D Asghar

The pharaoh is having the last laugh. I mean Hosni Mubarak, the disgraced former president of Egypt. He has a lot to laugh about. Nominally in detention, he actually now lives in comfortable retirement in a military hospital, well looked after by the many field marshals and generals whom he promoted and patronised over three […]

No I am not going to do the usual condemnation, the usual nonsense that people utter to demonstrate their presumed sorrow. As if the perpetrators of terrorist attacks give a hoot about any such condemnations. They perhaps laugh at such hollow and meaningless verbosity; the channels go a step ahead and keep track of who […]

It is best to avoid getting into debates on hypothetical situations based on ‘what if’ postulations, particularly on such a sensitive issue as partition. Nevertheless, I am tempted to make a few observations on the subject, prompted by Mr Yasser Latif Hamdani’s recent article, ‘What if there had been no partition of India?’ (Daily Times, […]

Altaf Bhai’s arrest on suspicion of money laundering did not come as a surprise. Altaf Hussain had told his faithful followers that British law enforcement agencies were after him and have made his life extremely difficult, as of last year. Based on what information has surfaced so far, the correspondents of news channels have reported […]

If the protection of the life, liberty and property of its citizens is the primary duty of any state, then the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has totally failed to discharge its duties, its more than a million-strong armed forces (army, paramilitary and police), hundreds of tanks, squadrons of F-16s, many ‘sensitive’ and not-so-sensitive agencies notwithstanding. […]

I knew this from the word go but it is still worth a mention. Our idiot box lives up to its name with a bunch of idiots spewing a whole lot of nonsense and creating a hypothesis that royally confuses the general public. The Indian Prime Minister (PM) invited our PM along with the heads […]

Within the space of a couple of months, we witnessed three accidents involving the deaths of hundreds of people in each case. The tragedies spanned three countries separated by physical distance and cultural attitudes. Curiously, too, one happened in the air, the other at sea and the third, literally, inside the earth, 400 metres underground. […]

So India as expected got ‘Modi-fied’. Last year when at our end the PML-N claimed victory, as a populist relatively right wing party, I had predicted on my favourite media Twitter that a similar fate lay in store for our neighbours. I made those rather simplistic predictions, based on feeling the pulse of Indians on […]

I do not know about the rest of you but certain phrases and statements just amuse me. We tend to hear them very often and repeat them in front of others to impress them with our skills and command over current events. Take the term ‘civil society’ for example. At least in this flawed scribe’s […]

Very rarely will you find in any other country, its ‘local traders’ showing their solidarity with the chief spook — the citizens erecting giant size posters with usual ‘patriotic’ bylines, singing praises of their ‘lion’, plastered all over the federal capital. But we are different are we not? In any other country, typically what an […]