Mobile phones help transform Pakistan
By ASMAA MALIK, The Gazette December 3, 2010
It's been almost 20 years since I went to high school here. Back then, we would get excited about a foil bag of rippled potato chips or a Pakistani-style burger topped with a fried egg.
But over the last 10 years especially, the speed of globalization in Pakistan has accelerated dramatically. I've been visiting family for the last few weeks, and last night we had Pizza Hut's Chicken Tikka Supreme special delivered via motorbike to my aunt's iron-gated door in 30 minutes or less.
Alongside the swift arrival of KFC and McDonald's logos to Lahore's dusty, cluttered cityscape, billboards for Pakistan's emerging telecommunications and technology companies have kept pace.
In big cities, the Internet has become ubiquitous. You can get unlimited broadband access for as little as 500 rupees (about $6) monthly in this country, where a comfortably middle-class household runs on about 50,000 rupees ($600) a month.
Like their counterparts around the world, Pakistani teens spend hours in front of their laptops checking out their friends' profiles on Facebook and watching videos on YouTube.
But for many in their parents' generation, especially among the middle class, the Internet is still not an everyday destination. Their technology of choice, and now of necessity, has become the mobile phone.
Between them, my aunt, uncle and their two 20-something daughters have seven cellphones. Each of my aunt's three phones is with a different pay-as-you-go mobile provider and she keeps track of about 200 different phone numbers of friends and relatives among them.
Many people bemoan how the omnipresent cellphone has enabled Pakistani culture, already notorious for its lax schedules, or "Pakistan Standard Time," to become even more chaotic, with every plan and rendezvous left to the last minute.
More significantly, however, the cellphone has opened up a back channel for people to voice their frustrations with the country's dire economic situation and its rampant political corruption. Increasingly, newspapers and television stations ask people to phone in with their political views and questions.
My aunt Naila, 48, has become quite a prolific opinionator, calling her newspaper once a week to give them a piece of her mind about everything from Pakistan's (in her mind, completely unnecessary) switch to Daylight Savings Time and the (in her words, vital) role of the military in the country's governance. But people in Pakistan use their phones for more than just calls. Texting has turned the mobile phone into an electronic bulletin board and a booming business.
On her three phones, Naila receives about 15 text messages a day from advertisers, political parties,
religious groups and "professional" texters who write humorous poetry about rising sugar prices, pious messages about Islamic scripture and jokes about scandal in the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.
The messages my aunt receives are free, but if she passes them on to her friends, she has to pay. Naila says she doesn't send any herself, but in addition to the random texts she receives from strangers, she gets about three or four forwards a day from her friends and relatives. These "professional" texts are written to go viral.
"May every blossom in the garden of life bright your Eid with joy and fill your days with the sweet fragrance of happiness. Eid Mubarak 2U nd ur family," says one holiday message from a niece forwarded to all seven of my aunt's phones.
In Pakistan and in neighbouring India, text messaging has become a literary art form, with hundreds of websites keeping track of the most popular sent messages and offering ready-to-send texts under categories like "Ramadan SMS," "broken heart SMS" and the ever-popular "Zardari SMS." There's even one called "Pepsi SMS," featuring jokes and poetry about "Pakistan's favourite cola."
One text I found on my aunt's phone voices a hopeful conspiracy theory about the current president: "Amazing facts about the age of presidents of Pakistan: Sikander Mirza died at the age of 64 years. Ayub Khan died at 64 years. Yahya Khan died at 64 years. Fazul Elahi died at 64 years. Zia ul Haq died at 64 years. And Zardari will be 64 in 2011. We ask you to be patient and pray that we will keep the record going."
Another one, written in pixelated Urdu script, is a verse from poem looking toward a brighter future: "I still keep the hope alive / that a community is building / in which no cruelty will live."
It is heartening to see how this transgressive technology has shot into the heart of Pakistan's traditionally conformist society. Provocative ideas and contradictory opinions, once the purview of the most vocal and politically active members of society, have come to the forefront in one of the most populist ways possible. Of course, it doesn't hurt that, along the way, local mobile companies are keeping the country's economic engine running, benefiting both themselves and the future of dissent in Pakistan.
amalik@montrealgazette.com
Mobile phones help transform Pakistan
Mobile phones help transform Pakistan
Linear Mode
