MERRY MEADOWS - Chapter 5 - The zIG zAG of Life

Back to the Present 

Perhaps it’s just a case of becoming comfortable writing about the subject, and finding the right storyline. The Lord, our Creator, blesses us with intelligence in installments, it is said. We all subconsciously await that one installment that constitutes the tipping point, yielding critical mass in comprehension, and opening the floodgates of performance.

In the case of the TCS Book my route to that tipping point lay in the periodical Connect. Incrementally my comfort zone with TCS increased. I made the transition from rank outsider to insider, while remaining in essence an outsider in keeping with my Consultant status. It afforded me the freedom to move freely and work at my own pace, observing and experiencing from up close, and then moving away to take a detached bird’s eye view of a 24/7 business with no respite that keeps everyone’s nose to the grind, a grind that all concerned take ownership of and genuinely appear to enjoy their days and nights at work.

Being correspondent and editor of TCS Connect enabled me to engage with the world of TCS as well, a world of valued customers that encompassed everything and everybody that was Pakistani both at home and abroad. Through Connect I met with people whom otherwise I would normally never have interacted with. They enriched me, and grew me with their stories, with their tales of valour and courage, and accomplishment in the face of daunting odds.

My personal growth during this period has been phenomenal. Some would say it has come late in life, in the sixth decade of my existence. As a writer, yes, I am guilty of being a late bloomer. For while I have written much in the past, and seen published much of that which I have written, I have never been able to make an adequate living out of it, given an inherited lifestyle the maintaining of which has defined ‘adequate’.

Zig Zag of Life

Fortunately I have had the privilege of an inheritance to lean on in my quest for being a writer. My inheritance has included the roof over my head, placing me at an enormous advantage, for isn’t that what the vast majority struggle to achieve through their life’s work, with the lucky few managing to secure it before retirement comes around.

The inheritance not withstanding, the pressure to be a meaningful breadwinner for my family in my own right has been incessant, and has had me try my hand at different ventures that I have pursued to their logical conclusions, normally in lieu of monetary loss due to an inability to operate under the table.

The draw of the entrepreneur within me, and the extremely inhospitable conditions in the business world for a new entrant, has led me off the beaten path time and again, and yielded most often a bumpy ride financially, even though I have enjoyed and regaled in the sheer thrill of the pursuit. But it has not amused my family that has had to bear the brunt of the fiscal austerity that self-employment invariably entails, until of course one hits the big time, which one never may, making do with austere bread and butter pursuits for the most part.

Contrary to popular belief amongst family and friends, I have never been averse to a 9 to 5 routine. The question that has arisen on several occasions is why haven’t I sought regular employment? Why have I stayed so fixated on self-employment? Why didn’t I, for instance, sit the civil service exam after my graduation and follow in the footsteps of my father and uncles? Why didn’t I opt for completing my MBA and joining a multinational like most of my friends from the Karachi University days did? The answer to these questions lies in three words, one of Korean extraction, and the other two of English. Democracy, Taekwondo and Squash.

When came time for me to sit the civil service exam in the year 1975, Pakistan’s bureaucracy was under savage attack, with the best and brightest taken out of the equation through the infamous 303 and 1400 lists drawn up by the martial law regime. Two of my uncles were on the 303 list, and the atmosphere in our joint family house in Karachi on Kashmir Road was vitiated by anger and resentment.

The old order civil servant was trained to say no to his or her political masters, and ensure that the greater interest of the state prevailed when faced with political expediency. The new order, having rid the country of more than fifty percent of its population, was in no mood to brook opposition to its nefarious designs, and wanted feudal ‘munshis’ and not powerful representatives of the state, as one article in the Dawn magazine put it.

To my impressionable twenty-one year old mind that was reason enough to discount the civil service as a career option. So, instead of the civil service exam I opted to sit for the Institute of Business Administration’s Aptitude Test, considered to be the toughest competitive exam of the time. I made the cut for the two years MBA program, gaining the approval of my family, which was the whole idea.

In the old order for a boy to become a man he had to prove his mettle by making the grade in what was known as the Central Superior Services exams for the much prized government employment in the Civil Service of Pakistan. If his scores gained him entry into the District Management Group, even the Foreign Service, he earned his stripes and became a matter of pride for the family, and a most eligible bachelor to boot. But that paradigm had been shattered by Bhutto. The bright sparks, who would normally be sitting the CSS exam, were leaving the shores of Pakistan in droves. The few who opted to stay were looking for corporate, not government employment.

A corporate career, with all its outward manifestations of glitz and glamour, was a foregone conclusion, except in my case I was making a high six figure monthly income while still in the MBA’s first semester, while entry level salaries for MBA graduates were no more than 15,000 rupees per month at the time.

The Taekwondo business that I had set up while still an undergraduate was flourishing in no uncertain terms, and I would have quit the MBA program in the first semester had it not been for my mother’s desire for me to complete my Master’s, a desire that I failed to meet regrettably. But I did stay on for another two semesters, before finally calling it quits.

While Taekwondo provided for me the initial boost in terms of critical self-belief in the making of money as a first generation businessman, it was my association with squash and the emergence of Jahangir Khan that decided for me sports management as the line I wished to pursue, with Mark McCormack and his International Management Group as role model.

The route to becoming a writer lies through many different terrain. While I was putting Karachi’s citizenry, young and old, through its paces in Taekwondo uniforms in over fifteen club franchises, KNA was crisscrossing the globe as a flight engineer in Pakistan International Airlines. TCS was as yet a few years away from being born.    

Merry Meadows - Memoirs of an entrepreneur