Subcontinental Divide

The Wild, New Employment Market

Subcontinental Divide by Ahsen Jillani

I have never met anybody who got up and was bouncing off the wall to get to work.

I mean, my dad had a great job, but he was hardly whistling while shaving for work at 6am. Very rarely, when we had a day off from school, my brother and I would accompany him to the office. This was a luxurious VIP experience, from the driver carrying his briefcase to a person opening his door at the high rise building at the government complex.

This was a massive, fun place for us, with a secretary in a large room outside the 5th floor office. A messenger could be summoned and would run in and collect envelopes with a fancy wax seal on them to deliver across the building or across the campus of many white buildings that made up what was then called the Secretariat in Islamabad, Pakistan.

My dad’s office was enormous. Thinking back, it was probably half the size of the bottom floor of my house. The living room area of it had a large couch and four large chairs. My dad would sometimes hang his coat in a closet and lie down on the couch, while the cafeteria brought us kids soft drinks and snacks. We drew pictures on fancy government notepads and were fascinated by things like staplers and paper clip dispensers and those rocking pads used to dry my dad’s very prominent (and unreadable) signature on multiple documents. He would pace around the large space talking while one of the secretaries took dictation in shorthand – which I looked at from behind her seat as fascinating hieroglyphics.

The reason I mention this memory dating back to the early 1970s is that if you had ever asked me about my favorite job, I would have said I wanted to be like my dad and do the big stuff of government. I couldn’t imagine anybody on earth not wanting or liking a job like that. But I also mention that because debt and the needs of the lifestyle and maybe some forward thinking on the future of his children, he left it all behind to sit in a cubicle the size of a bathroom at the UN. In the late 1980s, when I was visiting from America, he looked up while reading his Newsweek magazine in bed and said: “I am tired.” He was just 58 then.

The pandemic employment story is complex and multi-tiered. I have now met people who invested in the right stocks during the pandemic and probably don’t need to work for a good while. Having worked white collar and blue collar in America over the decades, I know people who made a new model out of our dependence on video calls; and I know people who were earning the best money of their lives due to all the stimulus checks and boosters being thrown at them.

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