In Respect of Honest Work

Just because an entrepreneur doesn't run a successful high-tech or "professional services" company, that does not  mean their business or their business skills aren't worth the respect typically attributed to high-tech businesses and entrepreneurs possessing college degrees. This is something I keep trying to remind myself each time I meet or hear of a successful Pakistani / Pakistani-American entrepreneur who runs a profitable auto repair shop in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Many Pakistanis are programmed to think of businesses or jobs outside of high-tech, medicine, law, politics & government as lowly. Auto repair business though are tech in nature, in the Pakistani mindset they are categorized as jobs for the under classes (or cullee classes).

Success as a nation requires us to break this in-bred societal prejudice. Something that owes it's roots to colonialism where pre-colonial jobs were shunned to the lowest rungs of society by the English colonial rulers in India. Case-in-point: Jamhadar was once a highly respected rank in the army, equivalent if not above that of a general.