Shattered lives, lost dreams
Fareeha (not her real name) introduced herself as a 28-year-old, but her haggard appearance made her look older than her years. “You start looking much older than you are when…
Rashad, my father
How do you write about a person who remained an integral part of your life for over 60 years? Someone who guided and helped you at every turn of your…
FY23: The budget
Friday 10 June the budget for 2022-23 is scheduled to be laid before parliament by the unelected though a PML-N stalwart finance minister, Miftah Ismail, who will have the honour…
Nasty, brutish and short
Nasty, brutish and short. That is how Thomas Hobbes described life in the state of nature, a setting in which there were no enforceable criteria of right and wrong. People…
Indo-Pak thaw: what went wrong?
What has so abruptly reversed the Modi government’s consent to a meeting sans the resumption of the dialogue process between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers on the sidelines of…
Pakistan of the poor
Democracy has become one of the most widely used and least understood notions in the modern lingua of politics. It has become a normative practice to appreciate democracy as the…
The saint of our disorders
After Abdul Sattar Edhi, Pakistan may not be the same. Our country has been diminished by his death. And I do not know if anyone of us has the gift…
When parties die
Political parties too have a sense of immortality like human beings. We know we have to die one day. But, exceptions aside, this immutable fact has little influence on what…
Decline of the Nehruvian
The spectre of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and one of the three founders of the Non-Alignment Movement along with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and Gamal Abdel…
Wish I were there
I have watched, in live telecasts, those massive protests staged in Cairo's Tahrir Square and in Istanbul’s Taksim Square some time back – with a sense of longing as well…
