In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. What? My voice is rising? You are right; I tend to become sentimental when I think of that city. It still occupies a place of great fondness in my heart, which is quite something, I must say, given the circumstances under which, after only eight months of residence, I would later depart.
Certainly, much of my early excitement about New York was wrapped up in my excitement about Underwood Samson. I remember my sense of wonder on the day I reported for duty. Their offices were perched on the forty-first and forty-second floors of a building in midtown — higher than any two structures here in Lahore would be if they were stacked one atop the other — and while I had previously flown in airplanes and visited the Himalayas, nothing had prepared me for the drama, the power of the view from their lobby. This, I realized, was another world from Pakistan; supporting my feet were the achievements of the most technologically advanced civilization our species had ever known.
Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.
But not on that day. On that day, I did not think of myself as a Pakistani, but as an Underwood Samson trainee, and my firm’s impressive offices made me proud. I wished I could show my parents and my brother! I stood still, taking in the vista, but not for long; soon after our arrival we entering analysts were marched into a conference room for our orientation presentation. There a vice president by the name of Sherman — his head gleaming from a recent shave — laid out the ethos of our new outfit.
“We’re a meritocracy,” he said. “We believe in being the best. You were the best candidates at the best schools in the country. That’s what got you here. But meritocracy doesn’t stop with recruiting. We’ll rank you every six months. You’ll know your rankings. Your bonuses and staffing will depend on them. If you do well, you’ll be rewarded. If you don’t, you’ll be out the door. It’s that simple. You’ll have your first rankings at the end of this training program.”
Simple indeed. I glanced about me to see how my fellow trainees were responding. There were five of them, in addition to myself, and four sat rigidly at attention; the fifth, a chap called Wainwright, was more relaxed. Twirling his pen between his fingers in a fashion reminiscent of Val Kilmer in Top Gun, he leaned towards me and whispered, “No points for second place, Maverick.” “You’re dangerous, Ice Man,” I replied — attempting to approximate a naval aviator’s drawl — and the two of us exchanged a grin.
But aside from light-hearted banter of this kind, there would be little in the way of fun and games at the workplace. For the next four weeks, our days followed a consistent routine. In the mornings we had a three-hour seminar: one of a series of modules that attempted to abridge an entire year of business school. We were taught by professors from the most prestigious institutions — a Wharton woman, for example, instructed us in finance — and the results of the tests we were administered were carefully recorded.
Lunch was taken in the cafeteria; over chicken-pesto-in-sun-dried-tomato wraps we observed the assured urgency with which our seniors conducted themselves. Afterwards we attended a workshop intended to familiarize us with computer programs such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Access. We spent this class sitting in a semicircle around a soft-spoken instructor who looked like a librarian; Wainwright dubbed it our “Microsoft Family Time.”
And finally, in the late afternoon we were divided into two teams of three for what Sherman referred to as “soft skills training.” These sessions involved role-playing real-life situations, such as dealing with an irate client or an uncooperative chief financial officer. We were taught to recognize another person’s style of thought, harness their agenda, and redirect it to achieve our desired outcome; indeed one might describe it as a form of mental judo for business.
I see you are impressed by the thoroughness of our training. I was as well. It was a testament to the systematic pragmatism — call it professionalism—that underpins your country’s success in so many fields. At Princeton, learning was imbued with an aura of creativity; at Underwood Samson, creativity was not excised — it was still present and valued — but it ceded its primacy to efficiency. Maximum return was the maxim to which we returned, time and again. We learned to prioritize — to determine the axis on which advancement would be most beneficial — and then to apply ourselves single-mindedly to the achievement of that objective.
But these musings of mine are perhaps rather dry! I do not mean to imply that I did not enjoy my initiation to the realm of high finance. On the contrary, I did. I felt empowered, and besides, all manner of new possibilities were opening up to me. I will give you an example: expense accounts. Do you know how exhilarating it is to be issued a credit card and told that your company will pick up the tab for any ostensibly work-related meal or entertainment? Forgive me: of course you do; you are here, after all, on business. But for me, at the age of twenty-two, this experience was a revelation. I could, if I desired, take my colleagues out for an after-work drink — an activity classified as “new hire cultivation”—and with impunity spend in an hour more than my father earned in a day!
As you can imagine, we new hires availed ourselves of the opportunity to cultivate one another on a regular basis. I remember the first night we did so; we went to the bar at the Royalton, on Forty-Fourth Street. Sherman came with us on this occasion and ordered a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate our induction. I looked around as we raised our glasses in a toast to ourselves. Two of my five colleagues were women; Wainwright and I were non-white. We were marvelously diverse…and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities — Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction; and not one of us was either short or overweight.
It struck me then — no, I must be honest, it strikes me now—that shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable. Perhaps something similar had occurred to Wainwright, for he winked and said to me, rather presciently as it would turn out, “Beware the dark side, young Sky-walker.” He had a penchant for quoting lines from popular cinema, much as my mother quoted the poems of Faiz and Ghalib. But I suspect Wainwright made this particular allusion to Star Wars mostly in jest, for immediately afterwards he, like I — like all of us, for that matter — drank heartily.
Sherman left when the champagne was done, but he told us to continue to our hearts’ content and to charge our bill to Underwood Samson. We did so, staggering out into the street around midnight. Wainwright and I shared a cab downtown. “Hey man,” he said, “do you get cricket?” I asked him what he meant. “My dad’s nuts about it,” he said. “He’s from Barbados. West Indies versus Pakistan”—and here he slipped into a Caribbean lilt—“best damn test match I ever saw.” I laughed. “That must have been in the eighties,” I said. “Neither team is quite so good now.”