Dr Haider Shah

The country celebrated its 69th Independence Day with a festive mood. This carefree jubilation, however, proved to be short-lived as the militant and fanatic followers of a Sunni banned outfit exacted their terrible revenge on the state for killing their leader, Malik Ishaq, and his associates by murdering the home minister of Punjab. Nations have […]

The internet has provided impetus to the process of globalisation as smart phone technology has shrunk the world, fitting it into our palm. Every technological breakthrough comes at a price though. If the car engine has made our lives more comfortable by improving transportation it has also polluted our air. The internet is no exception. […]

In 1971, Pakistan was under martial law and experiencing the horrors of the ‘we can fix it’ idealism of military brains. A draconian press censorship regime was therefore a natural disaster management tool in the hands of uniformed military rulers. We are now in 2015 and claim to have been through a socio-political revolution engineered […]

In London,as all media sources had predicted,we faced a blazing day on July 1; my car’s dashboard recorded 37 C temperature on the day. We were given many health-related warnings on the television and radio and were advised to drink fluids regularly during the day to avoid chances of dehydration. In Pakistan, the mercury remains […]

The UK’s pollsters were among the biggest losers, besides Labour and Liberal Democrats, as Conservatives emerged victorious in the UK parliamentary elections. The opinion poll industry had predicted a hung parliament after a neck-to-neck competition between the incumbent Conservatives and the challenger Labour party. Opinion poll experts had to eat humble pie as the exit […]

Sabeen Mahmud was silenced last Friday when she was driving back after organising a panel discussion called ‘Unsilencing Balochistan (Take 2)’, which took place in her café, The Second Floor (T2F). The conscientious segments of Pakistan were still struggling to deal with this shock when a professor of Karachi University was killed in a not very […]

No one would have noticed the entrance of the cyber crime bill in the National Assembly titled Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2015 amid the furore over Pak-Arab relations and the melodramatic situation in Karachi if some human rights analysts and editors of major dailies had not raised alarms over some potentially draconian powers granted […]

On April 30, 2014, Youm-e-Shuhada (Martyrs Day) was celebrated in Pakistan to mark the sacrifices of armed forces personnel. The most important newsworthy event of the day was the speech by General Raheel Sharif, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS). All important leaders that engineered a social or political change were famous for their charismatic […]

When a tree in a jungle is ablaze, no bird in the nearby trees sleeps complacently. But we have developed an uncanny ability of underestimating the nature of an impending trouble, be it a natural calamity or a storm created by our own national folly. Our inaction over blasphemy laws is one such example. In […]

After witnessing some ugly scenes, it comes as a relief to note that finally, some sanity has prevailed among doctors and normalcy is returning to hospitals in the Punjab. The situation reminded me of the London riots when some groups of opportunist youth went on a shoplifting spree. A few theory-led commentators started digging social […]