anti-perspirant / deodorant should be on top of their agenda.

We must realize the world in which we live in today moves two things: atoms and electrons. Atoms being the physical goods and electrons being the electronic Ones and Zeros on our digital infrastructure. We have adapted the electronic highway very well and are continuing to improve life on it. However, we still need physical goods, in order for us to become more efficient as a society on the whole, we need to remove inefficiencies and the stale-progress graphs and innovate and implement cutting edge technologies within our daily fabric. Failing to do so, will result in a totally disparate nation with two economies, the super-efficient digital economy and the super-inefficient physical economy.

For our futures sake, I hope we can hammer some sense into these courier companies, logistic companies and shipping companies.

Before I elaborate, let me quickly summarize. There was excess liquidity in the market, money was made available to almost anyone, people started getting 2nd and 3rd mortgages (when they really could not afford more than one). As everyone was out hunting for properties to invest, home prices soared. Wall Street got into the action. Hedge funds, money market funds, and God knows anything that could be carved out of such a booming-liquid-money-house-based-mortgage-lending-economy, was carved. The bubble burst. Then the downfall happened of which we all know about.

I am no economist – not even close. But for over 10+ years, I’ve kept a VERY close eye on a very specific segment of commercial real-estate: data-centers.

As more and more people get laid off, companies will continue to cut down costs. As costs are cut down, office/building expansion, etc. are also cut down. When people are out of a job, credit card defaults are bound to happen. When people don’t spend money, commercial businesses will get hit… and that is the Second Wave.

Soon enough you will see a lot of commercial building loans go into default. Right now we’ve been seeing home-loans gone bad, I bet you will be seeing commercial loans go bad pretty soon.

For any reversal of fortune, the first step is the slowdown, which we have already experienced, the send step is the stopping – which we are experiencing right now. The third would be the reversal itself. This I believe has started quietly. Nothing big yet, but this commercial default snowball is now becoming bigger and bigger.

Datacenters expansion by Google and Microsoft for example have been stalled. More and more emphasis is being applied now to pack more servers/gear into the same available space (blade servers, cloud computing, etc.)

Go-green options are huge. Large datacenters can get connected to grid in excess of 50Megawatts. Some exceed 100Megawatts. All signs and indications right now in the commercial datacenter markets is of a steep slowdown. Those with a lot of liquidity, are on a buying spree to grab land which is being offered at an unprecedented low rate. As we are now an electronic economy, this commercial vertical is seeing a lot of consolidation happen. The real-world brick-and-mortar companies are shuttering down a whole lot faster than you and I can fathom. Circuit City – gone bust! More and more are coming. Coffee sales at Starbucks have gone down significantly – imagine what the neighborhood coffee shop is experiencing. Casinos are laying off people. Which in turn affects the rental market in Las Vegas, which affects the new housing projects that are coming up – when the market goes under, a commercial default is imminent.

Look at all the advertisements of all the grand-land projects that use to come out in Dawn. All gone now. No more double-full page advertisements. All gone. Come to think of it – I hardly see any new tower coming up. Those that are already in the build – have slowed down. The Centaurus in Islamabad is in trouble. So is the Grand Hyatt Project in Islamabad. By trouble – it’s always financial. Commercial office and residential projects in Karachi are equally affected. Whatever happened to Emaar’s expansion plans – on hold I bet.

Year 2009 is not going to be easy by any ways or means. For Pakistan, it will be a whole lot tougher. Water shortage will have a serious impact on agriculture this year. Note it down. I will revisit and put a “told-you-so” in the comments a few months from now. Electricity woes will be almost unbearable come this summer. A lot more projects within Pakistan will be facing serious crisis as the months progress. I wish I had some good news, but the fact of the matter is – people are just not prepared for the storm that is coming.

So, we have decided to name our small data-centers after the Karakoram Range, in particular the peaks. The First one we are initiating is going to be called K2 (i.e Mount Godwin Austin), and henceforth as we keep naming them, we will keep assigning the names of the Karakoram peaks to them.

The reasoning behind naming them after our majestic mountain peaks is because they are one great asset of this country. They are our primary water supply, they can easily be cited as the nature’s greatest wonders, and also offer us various forms of natural protection. The same sense goes into our data-center. It’s our (i.e. our company’s) greatest asset, it’s our valued resource and in some manner, our peak.

So – with this – once the data-center is ready for business, we shall aptly christen it as K2.

Of late we have been sourcing equipment for the data center. Having servers, routers, parts, accessories, cables, drives, processors, switches, firewalls, power plugs, etc. picked up from various countries and cities across the world. The ONLY company worth mentioning is Fedex. We initiated a Fedex corporate account a couple of months back. It has been nothing short of a lifesaver for us. For example when we were buying KVM switches, from a small distributor in Texas. We did a wire-transfer for the money, and for equipment pickup – we simply gave our Fedex number to the company. It was as simple as that. No need to make an invoice, no other details. Simply provide the Fedex number. The Fedex man arrives, picks up the goods, and labels them, etc. and delivers them to our door step in Karachi. If customs clearance is required – that too is taken care of by our local clearing agent.

The whole process is so simple. Yes, it is expensive, but Fedex today has by far the best coverage. I use to think DHL and TNT were the prevailing tigers of Asia, but that is not so true anymore. DHL, when we wanted to open a corporate account with them in Pakistan, just kept on giving us the run-around, today the sales guy is coming. Tomorrow the sales guy is coming. I mean I literally had to call up their office so many times, citing I want to become a corporate customer. I guess we were not important enough. With Fedex, – everything was SO professional. Next day their sales rep came to us. Explained to us the entire process and we were up and running within a couple of days. I haven’t looked back since. We’ve even had shipments weighing up to 250Kgs be picked up and delivered. Such is the cool efficiency of Fedex.

I wish other courier companies can also get their act together like this. A good example is to use a friend to call their own companies and initiate a sales query and see how your own team responds. I will admit one thing for sure, I NEVER was a fan of Fedex. I thought DHL was the coolest company in the world to work with, however, all that changed with one experience.

This year, I decided to write a letter and write to the very top, i.e. the two CEOs of Ebay and PayPal, John Donahoe & Scott Thompson.

Rather than just email, I decided to formally send a letter and Fedex’d it to them. The letters were delivered yesterday. Now it is a wait and see – as to what they will say.

John Donahoe
President and CEO
eBay Inc.
2145 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, CA 95125
USA

Subject: PayPal for Pakistan

Dear Mr. Donahoe,

I understand you are someone who is immensely busy and have thousands of other important issues to deal with, but I thought I’d try my luck with you. I’ve been writing to PayPal / eBay since 2002 regarding issuance of PayPal accounts for Pakistan, in 2005 I started including eBay in my correspondences to include eBay accounts for Pakistan.

I have never received a reply back. Twice in the past, I received a reply back (filed via customer services) that my ‘complaint’ has been lodged and PayPal will look into it. Other than that, have not gotten a satisfactory reply.

The issue – simple. Why is eBay / PayPal not being offered for Pakistan?

I just finished reading an article on your hand-on approach in TIME Magazine (Issue 12 January 2009 – Asian Edition, Page 35, written by Kristina Dell), it simply compelled me to get on the computer and write another letter to eBay / PayPal. The article gave me hope (again!)

Pakistan – purely from your business perspective may not be that big of an economy, but it surely has an economy that is larger and more active than Bhutan, Chad, Honduras, Somalia, Maldives, Rwanda, Uganda, Yemen —combined!

If these countries can have the privilege of obtaining a PayPal account, why not Pakistan?

As Pakistanis cannot legally have a PayPal account, 1000s of users here circumvent the system and obtain PayPal IDs from their friends and relatives abroad to use and conduct commerce. This should be of no surprise to you.

The same can be said about eBay.

Like I cited, we may not be that big on your radar, perhaps we’re not even equated to a blip, but a country of 170 Million, to be blatantly ignored (you may agree or disagree on my choice of words, if the above mentioned countries can have PayPal, I’d like to know what piece of legislation, law, banking infrastructure, etc. prevents eBay/PayPal from including Pakistan under your countries-in-which-you-work umbrella).

Pakistan’s predominant trading Partner happens to be the US. Within respect to both imports and exports (discounting oil).

The first time I experienced eBay and PayPal in the summer of 2001 whilst briefly working in the US – I was mesmerized to say the least. Till date, I wish we had the privilege of conducting business on a website so many take for granted.

This is not meant to be a protest letter by any means. In fact it is one of a very humble request. A request whose time has come, and was long overdue. I have in the past cited my willingness to help, providing information or getting eBay / PayPal connected to Banks, regulators, whomsoever you would like to meet. I am, in no way proposing or advocating a ‘role’ for myself – my intention is just to help.

Is it too much to think that perhaps this one letter will get the ball rolling. Or if the ball is already rolling, yield the desired result. Will this letter be tacked on your things-to-do board and actually get done with? Is this the right time to plead the case for my country?

I’ll end my letter with a quote from Dale Carnegie (sorry, couldn’t find a befitting Irish quote) “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”

I just want to be able to have an eBay and a PayPal account from Pakistan. In the event you want to reach me, the easiest way is via email, my personal email address is babushka99@gmail.com and official email address is faisal@nacspl.com
Regards,

FAISAL KHAN
CEO
Net Access Communication Systems (Private) Limited
Karachi, Pakistan.

CC: Mr. Scott Thompson, President, PayPal.

MNAs and MPAs, et. al. today act like they are above the law and everything else. Like they are not accountable. Like we (the very people for putting them in power) are stupid. That we are gullible (I have to agree on that), that we simply need to be told and kept in the dark. Do MNAs/MPAs obey traffic rules? Get cited for breaking them? How much ‘free/complimentary’ stuff/services do they get? Do they report the same? Do we have a log / progress report of our elected priests/priestess of how many minutes they spent debating or how many hours they have logged in the National or Provincial assemblies? What was their attendance rate? What’s the ‘progress’ report? How effective / efficient have they been since in power. Do they set an example of what they preach in rallies? Why cannot an MNA/MPA be held accountable for the people, by the people? Why must one shudder at the very thought of questioning an elected official. Does anyone have the balls to go up to an MNA or MPA who is driving with guards – and ask them to produce the license for their weapons? And what about the violation of displaying of arms in public? Can they be charged for it? What about petrol theft (you would be SURPRISED at how many MNAs and MPAs get free petrol/diesel – its not actually free – but consider that to be the way – as the elected official is not paying for it).

Why cannot we hold our politicians accountable? Why must we restrict our conversations regarding our disgust for elected officials at luncheons and dinner parties. Why not in a more accountable manner and platform? Even a neutral TV appearance with a simple Yes/No list of 20 basic questions would be a good start. I know this is wishful thinking – but it would be a start.

We have been brought to (or maybe it is just me) to think that Kashmir will ALWAYS be ours – it is a rightful part of Pakistan. To think otherwise would be unpatriotic. Well, I’d like to speak my mind. These are my opinions and what I found out – slowly but surely, a lot of people share this too.

Kashmir happened before me – so I really don’t give two hoots about it. I was led (read: brain fed) to believe it is our most important problem. It is absolutely not. It certainly ain’t on my radar anywhere. Never was – probably never will be. We have four provinces: Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan and North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Does – adding a 5th one make us any better – no. I don’t think so. In fact if we did not have Kashmir altogether, we’d we far better off. We spend Billion of Rupees a year (if not Billions of Dollars) for the past god knows how many decades to wage a guerrilla war, proximity war with the Indians and they do the same. What the fuck for? So we can plan a flag in the valley and say – this too now is ours? I don’t think so.

I don’t suppose a visit to the valley will change that either. Sure, I would probably be blow away by its beauty, etc. but so will a visit to Christchurch. Kashmiris always have referred to themselves as ‘Kashmiris’… I have NEVER ONCE come across a Kashmiri who considers themselves a Pakistan.

I for one say – let it go – surprise the daylights out of the world and more importantly the Indians and let it go. Fuck Jamaat-e-Islaami who will bitch and crib about it. These Mullah Monkeys will eventually settle down. Forget the Army Jawan who has now perfected killing – yes, he will have to be laid off. Lets for once close our borders. The Kashmiris can wage their own battles with the Indian and their law/rule. We have a problem at hand keeping a hold of our 160 Million or whatever the current population number is, what are we going to do with the absorption of more people. More trouble if you ask me.

Let Kashmir go,

Let us concentrate on the problems at hand, which are economic in nature. We keep striking for Kashmir and Palestine, etc. One will get rid of Kashmir – and when it comes to Palestine, do the Arab really give a flying fuck about Kashmir? I bet you they cannot even point their compass in the right direction let alone locate it – and the same goes for our politicians who have used Palestine as a reason to bitch and crib about. This ‘Muslim’ brotherhood we keep talking about is more shattered than the Dracula’s glass. Who are we fooling? I need the Government to concentrate on economics. To concentrate on development. To concentrate on getting a new land-law in place. To work on alternative energy. To start a ‘jihad’ against illiteracy. To have a massive drive to increase our sciences and engineering penetration in our scholastic youth. We need scientists and engineers in order to possibly survive the next 50 years. MBAs and Lawyer movements will simply not survive. As an engineer – I view this simply as BS. At the end of the day today, EVERYTHING you touch is either made possible by a scientist or an engineer. Think about it – everything.

I really don’t want to hear how Kashmir is our problem. It is not my fellow Pakistanis – it never was. The Kashmiris can have their own Kashmiristan or whatever the they want to call it. I would like to just say – Not In My Backyard (NIMBY).

People of Pakistan are confused which side on the stamp to spit on!!!!

Courtesy: SFI