Titanic disaster by consensus?
A pew survey on how Saudi Arabia is viewed abroad including in Pakistan and the renewed Saudi resolve to keep women out of the driving seat coincided. An overwhelming majority…
Bankruptcy of the mental kind
“Such incidents are not conducive to peace talks…”, PM Sharif. Some revelation this…if the death toll in the Peshawar church attack had been somewhat lower, would that have facilitated peace…
Humanity at stake in Syria
Wimp. That’s what pundits in the west and Middle East seem to think about President Barack Obama following his ‘flip-flop’ over Syria. Even those opposed to western interference in the…
Police: how many should die?
In the aftermath of the Dera Ismail Khan jailbreak, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Minister for Revenue and Estate Ali Amin Khan Gandapur visited the jail. Talking to reporters, he expressed his frustration…
Civil society’s failures
Economists know about what they call ‘market failure’ as well as ‘government failure’ in a situation where neither institution as a whole, for a number of well-recognised reasons, has been…
Politics of visibility
Pakistan’s elite has been seen to manifest a myriad of contradictions. Perhaps one of the most significant of these is the nature of its liberalism. Liberalism usually connotes democratic values,…
Rs500 billion
Rs500 billion divided by 360 days comes close to Rs1.5 billion a day every day of the year. Rs500 billion divided among each and every Pakistani family comes to Rs17,000…
Our rooms and their streets
Use your brain before May 11 – this meme, one of many that are doing the rounds on the Pakistani blogosphere in the run-up to the general elections, comes as…
The issue is governance
As the dust of electoral controversy settles down the focus of the national debate should now be not only on what needs to be done first but also on the…
The politics of urbanisation
In relatively stable societies, economics shapes politics these are places where one can meaningfully say `it`s the economy, stupid`. Even seemingly bizarre foreign policies can be related to economics as…
