Selecting
a good driver
Shakir Lakhani
JULY
12, 2019
If you are over 50 and
have been living in a major city like Karachi or Lahore for many years, it’s
only natural for your heart to have been affected. Particularly if you have
spent most of your time seated the whole day, and you are one of the millions
of Pakistanis who think exercising is a waste of time and should be avoided at
all costs. More so if you are a smoker and eat fatty foods as if it’s your last
meal on earth. So you shouldn’t be surprised if one day you’re taken to a
hospital screaming your head off due to the intense pain in your chest. In
about a week, you’ll be poorer by more than a million rupees (depending on the
hospital). But it’s after you’ve had the angioplasty or triple bypass surgery
that your troubles begin.
The doctors will request
your family members to not let you drive. It’s in the national interest, they
will say. If the old man even happens to have a mild accident, he will have
another attack and the car will go out of control and his driving will result
in many deaths and injuries. Thus, you now have to employ a driver to do
something that you’ve been doing since you were in your teens. No problem, you
tell yourself. With so much unemployment, it should be easy to find a good
driver. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Until ten years back,
there was no way of knowing whether a driver’s license was fake or genuine. But
now, with the presence of license verification apps, it takes a minute to
determine if the applicant’s license is genuine. You will be shocked to find
out that seven or eight out of ten drivers in Karachi have fake licenses. This
also explains why traffic policemen in Karachi are so wealthy. Every time they
come across a driver with a fake license, they increase their bank wealth by
five hundred rupees. But it’s the attitude of the drivers that shocks you more.
‘Why should it matter if the license is genuine or fake?’, they ask. You have
to be patient and explain that in case of an accident, the insurance company will
refuse to pay for the damage done to your car if it was being driven by a fake
license holder at the time. They look at you like you’re from another planet.
It’s like they’re asking themselves, “Insurance, what’s that?”
Finally, after
interviewing seven or eight candidates, you find one with a genuine license and
hire him. If you think your troubles are over, you’re mistaken.
In the first two or three
days, you find that your driver is like most drivers in Karachi who believe
that only fools obey traffic rules. So, you almost have a heart attack when he
drives breezily through red lights and is amazed when you protest. You tell
your family members that his erratic driving will give you a heart attack,
defeating the very purpose for which you hired him. Your wife and children tell
you to use your smartphone for reading newspapers online or see what’s going on
in Twitter and not look at him.
Your driver is most likely to be someone in his thirties who
already has seven children and because he’s been told that birth control is a
heinous sin, he plans to have many more. His own father (besides having nine or
ten children himself) probably has as many brothers and sisters, and each of
them also has many children. So your driver has at least fifty or sixty cousins,
besides many uncles, aunts and nephews. By the way, as there is no word for
“cousin” in Urdu or the local languages, all such cousins are called “brothers”
or “sisters”. Now among all these relatives, there will be days when one of
them is likely to be sick and has to be taken to hospital, or may even die. So,
in about a couple of months, after your driver has taken six or seven days off
because one of his brothers is sick or has died, you ask him how many brothers
he has. That’s when you find out that when he says “brother”, he often means
“cousin”.
But that’s not all. Every
time one of his relatives has to marry (which happens at least once a month),
he wants a loan. After about six months, he has borrowed an amount equivalent
to more than a month’s salary (which you’ll never get back). You find yourself
wondering why you shouldn’t sack him, but no, your family members won’t hear of
it (they remember what the doctor said). You fervently hope that the police
come and arrest him for something he did many years back (like killing some of
his relatives in a property dispute). But no such luck, until one day he wants
to leave for a couple of months. This time your family members support you. You
let him go and swear you’ll never hire a driver again. As for that warning, the
doctors gave after turning you into a pauper, to hell with it. Don’t worry, you
were driving on those days when he was attending funerals and marriages, and
nothing happened- you didn’t die nor did you kill anyone. So go ahead, live
peacefully and stay away from drivers as much as you can.
The writer is an engineer, a former visiting
lecturer at NED Engineering College, an industrialist, and has been associated
with the petroleum, chemical industries for many years. He tweets
@shakirlakhani
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