Dr Syed Mansoor Hussain

Four weeks ago I decided to take some time off from writing my column for this newspaper. Not because there was nothing that I wished to write about but rather what I wanted to write was starting to become bitter and angry and clearly I needed a respite. So I took off for the land […]

Mr Imran Khan has made his fight against ‘corruption’ the centrepiece of his political campaign. For all practical purposes, the only form of corruption he is willing to target directly and most vocally is that personified by President Asif Ali Zardari and Mr Nawaz Sharif. It is, however, a simple reality that even if both […]

Recent arrests in Lahore of people involved in illegal kidney transplants have brought this issue back into the limelight, sort of. Over the last couple of years, new laws about transplantation have undoubtedly decreased the number of ‘unrelated donor’ transplants but the practice continues and if not checked will slowly increase in frequency. As such […]

The advantage of being an opinion writer is that I can write much of anything as long as the opinions I present have some basis in facts or objective assessment of the news or of historical reality. It is for this reason that I have avoided three topics since I always felt too emotionally involved […]

A friend of mine recently called me up from the US to chat. Having read my latest column in this newspaper, he complained — sort of — that I was not sufficiently hard-hitting and I should aggressively attack the ‘sinister’ Pakistani ‘deep state’. Frankly, I have been reading much about this deep state thing so […]

“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things.’” It is time to talk of many things for us in Pakistan right now: people being killed, budgets being presented, load shedding, petrol shortages and of course the ever present threat of terrorism. Things are evidently so bad that every prophet of doom […]

Mr Imran Khan, the last real defender of national honour, said while talking of the latest visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that since Pakistanis are beggars asking the US for money, therefore they cannot be treated with respect by the US. Now this seems pretty upfront and obvious but is it really? […]

The president of Pakistan should, in my humble opinion, immediately appoint a really high-powered judicial commission to investigate what happened to all the commissions, panels and committees that have over the years investigated all sorts of things and what happened to their reports before new commissions are appointed to investigate new things. As it is, […]

The five-week long strike by young doctors in training has finally come to an end. The stalemate ended when a delegation of the striking Young Doctors Association (YDA) finally had a face-to-face meeting with Mian Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister (CM) of Punjab. Even though no actual announcements about any of the YDA’s core demands […]