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POSTCARD USA: It’s springtime Washington —Khalid Hasan

Last time I heard Dr Ishrat Hussain, he declared that democracy and development did not go together. I did not have the heart to tell him that he had taken me back to Ayub’s “Decade of Development”. I suppose that explains why he is the Governor of State Bank and I am not

“It is a month before the month of May: And the Spring comes slowly up this way,” wrote Coleridge, which is exactly what we now have under Washington skies. The cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial are out on schedule and will have peaked at the weekend. And where you have cherry blossoms, you have Japanese. They do the world in droves. A lone Japanese is not a common sight. They do not wander about aimlessly. They have everything worked out to the last dot. They have maps and English-Japanese dictionaries and if you ask them something, they smile, which is their way of saying that they are not sure if their English will carry them through the conversation you are trying to have.

It is hard to believe that it is the same people who gave America Pearl Harbour and who treated their prisoners with such extreme cruelty. All that is now forgotten and the Japanese themselves have rewritten their history. The rape of Nanking is barely mentioned and the harsh rule imposed on the Koreans stands entirely forgotten, though not by the Koreans. As for the Chinese, they have long memories. They also believe that ultimately all scores should be settled. Washington remains one of the favourites with Japanese tourists, so there it all is, at least till the next Pearl Harbour.

The first heralds of spring are the narcissus and those tiny yellow flowers that sprout from the long-branched bush whose name I do not know. Yellow is the colour of spring in our part of the world and it is the first colour to appear here, but it is soon overwhelmed by a riot of pink and white. It is strange how nature, regardless of the affairs of men, follows its own impersonal cycle. Therein lies a lesson for those who when in positions of power believe that the sun rises and sets at their express wishes.

The cheer that spring brings has been marred, however, by a number of deaths. The Pope is gone and the attention his passing has received in the American press and on television, can be taken as a graph of the popularity of this remarkable man. However, there are some who are pointing out, though in muted voices, that the Pope was extremely conservative and dead set against abortion, female priests and birth control. On one of his visits to Latin America, he repeatedly jabbed his finger at one of his priests who believed that it was the duty of the church to fight for human rights and to stand up to dictatorship. That approach came to be known as liberation theology, but the Pope would have none of it. He did not believe it was for the church to get into such things.

Everyone who watches television news was shocked by the sad news that one of the most watched news anchors, Peter Jennings, had lung cancer. He made the announcement himself. This was followed by the news a day later that Saul Bellow, whom most people place in the same class as Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck had died. He was well into his eighties. I never read any of his books though I bought a few of them over the years. Not every book that one buys, one reads. Some one reads a few pages of and abandons; others one plans to read at some point and then there are those that one never has any intention of reading. I have read Ulysses, but not War and Peace, though I have always had the intention to do so. Maybe it is those long Russian names that put me off. I have been told that if you can read through the first hundred pages or so, you will be glued, but a hundred pages are a hundred pages. In any case, Tolstoy has enough readers, so he can do without this one.

Spring brings birds one has not seen all winter. It also brings their human counterparts from Pakistan. An email from the Embassy of Pakistan states that an un-elected young gentleman who is said to be the apple of Mr Shaukat Aziz’s eye and, that being the case, naturally runs the Ministry of Finance, is going to be in town and, what is more, in the company of Governor Ishrat Hussain of the State Bank of Pakistan. Why is it that every time I sneeze, I find him in Washington? The few of us who report for the Pakistani press are to be briefed on the great economic strides the country has made. I await the arrival of both. Last time I heard Dr Ishrat Hussain, he puffed out his chest and declared that democracy and development did not go together. I did not have the heart to tell him that he had taken me back to Ayub Khan’s “Decade of Development”. I suppose that explains why he is the Governor of State Bank and I am not.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net

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