Wrong name ...right cause! - A reflection on 50 years of an unusual newspaper

This writer has never quite taken to the name of the Business Recorder. The title is far too restrictive and even mundane. "Business" is too transactional. "Recorder" is too mechanical. Whereas what this remarkable newspaper has done for five whole decades is to define the subject of political economy as a specialised sector deserving of exclusive attention , rather than merely cover business news as an adjunct section of a daily journal that deals primarily with political events and also covers sports, entertainment , local news, et al.
In 50 years, Business Recorder --- notwithstanding its deceptively narrowly-focused name! --- has actually pioneered a holistic approach in Pakistani journalism to a particularist yet pervasive dimension of our country and our times. This conceptually comprehensive perspective has promoted the need to view events, trends, statements, actions ostensibly relevant only to the trade or financial or monetary or investment aspects as reflections of the larger, multi-dimensional, multi-layered societal, demographic, regional, global and inescapably political realities that shape how whole countries change, for the better or for the o worse.
Initially, one did not take this newspaper as seriously as is suggested by the portentous observation in the preceding paragraph. One tended to presume that this strange new entrant into journalism was merely yet another addition to the field, meant to appeal to a limited number of prosperous entrepreneurs whose primary interest was in enhancing personal and corporate profit.
Gradually, however , just as the newspaper itself began to discover its own potential , and began to deal with the challenge of how to be distinct and, if possible, better than the daily business section of Pakistan's leading English general newspaper, one developed an appreciation for this new venture's individuality.
One determinant factor on how quickly and how distinctly Business Recorder could carve out a specific, unmistakable niche was the fact that the human resource pool from which it could draw its own staff was the very same pool from which all other English general newspapers were deriving their team members. And neither the universities at that time nor the emerging first-ever business education institutions like IBA were preparing specialists, at that time, in reporting on business issues with special skills.
So the newspaper itself and its staff --- both were learning-on-the-job.
And they were doing so in tumultuous times. From the hopes and actual highs in conventional industrial output achieved during the first years of the Ayub Khan Government came the sudden break in momentum with the September 1965 war with India. That event, momentarily inspiring for the examples of courage and resistance shown by both the people and by the Armed Forces ultimately proved to be a drastic turning point toward a descent of the country's polity --- in terms of unity and of economics --- to the country's disintegration in 1971.
Business Recorder's formative phases were therefore a prolonged baptism in fire. That searing, traumatic experience for the entire nation must obviously have enabled the journal to become more conscious than it earlier was that its mandate was larger than commerce alone.
Conventionally defined on the dictionary of the internet --- not one's first favourite because the thick, printed-on-paper version is still the first preferred dictionary --- the scope of political economy places it as a branch of the social sciences. Drawing from the economy and political science, the political economy perspective uses sociological viewpoints as well to observe how a country is governed and managed. And inevitably, how all this impacts on a nation's productivity, progress and prosperity.
During one's six years in the Senate of Pakistan, 1985 to 1991, a relatively brief period that saw martial law and its removal, followed by five changes of governments, one began to notice that the Business Recorder published a daily Press Gallery report on the proceedings of Parliament. The content of those daily blends of what was said on the floors of the two Houses mixed with the caustic soda of the writers' own opinions reflected, in a limited yet revealing way, how the newspaper recognised ostensibly non-business affairs as also being directly relevant to the business of business!
Over the 50 years of its youth , the newspaper has steadily acquired its specialist economics expertise through a combination of in-house professional resources deployed for day-to-day reporting as well as daily editorial comment, regular columnists (including one's old-young friend Nusrat Nasarullah!), free-lance contributors of its op-ed analyses, interviews with captains --- and brigadiers and generals!--- of industry, reproductions of ,and reflections on official statements, explorations of detailed studies conducted by research forums and think tanks, regional and global views and readers' reactions and outpourings.
On the way, the paper has trained and nurtured hundreds of journalists and workers, coached promising practitioners to become proper professionals, evolved as a stable organization, played an active role in building collective representative forums, served often as a bridge between the perennially-discontented business sector and Government.
Though clearly geared, by name and by function, to cater to a fairly well-defined audience, and thus making no bones about it, the newspaper may sometimes be, rightly or wrongly, seen as a spokesman for the narrow, vested interests of private profit. This is an occupational hazard the journal always needs to be conscious of. But on balance, after making an unavoidable allowance for the inherent space it occupies, the Business Recorder has placed the public interest as its guiding editorial principle.
Due to the limited yet influential status of the English-reading segment of the country's business-related population , one wishes that the huge numbers of non-English speaking and reading businesspersons of our land, doing their work so industriously and productively in every nook and corner could also , at least occasionally, be able to read the Business Recorder! Who knows, in the emerging age of mobile media, up ahead somewhere may well be electronic versions in Punjabi and Sindhi, in Sindhi and Seraiki, in Pushto and in Gujarati, of the newspaper taking shape in embryo form!
Credit for this visionary venture 50 ages ago rightfully belongs to its founder. Amongst those few Muslim professional journalists who made the national and psychological transition from pre-1947 times to an independent, severely disadvantaged Pakistan, Mr. M .A. Zuberi bravely chose to take the first steps into the unknown realm of a full-fledged business daily newspaper.
It was, and remains, aptly symbolic of the determination to be different that the location of the premises of Business Recorder is at some fair distance from the traditional Fleet Street area of Pakistani journalism.... which was McLeod Road/later I. I. Chundhrigar Road. That distance by itself must have helped the founder to strike his own precise path!
One recalls with pleasure his characteristic persona, his fascinating collection of anecdotes and episodes from his personal participation in historic events and meetings which were part of the country's crucial early decades, his leadership of the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors and his continuing concern for developing journalism as much as for the development of the economy and national institutions .
Though his direct off-spring, his grandchildren, his nephews, the part of his family that has remained associated with the newspaper and its affiliate groups have, in their own respective right, established their individual capabilities, Mr. M.A. Zuberi must surely be enjoying the view from up there somewhere at the legacy he helped create.
He must also be a fairly regular viewer of Aaj TV, the unlikely but frequently pleasantly surprising first cousin of the Business Recorder. Though each entity has managed to ensure its respective separate media and genre identity. While the newspaper itself will surely benefit from the self-scrutiny conducted by the second and third generation of Mr. M.A. Zuberi's proud descendants of this part of the large Zuberi clan on the milestone of the golden anniversary, one joins many others in wishing full speed ahead to the completion of an action-packed, exciting century!
And as for the name, a rose by any other....?
Credit for this visionary venture 50 ages ago rightfully belongs to its founder.