The wondrous Yosemite National Park on March 24, 2019Named after the Indians who lived there, Yosemite National Park is located four hours south east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The park draws four million visitors annually. The most impressive site is Yosemite Valley, carved by rivers of ice millions of years ago. It’s seven miles long and about a mile […]
Exploring Kauai’s Allerton Garden on February 25, 2019As luck would have it, we discovered Allerton Garden on the last day of our tour of Kauai. It id a hidden gem that National Geographic Traveler considers one of the 50 Places of a Lifetime in America. Several movies have been filmed there, including Jurassic Park, South Pacific and Pirates of the Caribbean. The […]
The enigma of arms race with India on February 8, 2019Being much smaller than India, Pakistan knows that it can never reach parity with India in conventional weapons without bankrupting itself. So it developed nuclear weapons. Its nuclear arsenal is now estimated to be on par with India’s. That should have freed up resources from the conventional arms race to be spent on economic, social […]
Tilak Devasher on Pakistan’s future direction on January 28, 2019Pakistan is the world’s sole nuclear power strategically located at the entrance to the Gulf. The Arab countries and China are making major investments in Pakistan. Two Pakistanis have been awarded the Nobel Prize. And the country has incredible natural beauty. Yet something is not quite right. The Pakistani passport ranks fifth from the bottom […]
The irrational longing for the Musharraf years on January 27, 2019When you have been gone for a decade, people being to miss you. A decade after Field MarshalAyub resigned, signs began to appear on trucks saying, “We began to miss you once you were gone.” Is nostalgia a human trait? Musharraf stepped down on the 18th of August, 2008 and some people are missing him. […]
Exploring the Victorian Harbour on January 20, 2019Ages ago, when I lived in Karachi, I saw a movie called ‘Hong Kong’s Hot Harbour’. It was a thriller with a boat combat. A year or two later I found myself in Hong Kong while in transit to San Francisco on PanAm. It was an overnight stop and there was not much time to […]
Exploring the City of Azaleas on January 16, 2019While visiting Beijing some 18 years ago, we had toured the Forbidden City. It was a massive palace with 9,999 and a half rooms, walled and surrounded by a moat. While the Changing of Guards ceremony was awesome, we had discovered that several of the imperial masterworks which were originally housed in the Forbidden City […]
Exploring one of Mexico’s top five tourist destinations on January 8, 2019Everyone raved about Cabo. Our daughters had been there half a dozen times but we had never been. So this year we decided to go there for they year-end family holidays. We arrived on a Monday and departed on a Friday. Cabo San Lucas is located in the state of Baja California Sur in Mexico, […]
A memoir of Egypt on December 24, 2018I arrived in Cairo (Al Qahira, the victorious) in November 1996, very conscious of the history that awaited. I was looking forward to visiting the only surviving member of the seven ancient wonders of the world, the pyramids of Giza. I reached out to one of the several Egyptians who had attended a three-month course […]
General Yahya’s endgame on December 22, 2018On December 20th, 1971, Yahya was deposed as president, army chief and chief martial administrator by the Pakistani military. His ignominious departure provided a sharp contrast to the fanfare that had attended his arrival to that exalted office on the 25th of March, 1969, when he had replaced President Field Marshal Ayub Khan. Faced with […]