Interview with Benazir Bhutto (Academy of Achievement)

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/bhu0int-1

Could you begin by telling us something about your childhood in Karachi?

Benazir Bhutto: 1953. It was a very different world then. Very few motor cars and much more poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor was greater, too. I remember people walking barefoot and bare-backed because of the poverty.

It was a very privileged life that we led with huge homes and scores of staff with everything looked after. Now the world has changed much more. There's a greater appreciation of each human being, being equal and entitled to the same opportunity, as well as an emphasis on human dignity. In those days there was much less dignity.

I remember that the poorer people would greet the richer people by bending down and touching their feet, or prostrating them and throwing themselves on the feet, so it was a totally different kind of world and it has changed for the better in that sense.

As you say, you led a life of privilege amidst great poverty. Were you aware of these disparities? How did this influence you?

Benazir Bhutto: My father was always championing the cause of the poor. He was very much against the status quo, so he was always telling us that it is wrong, that there should be people in such abject poverty, unable to feed their children.

I'd be sitting there when women would come to my mother and say, "Take my children, we can't feed them."

My father was a lawyer. I remember him coming back and saying that a man came and said, "I don't have any money to pay you for this case." Some other case he'd been involved in. And he said, "Take my cow because I don't have any money," and that was the cow that would give them milk to feed the children. So it was quite shocking to me, and I was sensitive to it because my father was sensitive to it.

And he'd take us -- we were landowners, large landowners -- and he would take us to the lands and he would tell me, "Look at the way these people sweat in the heat and in the sun in the fields, and it is because of their sweat that you will have the opportunity to be educated, and you have a debt to these people, because they weren't born to sweat like this.

And, "You have a debt and you've got to come back and pay that debt by serving your people."

snip...

I find her life very fascinating, and this was a great read. Thanks. (And I don't envy her right now, though I'm fascinated with her tumultuous return to Pakistan.)