Marina Lewycka’s delightful, but also sad little novel ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’ tells the story of an 84-year old Ukrainian émigré engineer in England who falls in love with a 36-year old glamorous divorcee gold-digger, Valentina, also Ukrainian, who wants to immigrate to the UK. As part of the ‘deal’ under which Valentina lets the old man touch her now and again, he has not only to improve her immigrant status by marrying her, he also has to buy her a car. He has very little money so they settle on a used but shiny 3-litre Rover with “leather seats that smell of expensive cigars, a walnut dashboard and 186,000 miles on the clock”.
The car breaks down on the very first day with a broken clutch. While the poor old man scrapes together enough money, even borrowing from his married daughters to have the car repaired every time it breaks down, Valentina starts to refer to it as ‘crap car’.
Well, sirs, the Pakistan-assembled cars we have to suffer more than meet the criteria of ‘crap cars’ when compared with the used cars coming into the country or with cars made by the same parent companies elsewhere in the world. I should know because I have now had the misfortune of owning not one, but bloody fool me, two of them, brand-new: the first a diesel Toyota Corolla and the second a CNG-fitted Suzuki Liana; and the greatest pleasure of owning one Japanese-made Toyota Vitz, three-years old when I bought it with 35,240 kilometres on the clock. The difference between the locally assembled brand-new ‘crap cars’ and the Japanese-made used Vitz is, as said in the vernacular, one between the sky and the earth.
The Toyota’s noisy engine shuddered like no one’s business, the paint began to come off in the first month, its glove compartment got stuck every other day and its brakes were so bad it just would not stop when they were applied, resulting in three crashes, the last one totalling the car. The Suzuki only stopped wobbling violently until I changed the tyres and wheels at considerable expense, the brakes are as bad as those on the Toyota and the paint is not only coming off, it has little scratches on it despite the loving care with which the car is looked after. It has done 35,000 kilometres only and already the front suspension is creaking and groaning and making sounds as if it were just about to crack/come apart. Of course it has been to the dealer’s three times, and every time came back with the dealer insisting there is nothing wrong with it. I might add that the car is used for the Wah-Islamabad the Beautiful school-run on the motorway; it has never been used on country roads, ever.
Needless to say, the dealership where you take your car for service/repairs does not, perish the thought, offer you a ‘courtesy car’ to use while yours is in the workshop as is the custom everywhere else in the world. We are Pakistani you see, and must therefore do everything our own unique way.
The question we must ask, however, is how the Pakistani assemblers and the Japanese parent companies get away with supplying ‘crap cars’ to the Pakistani market when they would dare not do so in any other country; and how they can get away with the pathetic after-sales service that they provide in this country? Obviously because there is no effective watchdog to protect the poor consumer and the government departments which should keep an eye on the manufacturers are hand-in-glove with the manufacturers/assemblers. Note please that the Toyota sold in India or in Thailand is so much better than our version. So what else is new?
I started my piece with a mention of the Crap Cars because there is an increasing crescendo in the press, obviously orchestrated by vested interests, for the government to ban the import of used cars so that the interests may have access to a completely captive market. The very least the government can do is to not toe this line so that there is some competition, which is the only way the local cars will improve. Give the Seth a protected market and he will skin the consumer mercilessly. Specially when the government has abdicated all responsibility in this respect too, and dances only to his tune.
Meanwhile, many tons of plastic bags and much raw sewage has flowed under the Ravi bridge since my last article on Dick ‘The Sneer’ Cheney’s visit to the Fatherland; the American ambassador has been “called” to the Hotel Scheherezade to listen to our mandarins whine about how unkind it was of ‘The Sneer’ to actually tell journalists while he was still in Pakistan that he had given our Commando a “tough” message to do more in the so-called “war on terror”; and the news from the United States is uniformly bad for the junta.
In an effort to blunt this most recent assault the Letter Writers are out in force, extolling Pervez Musharraf and his government for doing everything possible and bad-mouthing the Americans for bad-mouthing him.
So what else is new, and why in the world should we expect any better when our antecedents as a rentier and a mercenary state are so well established that it is embarrassing — remember the many millions of scrumptious Dollars the CIA paid us for selling them “terrorists”, some as young as 12 years, at 5000 a pop? Of course, this is not to say that Pakistan should not do its all to banish terrorism from the country completely, it is only to point out that the government is seen to act only when the Americans deliver another kick up de’ bum. Case in point: the arrest of Mullah Obaidullah the former ‘Defence Minister’ of the Taliban just as soon as ‘The Sneer’ delivered the latest one.
I am told by a reader (who shall remain anonymous at his specific request) apropos my column ‘If it walks like a duck...’ (Daily Times, March 1), in which I had once again implored Pervez Musharraf to truly reconcile the country so that it may face the challenges united: “Please accept my sincerest apology for what I am going to say next because I mean no insult or disrespect to you whatsoever; I know you have recorded your advice of national reconciliation for posterity, but if you think that there is even an iota of a chance that the General will follow your advice, then Sir, I welcome you to my 150 million strong citizens CBF (Complete Bloody Fools) club”. May I once again request the General to see the reality for what it is and to put the country above his own desire to rule forever.