No prizes for guessing what Pakistan will do on October 1, 2009The United States and Pakistan are like Martha and George in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. They can’t even make love without insulting and abusing each other. The latest in their long and continuing walpurgisnacht is S.1707, the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act 2009. (This article is based on S.1707 CPS, the version considered […]
Hefners Bunny Gala! on January 31, 2009There is a place in Islamabad, Bunny Gala, and Hugh Hefner is going to buy it. A place called Bunny Gala must have Hefner in the middle of it, and live up to its name.Don’t ask me how Hefner came across a reference to Bunny Gala. It may well have been through some respectable gent, […]
Drawing-room Notebooks on December 1, 2007I am a naturalised Lahori, part of the flotsam washed onto the incestuous shores of this city. My name’s up there so that’s a fairly good start. I am a Pisces. For reasons both of the two fish going in opposite directions and because Lahore has brushed off on me, I am a mass of […]
Heres to rank stupidity on May 31, 2007In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Masque of Pandora, Prometheus warns Epimetheus against having Pandora as a guest thus: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”When Dr Ayesha Siddiqa called Thursday noon to inform me that the governemnt (read the military) had banned the launch of her book, “Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy,” […]