The right man for the wrong job
“If you are going through hell, keep going” — Churchill With octogenarians walking us through the most tumultuous times in our history, we don’t see a way out. No promises,…
Elections and ‘Ideology of Pakistan’
The Election Commission's returning officers, drawn from subordinate judiciary, have been taking vicarious pleasure in applying Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution to determine the qualifications/disqualifications of candidates on…
Everything’s almost free in Spain’s parallel barter economy
It can be argued that extra-judicial interventions first by Ghulam Mohammad as Governor General in 1951 and later by military regimes and disregard of the Constitution - facilitated by either…
Nawaz in Wonderland
PML-N’s 2013 elections manifesto brings to mind the fairy-tale ‘Alice in Wonderland’. “If you don’t know where you are going, then it doesn’t matter which way you go”. This seems…
What are the caretakers up to?
The caretaker Prime Minister Mir Hazar Khan Khoso received briefings from different ministries/departments and took more than a week to identify fifteen individuals as his cabinet members. One of the…
This could be such an exciting country
Some architecture becomes beautiful by adding things to it domes and minarets, and quadrangles and outer walls. Some architecture looks good when unnecessary clutter around it is cleared. Some daughters…
Shattered dreams
Apart from being the day of the Lahore Resolution, March 23 has, and should have, another significance for us. On that day, in 1956, the country, hitherto governed under the…
Undermining the elections
In our own little world of feudal-colonial-authoritarian traditions, the aspirations for democratic values and institutions are evenly matched by a discomfort with both values and institutions. How deep is that…
Of absurdity and tragedy
Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s sudden gush of ‘peace-mongering’ and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and the PML-N’s support for the same is one of those absurdities of life that are too deep for…
Losing both war and peace
Inscribed on the wall of a Buddhist temple in Hawaii are the words: ‘Every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key can open the…
