Pak-born Texan mayor seeks Musharraf's advice to run city

Texas, Aug 12 (ANI): A Pakistani-born Texan mayor, Arjumand Hashmi, has turned to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf for advice to run the city, a news report has revealed.

"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," The News quoted from the New York Times report.

Hashmi, a small-government Republican, when faced with the dilemma of deciding whether to buy new fire trucks, turned to Musharraf.

Hashmi was elected mayor of a Texas town of inhabited by around 25,000 whites and Christians.

The NYT said Hashmi, who is in his early 50s, wakes up at 3:30 am most days, and prays the first of his customary three daily prayers. He then alternates throughout the day between doctor and mayor.

When he was first running, the town came up with all the predictable whispers- that he was trying to drive out Christianity, that he was a rich doctor trying to buy the town, that he would build a mosque, that he was a terrorist, the paper said.

Today he has won over much of the city. 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, it added.

According to him, he is free to govern by reason, because he is an outsider, and has no cousin or classmate in town. (ANI)