The Sharifs have always been partial to the Turks.
Erdogan is their man and they like having him and his guys around. Recently, when a Turkish delegation was over, the Pakistani Turkish Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif held a dinner in their honour.
Now, as opposed to the Punjab CM, the elder Sharif doesn’t speak Turkish. So he needed a translator. The latter handled the job with aplomb, till the premier switched from English to Urdu, after which much was lost in translation, to say the least.
Sensing the scale of the problem, the elder Sharif quipped that the delegation was going to be given a copy of the speech that he was reading.
This story presumably doesn’t have much of a happy ending for the poor translator.
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The development sector wonks are looking into leveraging the country’s mobile banking infrastructure to safeguard the ROSCAs (fancy technical word for your standard, garden variety “committees” aka in the Punjab as kam-ay-tee) as a way of ensuring savings amongst the poor.
But on the other end of the spectrum, the kam-ay-tee culture has really taken off amongst the elite ladies. With the US dollar slowly replacing the humble rupee, the kitty has swollen to rather impressive amounts. The meetings of the said kitty taken place at swanky restaurants and hotels and, of late, themes and dress codes are being announced for the meetings. More of a social gathering than any actual financial utility for all involved, really.
