THE STIGMA OF ‘JUGAAR’ (SOURCE)
Rizwan gave the test conducted by PSO for recruitment a few days ago. I asked afterwards how it went and he replied that it was a difficult test and that he didn’t do that well. He further added even if he had done exceptionally well at it, he wouldn’t be optimistic. Why? Because PSO is government owned, and that in order to get in a government organization, you need to have the source, a theory which is unanimously accepted by all and sundry.
The word ‘source’ holds a very important place in the Pakistani mindset. Its meaning is a bit different in our culture. It is considered ‘positive’ by those who have it and ‘negative’ by those who haven’t. This bipolar term is called ‘Jugaar’ in Pakistan. Mostly the illiterate types used to use this term, but these days everyone uses willfully.
But why is the term ‘source’ so much synonymous with ‘job’ in Pakistan? Well, if you look at the broader picture, this phenomenon is common throughout the world, but more so in Third World countries.
Let’s just consider my batch (1999-2000) and how this phenomenon has affected us all. Even before we had passed out, it was at the back of everybody’s mind that in order to get the dream job, they had to make contacts with influential people; those firmly entrenched in the big shots of Pakistani industry. But we are all taken aback by what we have seen and observed over the past few months. Your percentage does not hold much ground if you are after a really good job. To an extent it does, but only if you are in the top 10. You go any further down than that, and it begins to lose any relevance. The notion that government-owned companies are biased in their recruitment process began to take solid form when Suparco, the sole Pakistan space agency went and selected Asma and Afaaque for the job. Now these were the position holders of our batch and no doubt they deserved that job. But they both had failed the written test which our entire batch plus a couple hundred other had given. Many passed the initial test but were shot out in the interview following the test. So when they heard that these two had been given the job, naturally the entire batch got infuriated. And their grievances were genuine. They argued that if Suparco had wanted to employ the position holders in the first place, why did they waste others students’ money (the test cost about Rs.500-600)? A couple of other students were also employed who had passed the test, but ‘coincidentally’, even they were position holders; falling in the top 10 slot. Then PIA gave their advertisement, for which you had dish out Rs. 500 again. Candidates cried fowl even in their selection procedure. In short, the government-owned companies’ reputation was never great amongst these people, but now it is dead and buried.
But this shady selection procedure is not limited to the government institutes, but even the private firms, in fact even the multi-nationals operating in Pakistan are not immune to this epidemic. People even allege they ( the multi-nationals) are the biggest culprits. Sometime back, a friend of mine who had done his MBA from the IBA, told me that almost all the companies in Pakistan employed people who had clout within the company. The Ad was published in the classified merely to give an impression that they were fair in their dealings and employed people on merit. Who would want to deal with a company who didn’t even induct fairly? So in order to uphold a spotless image, they go through all the trouble of conducting written tests and interview after interview while they have selected the ‘desirable’ candidates long before hand. Sometimes they go for a mixture; selecting one meritorious person from this process, while inducting a dozen others merely on Jugaar. So according to him, this whole fanfare is a sham. I don’t blame him for this theory though. This guy had done his Masters in Banking and Finance from IBA, the most reputed business school in Karachi, if not in the entire country. Not even that, he received an award from the then governor Moinuddin Haider for some exceptional work he had carried out. In spite of all these credentials, he had to sweat it out for almost six months before he got a job! And people say that IBA graduates get recruited even before they have graduated. So much for that. This guy really has some dirt on many firms to go along with his theories. And if you reflect on your observations of the job market, you’ll realize that his allegations do hold good. For instance, he alleges that rarely a multi-national bank goes through a recruitment process advertised in the media. That should mean they seldom hire new hands, right? Wrong! Just sift through your relatives, friends and contact you may have made in your life, you’ll soon come up with a person recently employed by so and so bank. Just like that. Sometimes the candidate is not even an MBA; just plain B.Com and yet he gets a lucrative job in a grandeur bank.
I didn’t give much thought to this conspiracy theory but it was there with me subconsciously, so when the Suparco people came with all that sweet talk, I immediately sensed something fishy. I had rational reasons as well. It so happened that two weeks before these people came, an anonymous ad appeared in the local classifieds with the application form printed there as well along with a demand for Rs.500. So when these Suparco guys showed up and started to build up a hype with their sugar-coated sweet talk, I knew they were just here to extort money by fooling all these fresh graduates. Then when I looked at their application forms, they were the same from the classifieds, and my suspicion was confirmed. Naturally I didn’t apply and exhorted others also to avoid it, since these people didn’t look likely to pick candidates purely on merit. No one listened and the rest is history.
Our batch although comprised of 150 students divided into two sections, and yet for some inexplicable reason in this big lot also, everyone knows where each person belonging to the batch is employed, how he got the job, how much he’s being paid, etc. It’s the biggest gossip network I’ve come across, which should make CNN and Fox TV proud. So no one is immune to harsh criticism if he gets the job by Jugaar. He may be the nicest person in the world, but once he gets in a company by foul means, he gets tainted as the bad guy. The better the job, the more scathing criticism he’s prone to by this amazing network. Quite a few people have been awarded the best villain titles up till now. Let me retract a bit. People getting inconsequential jobs through contacts are spared this attack. It’s mostly those that get the high-flying jobs that have to face the wrath of this network.
The very first to get this ‘honor’ was Umair who got in Engro. Although he droned on about how he had to go through five grueling interviews before they finally decided on him, no one believed, in spite of the fact that he’s a top notch student and probably deserved what he got. But the thing people focused on was that he’s a Punjabi ( Karachiites have a disdain ranging from minor to extreme for Punjabis on the pretext that they rule the entire Pakistan by proxy). Then the fact that his father holds a high-profile position in the industry didn’t help his matters. But the reason that pissed everyone off was the fact that Engro didn’t go through even a farce selection procedure which other companies do to save face. They just went ahead and picked this guy who, no doubt, was deserving, but may not have been the most deserving one. And Engro didn’t give much of a chance to anybody else to find that out.
Then there’s the case of Honda Atlas owned by the Sherwani group, one of the most influential and successful groups here. Their selection process was a huge fanfare with expectations running high for all the participants. And it looked to be pretty fair as well till the very end. It was only later a guy whose father knows people around Honda disclosed that two out of the three trainee engineers selected by them were done so through Jugaar. The three were Ahmed, Mohtashim and Furrukh. The grapevine has it that the father of either of the two had known people in there, who got both of them in. Arslan and Noman were two people who were most disappointed by this, since they were their till the very end of the selection process. Noman was shown the door in the fourth interview whereas Arslan was cut out in the fifth and final interview. There were only five people left in the last interview and Arslan was pretty confident that this was going to be pretty much a formality and that they had selected the five of them. Suffice to say he was devastated when he wasn’t offered the job. And who wouldn’t be? Honda is located in Shershah, and this guy had to go there by bus five times with God know how high expectations. And what does he get? Not even a phone call to say that they couldn’t offer him the job. He found out about it from the chosen ones. How cruel can you get? There’s a serious lack of courtesy in Pakistan, and the multi-nationals landing here adopt the same callous attitude. Tell me honestly, don’t you think you owe a guy a response after having taking him for not one but five ‘roller-coaster rides’?
These were some of the high-profile cases. Then there are some minor ones as well, such as Danish and Fahad getting into Dewan Farooque industry in Sajaawal. Asad getting into Air Blue, a new local airline. Not many people knew about this asad Jugaar, it was Bilal who told me that they accepting only licensed aviation engineers, so Asad couldn’t have got in without the ‘help’.
Recently, Faisal got into PRL (Pakistan Refinery Ltd.) and this seems to have irked a lot of people. The thing is, PRL only called candidates with percentage above 70%, but Faisal has got 63%, so this was a dead giveaway. Then the fact that they actually selected him overlooking most of the 70%s was ample proof it wasn’t a ‘clean selection’. PRL isn’t offering a lucrative package or anything, but the fact that it’s a petroleum job is mouth-watering enough for the people. The job market in petroleum industry in Pakistan is considered saturated, so you can well imagine people’s indignation when a less deserving candidate slips in. Faisal was working before in Pak Suzuki and people even consider that job now Jugaar. That’s what a Jugaaro job does for you; strips off your credibility. Faisal may make great strides in PRL on the basis of his own abilities, but people will only remember that this guy had the source, and that any achievement he pulls off isn’t his doing but the work of his ‘source’.
What all this does is make people lose faith in the system. Arslan has been bickering since that bitter experience that your marks don’t amount to shit when searching for a good job. Many people have developed this perception over the past few months, that getting a satisfactory job in the Pakistani market is as dirty a game as politics.
In the end, all I would like to say is that this gossip networks is nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. They may shred a person to pieces with their venomous mouth, but give them a Jugaaro job and they will grab it with both hands without a second thought about the very stigma they righteously loathed. But then, that’s no big deal, since we as a nation thrive on hypocrisy. It makes the world go round for us.
And I’m no different. The only thing to my credit is that I refused to work for PIA when my father could have easily got me in, a job most people would die for. But now give me a job through foul means, and I will not hesitate for a second.
The word ‘source’ holds a very important place in the Pakistani mindset. Its meaning is a bit different in our culture. It is considered ‘positive’ by those who have it and ‘negative’ by those who haven’t. This bipolar term is called ‘Jugaar’ in Pakistan. Mostly the illiterate types used to use this term, but these days everyone uses willfully.
But why is the term ‘source’ so much synonymous with ‘job’ in Pakistan? Well, if you look at the broader picture, this phenomenon is common throughout the world, but more so in Third World countries.
Let’s just consider my batch (1999-2000) and how this phenomenon has affected us all. Even before we had passed out, it was at the back of everybody’s mind that in order to get the dream job, they had to make contacts with influential people; those firmly entrenched in the big shots of Pakistani industry. But we are all taken aback by what we have seen and observed over the past few months. Your percentage does not hold much ground if you are after a really good job. To an extent it does, but only if you are in the top 10. You go any further down than that, and it begins to lose any relevance. The notion that government-owned companies are biased in their recruitment process began to take solid form when Suparco, the sole Pakistan space agency went and selected Asma and Afaaque for the job. Now these were the position holders of our batch and no doubt they deserved that job. But they both had failed the written test which our entire batch plus a couple hundred other had given. Many passed the initial test but were shot out in the interview following the test. So when they heard that these two had been given the job, naturally the entire batch got infuriated. And their grievances were genuine. They argued that if Suparco had wanted to employ the position holders in the first place, why did they waste others students’ money (the test cost about Rs.500-600)? A couple of other students were also employed who had passed the test, but ‘coincidentally’, even they were position holders; falling in the top 10 slot. Then PIA gave their advertisement, for which you had dish out Rs. 500 again. Candidates cried fowl even in their selection procedure. In short, the government-owned companies’ reputation was never great amongst these people, but now it is dead and buried.
But this shady selection procedure is not limited to the government institutes, but even the private firms, in fact even the multi-nationals operating in Pakistan are not immune to this epidemic. People even allege they ( the multi-nationals) are the biggest culprits. Sometime back, a friend of mine who had done his MBA from the IBA, told me that almost all the companies in Pakistan employed people who had clout within the company. The Ad was published in the classified merely to give an impression that they were fair in their dealings and employed people on merit. Who would want to deal with a company who didn’t even induct fairly? So in order to uphold a spotless image, they go through all the trouble of conducting written tests and interview after interview while they have selected the ‘desirable’ candidates long before hand. Sometimes they go for a mixture; selecting one meritorious person from this process, while inducting a dozen others merely on Jugaar. So according to him, this whole fanfare is a sham. I don’t blame him for this theory though. This guy had done his Masters in Banking and Finance from IBA, the most reputed business school in Karachi, if not in the entire country. Not even that, he received an award from the then governor Moinuddin Haider for some exceptional work he had carried out. In spite of all these credentials, he had to sweat it out for almost six months before he got a job! And people say that IBA graduates get recruited even before they have graduated. So much for that. This guy really has some dirt on many firms to go along with his theories. And if you reflect on your observations of the job market, you’ll realize that his allegations do hold good. For instance, he alleges that rarely a multi-national bank goes through a recruitment process advertised in the media. That should mean they seldom hire new hands, right? Wrong! Just sift through your relatives, friends and contact you may have made in your life, you’ll soon come up with a person recently employed by so and so bank. Just like that. Sometimes the candidate is not even an MBA; just plain B.Com and yet he gets a lucrative job in a grandeur bank.
I didn’t give much thought to this conspiracy theory but it was there with me subconsciously, so when the Suparco people came with all that sweet talk, I immediately sensed something fishy. I had rational reasons as well. It so happened that two weeks before these people came, an anonymous ad appeared in the local classifieds with the application form printed there as well along with a demand for Rs.500. So when these Suparco guys showed up and started to build up a hype with their sugar-coated sweet talk, I knew they were just here to extort money by fooling all these fresh graduates. Then when I looked at their application forms, they were the same from the classifieds, and my suspicion was confirmed. Naturally I didn’t apply and exhorted others also to avoid it, since these people didn’t look likely to pick candidates purely on merit. No one listened and the rest is history.
Our batch although comprised of 150 students divided into two sections, and yet for some inexplicable reason in this big lot also, everyone knows where each person belonging to the batch is employed, how he got the job, how much he’s being paid, etc. It’s the biggest gossip network I’ve come across, which should make CNN and Fox TV proud. So no one is immune to harsh criticism if he gets the job by Jugaar. He may be the nicest person in the world, but once he gets in a company by foul means, he gets tainted as the bad guy. The better the job, the more scathing criticism he’s prone to by this amazing network. Quite a few people have been awarded the best villain titles up till now. Let me retract a bit. People getting inconsequential jobs through contacts are spared this attack. It’s mostly those that get the high-flying jobs that have to face the wrath of this network.
The very first to get this ‘honor’ was Umair who got in Engro. Although he droned on about how he had to go through five grueling interviews before they finally decided on him, no one believed, in spite of the fact that he’s a top notch student and probably deserved what he got. But the thing people focused on was that he’s a Punjabi ( Karachiites have a disdain ranging from minor to extreme for Punjabis on the pretext that they rule the entire Pakistan by proxy). Then the fact that his father holds a high-profile position in the industry didn’t help his matters. But the reason that pissed everyone off was the fact that Engro didn’t go through even a farce selection procedure which other companies do to save face. They just went ahead and picked this guy who, no doubt, was deserving, but may not have been the most deserving one. And Engro didn’t give much of a chance to anybody else to find that out.
Then there’s the case of Honda Atlas owned by the Sherwani group, one of the most influential and successful groups here. Their selection process was a huge fanfare with expectations running high for all the participants. And it looked to be pretty fair as well till the very end. It was only later a guy whose father knows people around Honda disclosed that two out of the three trainee engineers selected by them were done so through Jugaar. The three were Ahmed, Mohtashim and Furrukh. The grapevine has it that the father of either of the two had known people in there, who got both of them in. Arslan and Noman were two people who were most disappointed by this, since they were their till the very end of the selection process. Noman was shown the door in the fourth interview whereas Arslan was cut out in the fifth and final interview. There were only five people left in the last interview and Arslan was pretty confident that this was going to be pretty much a formality and that they had selected the five of them. Suffice to say he was devastated when he wasn’t offered the job. And who wouldn’t be? Honda is located in Shershah, and this guy had to go there by bus five times with God know how high expectations. And what does he get? Not even a phone call to say that they couldn’t offer him the job. He found out about it from the chosen ones. How cruel can you get? There’s a serious lack of courtesy in Pakistan, and the multi-nationals landing here adopt the same callous attitude. Tell me honestly, don’t you think you owe a guy a response after having taking him for not one but five ‘roller-coaster rides’?
These were some of the high-profile cases. Then there are some minor ones as well, such as Danish and Fahad getting into Dewan Farooque industry in Sajaawal. Asad getting into Air Blue, a new local airline. Not many people knew about this asad Jugaar, it was Bilal who told me that they accepting only licensed aviation engineers, so Asad couldn’t have got in without the ‘help’.
Recently, Faisal got into PRL (Pakistan Refinery Ltd.) and this seems to have irked a lot of people. The thing is, PRL only called candidates with percentage above 70%, but Faisal has got 63%, so this was a dead giveaway. Then the fact that they actually selected him overlooking most of the 70%s was ample proof it wasn’t a ‘clean selection’. PRL isn’t offering a lucrative package or anything, but the fact that it’s a petroleum job is mouth-watering enough for the people. The job market in petroleum industry in Pakistan is considered saturated, so you can well imagine people’s indignation when a less deserving candidate slips in. Faisal was working before in Pak Suzuki and people even consider that job now Jugaar. That’s what a Jugaaro job does for you; strips off your credibility. Faisal may make great strides in PRL on the basis of his own abilities, but people will only remember that this guy had the source, and that any achievement he pulls off isn’t his doing but the work of his ‘source’.
What all this does is make people lose faith in the system. Arslan has been bickering since that bitter experience that your marks don’t amount to shit when searching for a good job. Many people have developed this perception over the past few months, that getting a satisfactory job in the Pakistani market is as dirty a game as politics.
In the end, all I would like to say is that this gossip networks is nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. They may shred a person to pieces with their venomous mouth, but give them a Jugaaro job and they will grab it with both hands without a second thought about the very stigma they righteously loathed. But then, that’s no big deal, since we as a nation thrive on hypocrisy. It makes the world go round for us.
And I’m no different. The only thing to my credit is that I refused to work for PIA when my father could have easily got me in, a job most people would die for. But now give me a job through foul means, and I will not hesitate for a second.
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