I met a longstanding client for lunch at the British Library. I’ve worked with him for years now, but this is the first time we met. He studies Ethiopia and was lamenting that he had to redo bits of his recently-completed monograph after the political changes in the country, with Abiy taking power. Fortunately none of his findings are affected, so it’s mostly language changes. Brexit will affect him and his partner signficantly, as one is English and the other European, and we talked for a bit about the self-satisfaction one finds in the UK and that surely underpins the vote for many. Then we talked about Malaysia, which like Ethiopia is grappling with a new government when all the machinery of the state is designed to support what the new government stands again. Not a comparison that had occurred to me before today, but an interesting one.
The fourth vote, that we didn’t talk about but is very much on my mind, is Pakistan’s general election tomorrow. I hope it all goes well. I am worried. I did listen to a good discussion of it today which gave me a a few little glimmers of hope, that this election will cement the fact that all the parties have an interest in the democratic process; that the only left-leaning party of note, the PPP, is not dead as a nationwide force; that voting in elections are very clearly moving away from biradari politics towards issues (and perhaps eventually manifestos), and that the quality of discussion and analysis is very high indeed. Not on TV or the Whatsapp groups, but at least there is some maturity somewhere.
There was one good anecdote on the show. When Najam Sethi, who was the publisher of The Friday Times and had a TV show for a while, interviewed Asif Zardari and asked about Bilawal Bhutto (his son and the young leader by right of birth of the PPP) and his inability to speak much Urdu. Asif Zardari gave his glinting Cheshire Cat smile that every Pakistani knows well and said, ‘The boy will learn. Look at me, I learned Sindhi as a child in Nawabshah, Urdu when I went to Karachi, English when I went to London, and when I was in prison for 8 years I learned Punjabi.’
Aside from the lunch it was a successful day overall, as I came back with:
- a dark grey tank top
- a dark grey linen t-shirt
- a dark green wrap top of a type I had been searching for
- 40 probiotic capsules (I know, I know, it’s mostly nonsense, but I have reasons)
- a ‘soft’ foot file and foot cream
- two functioning credit cards
- cash for the person who is mending my trousers
- returned trousers to another shop
- two little travel bottles
The one failure was to come away without a sports bra.