All good things must come to an end on June 24, 2012This month it will be eight years since I have contributed a weekly column for this newspaper. This makes about 400 columns and each at 1,000 words, a total of 400,000 words. That by any estimation is a lot of words for somebody who is not a professional writer. As I think back over these […]
Schadenfreude on June 17, 2012Today, I am going to violate the late William Safire’s cardinal rule about op-ed columns. For a change, I will talk of more than three issues in the same article. The first issue is a serious personal gripe. For eight years, I have been writing an entirely erudite and even if I say so myself, […]
If you get a lemon, make lemonade on June 10, 2012Along the roads in Lahore that are being rebuilt again and again, massive iron structures are going up every few kilometres that are supposedly meant to allow pedestrians to walk across. But I must confess that I have never ever seen even a single pedestrian using these structures. Since more are being built even though […]
Abbottabad on June 4, 2012Five weeks ago the ‘sleepy’ garrison town of Abbottabad was thrust into the international limelight. A week later on what happened to be Mother’s Day I wrote my obligatory column on OBL. As I sent off my column, a thought kept pestering me about the city of Abbottabad that had nothing to do with OBL. […]
Real Muslims dont need electricity on June 3, 2012Concerning load shedding, I have an important revelation that must be brought to the attention of my readers and by extension, the public. In the past, I have been a trifle harsh about our now former minister of load shedding, especially about his statement after he took over his ministry that load shedding would end […]
Liberals, conservatives or what? on May 20, 2012It is almost exactly eight years since I came to Pakistan after having lived and worked in the US for close to 30 years. Initially, I went through a difficult period of readjustment. What literally kept me going was my work in King Edward Medical College (KEMC), the company of my late father, a chance […]
A political love fest in Pakistan on May 17, 2012Originally I was all set to write a bitterly cynical column about how bad things were in Pakistan but then the weather in Lahore turned really pleasant. As the temperature went down and the clouds and sprinkles of rain came around, the venom in my thoughts also dissipated. Perhaps something similar is happening to the […]
No man is an island on May 13, 2012A seven-member bench of the most honourable and puissant Supreme Court of Pakistan (SC) has delivered its ‘full’ verdict on the prime minister’s (PM) contempt of court case. Clearly, I have little expertise in constitutional law to make any intelligent observations in this matter. But what did excite me was the appended ‘opinion’ by the […]
An interesting mess on May 6, 2012Mian Nawaz Sharif is clearly in a terminal state of bother. In his latest public meeting, he declared that the time had come to use ‘kicks rather than words’. Gone is any pretext at being the ‘friendly opposition’. The object of his ire as always is the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its government of […]
Right, left or what? on April 29, 2012Last week I made the statement in these pages that as far as I can see there is no longer any ‘major’ ideological difference between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its two major political opponents at this time, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PM-N) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). (“The friendly opposition?”, Daily Times, April […]