A fatal distraction
An overnight visit to Lahore this week I thought would be a respite from Karachi, however fleeting it promised to be. And Lahore, at least atmospherically, was very welcoming with…
When the battle’s lost and won
In the baking heat of Delhi, the squirrels are lying flat on their belly in flowerpots I had watered in the morning, cooling their bodies with the residual moisture that…
Preparing for the Eid holidays
Why are people criticising the prime minister for spending the last week of Ramazan in the Holy Land?Of course there are problems to attend to at home but what exactly…
A sinister kind of silence
We live in a society that seems to have parted ways with the faculties of reason, rationality and basic humanity. These qualities are in so many ways crucial to life…
The case for a Kemalist intervention
Pakistani democracy has done things to itself which it now finds impossible to get rid of. We can take it as an axiom of ‘modern’ civilisation that the state has…
Apple strikes a new chord in the future of music
More than a decade ago, the late Steve Jobs pulled one of his trademark reality distorting manoeuvres, browbeating music label executives into selling songs on Apple Inc's then-nascent iTunes digital…
Farzana and the PM
How long would it take a wounded woman’s scream to circle this world when it is transmitted digitally? Well, it took forty-eight hours for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to, as…
A chain around the mind
It is convenient, indeed extremely convenient, for governments to try to place barriers around minds. Many, in fact most, attempt to do so in various ways, some using the ham-handed…
Dream versus reality
Gwadar, on Thursday, became the unlikely launching pad for some glad tidings for the nation. At one level, we had a visual message. There they were, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif…
Censorship: between conservatives and liberals
Even after the remand and continuing trial of Gen Musharraf, few believed that the days of military encroachment over civilian governance were behind us. We aren’t just peoples with short…
