Connecting the dates
Where were you on May 9, 2023? This is one journalistic device to bring up a particular event for comment and interpretation, an event that may have touched the lives…
A bonfire of literary festivals
What use do we have for the poets, writers and, in a general sense, intellectuals whose business it is to teach us to think, to feel and to dream? Well,…
A voyage around the TTP
At this time, when the new year has launched its promises and its threats against the backdrop of a wasted year, a great confusion is rising about the national sense…
Why civility matters
About a week ago, Federal Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb was accosted and harassed in London by a group of PTI supporters while on her way to a coffee shop. She…
Lynching season
A mentally challenged middle-aged man in Tulamba, a Khanewal village, is the latest victim of mob vigilantism on allegations of blasphemy. His brother revealed that the victim, Mushtaq Rajput, had…
Systemic nurturing of tragedy
At least twenty-three dead bodies in cars, on their way out of Murree. ‘Januaries’ seem to be particularly brutal. January 4, 2011: the Salmaan Taseer assassination. January 9, 2018: the…
Slippery slope of descent into barbarism
The Sialkot incident in which a Sri Lankan factory manager, Priyantha Kumara, was brutally bludgeoned to death by an enraged mob of the factory’s workers for alleged blasphemy and his…
Inconvenient unions
WHEN a prime minister marries, it is his or her own business. It is no concern of the state. When that marriage becomes itself a business, then polity has every…
The cost of surrender
THE terms of surrender may not have been made public but the capitulation could not have been more humiliating. There was nothing surprising about the government succumbing to a lawless…
Planning for a nation
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire IS there anything left to say about Sialkot? Condemn it more? Express outrage even more loudly? Use…
