What a real airport does
As a frequent traveller, one learns to appreciate the smallest of things during the travel itinerary. The real struggle during the journey is the time you leave your home/hotel for…
Planes and airports
This is perhaps more a travelogue, with a few lessons here and there, than a discourse on airports and planes. On a very recent trip to Dubai, got the dates…
Revolution: Islamabad style
Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital for half a century, was conceived as a peaceful retreat, away from the heat and dust of this country and the humdrum of its people. For a…
Politics over economics
This is the second of a two-part series on Pakistani administration’s focus on domestic factors while ignoring external factors which have a much greater relevance in formulation of our domestic…
Sleepwalking into the darkness
Venal and rent-seeking elites are a global phenomenon, but most countries don’t have to deal with the lack of imagination and basic incompetence that Pakistanis do. Every day the evidence…
A highway runs through it
There is an ancient view of the world according to which the Earth was a flat disk. That disk had to be supported by something. So, it was imagined that…
An eyewitness account
The past midnight announcement at the Islamabad international airport on Saturday, June 26 informed the passengers at the departure lounge that a PIA flight scheduled for Lahore from Islamabad has…
Changing the past
Here’s a riddle for you. Why do I think of Milan Kundera when I drive past the Teen Talwar roundabout in Karachi and am in a pensive mood? Naturally, when…
Textbooks of ‘respectability’
Who we are as individuals depends in large measure on the combined effects of many contributing factors. Our educational experiences, cultural and social influences of family and friends, books read,…
Institution building
AMIDST the din of the Kashmir crisis and the economy, there is little space for anything else, including the bureaucracy. That the bureaucracy is not working is something everyone agrees…
