No ajinomoto please

There’s much to celebrate in Pakistan on this Eid. The metro bus is up and running in the twin cities, despite an unanticipated and rather wet hiccup, experienced when the recent torrential downpour in the capital managed to convert Jinnah Avenue into a mini river and its underground metro walkways into flooded culverts.
Bloomberg has congratulated Pakistan in a report applauding the approximately 27 percent increase in infrastructure achieved by the current government. There have been some dazzling performances on the cricketing field. The Karachi operation is by and large successful and there is anecdotal and confirmed evidence that terror and terrorists have suffered some major blows in the port city and around the country.
The momentous Chinese economic corridor agreement has been signed and is now geared up for its implementation phase. In a surprise about-face Modi has extended the olive branch to Sharif who, befuddled yet gracious, has eagerly accepted the cosmetic bonhomie of his mercurial counterpart across the border. We have joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation together with India, which is bound to have a positive impact on our relations with our bigger neighbour. And Iran’s landmark agreement with the US and the rest of the world means Pakistan can now go ahead with the gas deal and expand economic relations with Teheran.
All bodes well – provided we don’t exercise our customary excellence to botch opportunities that offer themselves.
I want to talk about the Chinese. They have landed and are in our midst. Across Islamabad, in particular, their population has grown slowly but surely. In the daytime, their alert, serious and focused demeanours are witnessed across the business landscape of the city, as they struggle in mostly broken English to convey their points of view or decipher ours. In the evenings, in groups, they appear in sports attire, in each and every park and walking trail across the city, stretching and exercising their lithe athletic bodies, engaging in banter and regarding us, their hosts, with expressions of guarded amusement that are perhaps too often mistaken by us for general cheerfulness. With their arrival, their private kitchens and restaurants have also mushroomed in the capital city, much to the delight of this writer whose many vices include an indefensible partiality for Chinese cuisine.
We have celebrated the Chinese deal and described it in the unchanging and silly rhetoric of our long-standing ties and till-death-do-us part friendship. That’s always been our political and social comprehension of the Chinese – the staunch ally that only wants to provide unstinting support, because, well, we are the good guys after all. That superficial understanding is much like our flawed appreciation of the Chinese cuisine, which for decades has meant for us any boneless meat and vegetable dish that is first stir-fried in generous quantities of oil, great dollops of monosodium glutamate, copious amounts of soya bean sauce; and then stewed in chicken stock, that is thickened excessively with corn flour, till it finally achieves the appearance and the consistency of a grey or brown glutinous coagulate, and is served up with greasy rice or even greasier noodles.
MSG or ajinomoto, as it is popularly identified in our lingua franca, is the secret component, and over the years our romance with this cancerous condiment has reached such heights of ignorance that we now utilise it to mask and enhance the taste of every one of our local and foreign culinary concoctions. And herein lies the problem: MSG is camouflage. It is subterfuge designed to achieve the feel-good effect, an ingredient introduced to distract the palate from the faulty recipe and the cook’s inability to know what went wrong. It works only and particularly well with the foodie destitute of good taste; taste that may only be acquired when one has sampled the real McCoy.
The truth is there is very little in common between us and the Chinese. Theirs is a nation that has achieved unparalleled success through determination, hard work and the ethos of simplicity. Travel to their capital city and you will find a spectacle of efficient organisation and singularity of purpose; of humility in character and presentation, and limitless ambition in objectives and achievements. A nation devoid of any religious compulsions, which we find swamping us in utter confusion. United under, and obedient to, a powerful, disciplined single-party government that has left the world in awe with its clever manipulation of socialism to gradually embrace free-market economics and achieve a unique hybrid socialist-capitalist model.
It is a nation that has trumped the manifold machinations of its western detractors and confounded their hopes of its imminent collapse, to emerge instead as one of the primary investors and lenders in the free west.
So while we rant and rave to celebrate the economic corridor as a kind of fait accompli, as our MNAs and ministers and landed elite squabble secretly, greedily, over whose lands the corridor will traverse in its journey from south to north, we would do well to understand that the marriage of Chinese and Pakistani interests comes with a clearly worded pre-nuptial agreement. There will be zero tolerance for inefficiency, red-tape and kickbacks; there will be an expectation of an accommodating tax regime with no sly ad-hocism in the form of punitive tax measures by the tax authorities; there will be a demand for the creation of a safe and secure business environment; and finally, there will be little patience for any internal instability of the political kind.
This next fiscal year, then, will be the year when our Chinese business partners watch and observe and conclude whether their investment in the CPEC will indeed fetch the dividends they expect to earn. Let us hope we deliver to their expectations as we expect them to deliver to ours. We need this deal to work out for our economic revival and our role as a viable business partner. In this next fiscal year then, when multiple ingredients (Iran, India, Russia) are in the cooker, no ajinomoto please! We’ve endured enough of that. We need some healthy food; God knows we deserve it.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email: kmushir@hotmail.com
Twitter: @kmushir