Looking beyond the cosmetic
Amid the political turmoil that we have been victim to over the past few months, little attention paid to the results of the 2017 census. One of these results is…
Hippie, happy Kabul
During the 1962-75 period Kabul was one of the main outposts of the hippie movement. The other was Nepal (Kathmandu). This statement is not of the “Ripley’s Believe it or…
Stern business of funny money
In the mid-1990s the Soviet Union had collapsed and my friend Tariq Usman Haider was appointed as the envoy to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. I took the opportunity to…
Failure of imagination
On the evening of January 27, 1967 the Apollo 1 crew was performing a test rehearsal on the pad at Launch Complex 34 when a spark from a power surge…
Talking tourism
Earlier this month, during his visit to the Sonmiani beach in Balochistan’s Lasbela district, Prime Minister Imran Khan proposed establishing a “splendid tourist resort” along the coastal belt of the…
Unanswered question of independence
Was the independence of Pakistan from the British Raj in 1947 an act of de-colonization or merely a communal event? And is it any comfort or consolation to be robbed…
The excitement of a broken gramophone record
In Lahore at the Avari – where my irremediable poverty regularly takes me – I listened to Ishaq Dar going on and on about how they were going to change…
