An analysis of Pakistan’s politics performed in the style of a laboratory experiment would include the scientific imperative that any alteration...
And so it’s a wrap. The year 2017 is over and it has left us with much to ponder. What have we learnt and how have we been tested in the last...
Together with the plethora of problems that need fixing in Pakistan, the one that ought to be on top of the list for the current government, and...
Another tumultuous week in our blighted land passes, with the rupee taking a dive and with some further adjustments to our hodgepodge political...
Radical Islam is a dilemma for the world. The West understands that since the advent of the 19th and through the course of the 20th century,...
As I write this article, the storm clouds on the political horizon appear to be dissipating as an agreement has been reached with the protesters in...
I wrote about Singapore in my previous column and described its peculiar stability and staggering achievements, despite the amalgam of...
If there is a list of splendid countries you could put together, Singapore would have to be somewhere at the top. Because, simply put, Singapore is...
In the wake of a doctor’s termination from a well-known private hospital in Karachi – for sending his patient a friendship request over...
What’s the worst kind of dish you can have on an empty stomach in a cheap restaurant? Certainly a poorly cooked one. Here’s why: when...
As she walks through Wonderland, Alice arrives at a fork in the road and inquires the Rabbit about what path she should take. “Where do you...
A picture doing the rounds on social media captures an overhead bridge in Rawalpindi with a hoarding that bears the advertisement of an internet...
As darkness descends on the NORI hospital for cancer patients in Islamabad, the tumult of activity witnessed inside its gates during the day also...
On the eve of the new millennium, at a New Year’s party, I recall the frenzied atmosphere in the countdown to the year 2000. Apocalyptic...
There is a moment in Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’, where the protagonist, Nader, accuses Simin, the headstrong wife, of...
As the census results pour in, we are presented with the stark reality that almost 64 percent of our population is rural with the balance residing...
The celebrations began two nights before Independence Day and were much the same as they have been for a decade now in Islamabad. Draped in green...
My father’s generation was one of optimists. His life story is similar to that of the countless others who grew up in Pakistan in the...
Here’s a health check on the current state of affairs in Pakistan: our domestic politics are riven with no political consensus on how to steer...
No, this is not a reference to Art Baker’s human interest TV show from the 50s, the 70s iteration of which aired on PTV. I mean instead that...
Enroute to Karachi on board a PIA ATR turbo-prop, I reflect on the shifting baseline syndrome as it applies to Pakistan. It’s a three-hour...
The war rages on in Afghanistan. At the end of last week, the daily Afghanistan Times reported the deaths of at least 14 Taliban rebels and their...
At the Karachi Literature Festival, two sessions in particular, both on completely divergent themes, thoroughly captivated the audience’s...
It has been a disturbing week in the capital. Following the announcement by the Punjab government to shut down educational institutions in the wake...
Politics is about perception. I don’t know who said this, but it is an adage that defines political governance across the globe. People act on...
This is how the war against climate change has progressed thus far: it began in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when an international...
The writer is a freelance columnist.The Macedonian conquest of the Greek-speaking world brought an end to the era of the free Greek city states. The...
The writer is a freelance columnist.The weather is changing. We have all noticed it. If you were born in Pakistan and have lived here all your life...
When the story broke and made the pages of national newspapers, and when the electronic media picked it up and it quickly snowballed into one of the...
The notion of equality among members of any society is one that concerns political ideals of social justice in the civilised world. It also concerns...
There’s much to celebrate in Pakistan on this Eid. The metro bus is up and running in the twin cities, despite an unanticipated and rather wet...
If we pause and consider the pace and nature of Pakistan’s journey into decline, we cannot help but be amazed in the manner our rulers, over the...
The word on the grapevine, dear reader, is that democracy has failed. Political parties, it appears, are by and large peopled with lazy, corrupt,...
Growing up in the 1980s in Pakistan, my generation became acquainted with Afghanistan in the context of the war against the Soviet Union. In those...
I don’t know what has been more nerve-numbing: the Axact expose published in the NYT last week; the priggish denials by the bigwigs of the Axact...
I’m invited to a farmhouse party on the outskirts of Islamabad city. I do not know who coined the term ‘farmhouse’ to replace the more...
If you are you shocked, dear reader, with the recent spate of murders of civil society activists. If you feel an inescapable sense of dread when you...
The new cyber-crime bill, hastily approved by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information Technology, now awaits ratification by...
Showcasing Iran as the ‘State of Supreme Evil in the World’ is the metaphor that defines contemporary politics in the Middle East. It is an...
What's the litmus test to tell you that the managers at the helm of a company have lost the plot? From a bird’s eye view and in layman terms...
Years ago, in the scorching heat of a June afternoon, I found myself tasked with the discomfiting social obligation of visiting a very ill cousin in...
To imagine that terrorism, religious extremism, the growing inequality between rich and poor, the toadyism and corruption rampant within our...
Memories of childhood, that most magical and irrecoverable time of our lives, remain printed indelibly on a canvas that lies somewhere beneath the...
Walking down the carefully preserved, unending maze of halls that form the bowels of the Vatican Museum, my attention is riveted to a tapestry...
If you’re planning to reside in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for the foreseeable future, if your children are to grow up in this country and...
As I prepare for my travel to Europe I’m told I must obtain the polio certificate, which is now as important as the entry visa and the ‘ok to...
I’m in conversation with Pritamdaz Rathi, an economist who hails from the Chelhar village of Tharparkar and from whom I have the benefit of a...
I don’t know where and how he articulated it exactly, but Milan Kundera has described the singularly human capacity to overcome grief as the art...
As we busy ourselves with the tasks of engineering a national front against terrorism, it would do us well to also reflect on the political unrest...
