Paris adalah sebuah kota di negara bagian Texas, Amerika Serikat. Seorang
dokter jantung asal Pakistan, beragama Islam, terpilih menjadi walikota di kota
yang mayoritas Keristen. Tentu tidak ada "black campaign" yang bernada
SARA.
Meskipun sudah jadi walikota, profesi dokternya tidak
ditinggalkan. Ia masih menyempatkan diri menolong orang yang
memerlukannya. Tentu bukan karena bayarannya.
Berita ini dmuat di NY Times.
KM
July 27, 2012
Pakistani-Born Mayor Repairs, and Wins, Texans'
Hearts
By ANAND
GIRIDHARADAS
PARIS, TEXAS — This charming, droopy city needed new
fire trucks not long ago, but, like many American municipalities today, couldn't
necessarily afford them. The mayor, a small-government Republican, dithered: to
buy or not to buy? He turned to the natural choice for advice on running a Texan
city: Pervez Musharraf, the exiled ex-president of Pakistan.
Mr.
Musharraf may seem an unlikely adviser to the mayor of a Southern town where
crickets chirp shrilly and the leafy streets are dominated by places pledging to
fix your truck. But even more unlikely is the man he advised:Mayor
Arjumand Hashmi, a Pakistani-born cardiologist who has become one of the United
States' most improbable politicians.
He is
like the opening line of a joke: "So a Texan, a Muslim, a Republican, a doctor
and the mayor of Paris are sitting at a bar ..." Except that he is, by himself,
all of the people in the joke.
America seems to be an ever more divided, bitter country. Lost amid
those divisions is the story of how a down-on-its-luck town in Texas struck its
own little blow for unity. A little more than a year ago, this city of
25,000 —overwhelmingly white and Christian — made a Muslim
outsider their mayor. (Dr. Hashmi had campaigned to be one of seven
city councilors and, having won, was voted mayor by the council.)
The
mayor swept into office with an immigrant's zeal: planting hundreds of
crepe myrtle trees on the loop around the city; surprising local
agencies with impromptu visits during his lunch hour; interrupting the
"brother-in-law deals," as they're called in the South, that gave
contracts to the wrong people; using tax abatements to lure businesses to Paris.
All
this while serving as a cardiologist and leader of a local hospital
catheterization laboratory that is often the only thing standing between the chicken-fried steaks that patients keep on eating and
the deaths they nonetheless wish to defer.
Which
is why Dr. Hashmi, who is in his early 50s, wakes up at 3:30 a.m. most
days. He prays the first of his customary three daily
prayers. (He maxes out to the prescribed five when he can, but says
he's pretty sure Allah wouldn't want him stopping to pray when he's got a
catheter up someone's groin.) Then he alternates throughout the day between
doctor and mayor, doctor and mayor.
At
10:53 a.m. on a recent morning, wearing a muscle T-shirt and cowboy boots and
clutching two phones, he rushed into a hospital lounge and dictated a report.
His next patient wasn't ready, so he got in his BMW (he's also got a Bentley and
a Lamborghini and many other cars) and drove to his mechanic to check on the
black S.U.V. he plans to use to host visiting dignitaries. Ten minutes later, he
was again at the hospital, pumping dark dye into a sedated woman's heart,
searching for blockages. Fifteen minutes later, he was inspecting Paris's water
plant.
When
he was first running, the town erupted with all the predictable whispers: that
he was trying to drive Christianity out of Paris, that he was a rich doctor
trying to buy the town, that he would build a mosque, that he was a terrorist.
Today
he has won over much of the city. (His first council election was 4-3 in his
favor; he was re-elected this year 7-0.) Local citizens speak of him variously
as a blood transfusion and a breath of fresh air, even though some in the old
guard retain their anxieties.
Part
of his strategy has been to embrace his newness to the city, where he arrived in
2006 after many years in Tampa, Florida. He says that, because he is an
outsider, no one in Paris is his cousin or classmate, and that he is thus free
to govern by reason. He says he is trying to save the
city from the cronyism that he has seen strangle his own country: "In most of
third world countries, yes, there are rules and laws and regulations. But it
ends up that related people get things done," he said. He saw that same
phenomenon afflicting Paris. "I have lived it personally and seen why it doesn't
work," he said.
U.S.
politicians are wont to conceal the complexity and worldliness in their
backgrounds — as with Mitt Romney's ability to speak French or President Barack
Obama's early years in Indonesia.
Dr. Hashmi takes a different approach, speaking Urdu to
friends or family in front of his colleagues, answering the phones with "Salaam
aleikum" at times and at times with "How ya doin'?" His Pakistani accent remains
strong.
Just
after 11 p.m. that same night, after a full day's work twice over, he was
sitting on a sofa at home with his family and some friends, nibbling on flaky
cookies specially bought in Lahore.
His
beeper sounded. A middle-aged man was at the hospital with chest pains, and the
emergency room doctor wanted his advice. He asked for an electrocardiogram to be
texted to his iPhone. When
he saw it, he concluded that the man needed him. He told the doctor to prepare
the catheter, and he drove away down a dark country road into his Paris.
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