Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai or Goodbye

The Weekly Friday Column: A Personal Journey and a Call To "Fellow Travelers"

Photo: Afshin Molavi, Dubai, Circa 2011, at the “Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai or Goodbye” Moment

This column begins with a bottle of whisky. Johnnie Walker Black Label to be precise. It is set in Lahore, Pakistan. The year is 1993, and it involves the education of a young man: namely, me.

Those of you who know me will have heard lots of stories of Johnnie Walker from my travels across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, or you may have seen my piece on Johnnie Walker for Foreign Policy magazine in 2013, or the Discovery Channel documentary on Johnnie Walker that I participated in as a guest analyst recently (more on that later).

I thought it appropriate to begin my first regular Friday column with this story because it encapsulates so many threads of this site, Emerging World, and it also adds a personal touch to a column that will include many such touches.

The story takes place in a drawing room in Lahore, with four middle-aged Pakistani businessmen and myself. It was a long time ago, but I remember gilded Louis XIV-style furniture and heavy curtains. I can’t recall what color they were, but imagine something gold-ish and reddish. I was working for a Jeddah-based English language daily, The Arab News. Fresh out of college, I found myself sent to Pakistan to cover the general election pitting Nawaz Sharif against Benazir Bhutto (Bhutto lost the popular vote but won the premiership by cobbling together a coalition).

The gathering in Lahore was meant to be a primer for me — the green behind the ears cub reporter — arranged by a Pakistani businessman in Riyadh whom I had come to know. I can just imagine his conversation with his friends in Pakistan: “You must invite this odd young man to your home to teach him something about Pakistan.” I was “odd” to them because I was an American of Iranian descent, working for a newspaper in Saudi Arabia, sent to cover an election in Pakistan with no prior experience reporting on South Asia. “At first, we thought you were a spy,” one of the attendees of that gathering told me a few years laters later, “but when I saw you consistently get lost everywhere we went, I knew better.” Well, thanks, I suppose.

So, back to the gathering - and my education. On the first pour of the whisky, the assembled gentleman took me through some basic recent political history: the rise of Nawaz Sharif, the role of Punjab in Pakistani politics, the who’s who of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan’s People’s Party (PPP), the importance of this and that and the other (it’s hard to remember the details, but I’ve had many similar conversations over the years from Damascus to Delhi: the locals and veterans trying to bring the neophyte up to speed). On the second pour, foreign policy emerged: Pakistan’s “brotherly” ties with Saudi Arabia was reiterated (two of the gentlemen lived part time in Saudi Arabia and ran successful businesses) and, of course, the India challenge was parsed ad nauseam.

There was also some powerful fist-pounding on why the West was not doing much to save Bosnia’s Muslims. I remember that part well. “Muslims should not rely on the West anymore,” one of the guests thundered (roughly as I remember it; it was a long time ago), draining his whisky in the process. “The West doesn’t care about us,” he said, or something to that effect.

By the third pour of whisky, my relatively quiet host interrupted one of the guests, and turned to me, and said: “listen, my young friend, forget about all of the political nonsense you just heard. Follow the business and the trade and the money. That’s all you need to know. Then you will understand the politics” (that’s a statement I remember clearly.) A hearty back-and-forth ensued with some finger-wagging disagreement. More whisky was proffered and the night ended with a harrowing drive back to my hotel — the Lahore Gymkhana — by one of the heavily buzzed guests.

That whisky-soaked remark has stayed with me for nearly three decades. Today, following the money, the trade, the investment has become a routine part of my analytical framework, and it plays a prominent role in these pages — and in this column. While I don’t agree that politics is “nonsense,” I think analyzing countries and regions through multiple lenses — political, economic, commercial, social, cultural (read novels, young scholar!), and historical — gets us closer to the truth than exploring it solely through one or two lenses. When I hear a political scientist say, “I am not an economist,” my response is simple: you don’t have to be an economist to follow the business news of a country.

My Jeddah/Riyadh Days: “Dancing the Lambada Without Moving Your Hips”

When I first landed in Jeddah straight out of college on a National Council on US-Arab Relations fellowship program, I quickly learned that the business leaders and the private sector often proved to be the best sources of information. I also found that covering politics was not only futile (“those who know, don’t speak, and those who speak don’t know,” one veteran diplomat told me) but also nearly impossible. As my editor-in-chief, the witty and urbane, Persian poet-quoting, Urdu-speaking Saudi journalist Khaled al-Maeena put it, “trying to cover politics in Saudi Arabia is like dancing the lambada without moving your hips.”

So I focused on business, but even that had its perils. I was nearly booted out of the country for asking an impertinent question at a press conference. But the “impertinent” question was not directed at a Saudi official. It was directed at the late Ron Brown, US Commerce Secretary. I barely even remember what I asked, something about a pending Boeing deal. Apparently, a functionary at the Ministry of Information did not like the question. Cooler heads prevailed, and I stayed on.

It would have been a pity if I had left because I cherished my year and a half as a reporter in Jeddah and Riyadh. I made lifelong friends, connected with a wide range of people across the world (Sudanese, Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos, Syrians, to name just a few) and was writing for a local newspaper with deeply devoted readers (this was pre-internet mind you, so the green colored paper, the Arab News, was the lifeline to the outside world for a whole generation of expatriates from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Europe, the US and beyond.) Our main competitors were the International Herald Tribune and The Saudi Gazette and, to be honest, we provided a lot more Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, and World news than Arab news.

Working as a business reporter in Jeddah and in Riyadh was surprisingly rewarding. My schedule looked something like this: if it was Monday, it was a South Korean trade delegation, on Tuesday, maybe a Pakistani bankers reception for a visiting artist from Karachi, on Wednesday, a Nigerian minister interview, on Thursday, a Japanese embassy gathering, and on Friday, well, Friday was a day off in Saudi Arabia, and I often spent that day with a group of friends that included record executives from the Philippines, journalists from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, hotel managers from Switzerland (where else?), and tennis and basketball player friends from around the world.

The New Silk Road: Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai or Goodbye

I didn’t realize it at the time but in my business coverage in the early 1990s I was witnessing the early seeds of the New Silk Road forming, a subject I first wrote about in the Washington Post in 2007 and have been following ever since (check out my blog, the New Silk Road Monitor). The early 90s was also important because it’s the time that we began to see the beginnings of China’s lift-off, the unshackling of India, and the first stirrings of dramatic economic and social change across Asia, Africa and Latin America. In fact, according to development economist Steven Radelet, 1 billion people have been lifted from poverty since the early 1990s. Three decades ago, he notes, one in two people lived in extreme poverty. Today, one in six do. The so-called Third World was rising.

We don’t use that term today. Appropriately. It’s not just a matter of political correctness. It’s also wrong, because it assumes an inferiority -- third class status -- whereas today some of the most dynamic companies, cities, and economies have emerged from that so-called “Third world” – certainly over the past three decades. You’ll be hearing a lot about those companies, economies and cities in this newsletter and in this column.

About a decade ago, at a reception in Dubai, I met an investment banker recently transplanted from London who was excited about his move to the emirate to cover emerging markets. He said something that also stayed with me: “In my business, it’s Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai or Goodbye.” It felt like the kind of thing one would say in the pre-financial crisis, BRICs-era mood — but I think he was right at the time and the sentiment remains true. (the picture above is me from that visit, I think; I’ve been to Dubai so often, it has blurred. I’ll be writing a lot more about Dubai too in these pages).

Fellow Travelers

If this is your first time seeing this site, let me give you a brief rundown of what you can expect to see in these pages. If you are already a subscriber, thank you. Really. Attention is a valuable currency these days, and I promise not to abuse yours.

“If you’re going to tell a story,” Joseph Campbell once famously said, “tell a big one.” This newsletter is devoted to a big story -- a really big one --  so let me put it on the table right away. I believe we are living in a fundamentally transformative moment in world history, fueled by four big trends: the rise of emerging markets, growth of a new emerging middle class, rapid urbanization, and unprecedented connectivity -- both physical and technological. I believe these trends are about as disruption-proof as they get. Yes, they can even overcome a pandemic (more on that in future columns).

I am, in a sense, the chief story-teller of this site, but I am not alone. I will be joined by other story-tellers as well. We all have a story to tell, serious ones, impactful ones, melancholy ones, fun and funny ones, and in this newsletter, I intend to showcase many stories and story-tellers among my friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers. 

There is a song by the Persian singer and diva Googoosh called Hamsafar. (A clip of the song from the movie of the same name here). The word is literally translated as “fellow traveler,” but the Persian meaning is deeper than that. It means “fellow traveler” in all sorts of ways: emotional, intellectual, cultural as well as physical.

I’ve been fortunate to meet and know many fellow travelers and when you’ve entered your fifth decade of life as I have, you begin to reflect on all that you have done and seen and, mostly, on the people you have known, the people with whom you have shared ideas, dreams, thoughts -- and a whisky or two. At my age, you even begin to have your own nostalgia, not “borrowed nostalgia” (I “borrowed” nostalgia for a while from my family: of Tehran in the 60s before I was born; or pre civil war Beirut, or Dubai in the 1970s, or Cairo or Shanghai of the 1920s from books and novels and vintage posters). 

For those of you who have been subscribers, you know that on this site you’ll get a daily round-up of emerging markets news from global and regional media, and interviews with thought leaders from the worlds of investment, policy, academia, the creative arts, and beyond. The daily round-up -- with a focus on emerging markets investment -- will still hit your in-box six days a week, and more interviews are upcoming.

Whenever you launch a newsletter or site, someone will inevitably ask you: who’s your audience? I never liked that question. It assumes that people are one-dimensional, only interested in investment or international affairs or maybe the arts or cinema. But as Walt Whitman famously wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

We all contain multitudes and this column and this site will focus on your multitudes and my own. This site will not be successful without your direct engagement. You can reach me on LinkedIn here if you have an idea to share, a book you’ve read, a serial we should all watch, or an initiative that is very Emerging World-ish.

A wise friend once told me: “When you hear that noise in your head persistently, pay heed to it.” This column will perhaps quiet that noise as I intend to share some of the ideas with you, and some of my stories, like that Lahore memory, and many others. I hope you will become a hamsafar, a fellow traveler, by subscribing and sharing your ideas.

Until then, I hope you have a good weekend and week ahead.

Afshin

P.S - Next week (Friday March 19), I’ll be writing about an extraordinary new book, The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, by the veteran commodities journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. They certainly followed the money in their illuminating and entertaining tale of the greatest (and most nefarious) of the global commodity traders and they showed that when you follow the money, you can reveal some extraordinary insights about the state of geopolitics, the world, and our future.