Hina Hafeezullah Ishaq

“Pakistan is the front-line state in the war against terrorism” — the sheer depth and impact of this statement can only be understood and felt if one is either a Pakistani or a resident of Pakistan. I am both. I, like millions of other Pakistanis, live in a country devastated by uncertainties, the foremost being […]

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting the NADRA Executive Centre located in Liberty, Lahore. The purpose was to modify an identity card, seemingly a benign and simple enough task. The problem was that it was NADRA: the ‘National Agony and Dhakkay (push/shove) Rendering Authority’. Virgie R Orpilla was born in the Philippines to […]

The Indian Supreme Court is currently hearing petitions filed by the three condemned prisoners who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi and another condemned, named Bhullar, who was convicted for the bomb blasts of 1993. The mercy petitions filed by all four have been rejected by the president after having been kept pending for 11 and eight years, […]

Years ago, the fervour of Eid and more so of ‘chaand raat’ (night of the moon) was simply amazing; the Lahore police was forever formulating plans to maintain the traffic flow, control the eve-teasers and on the whole avoid a major disaster. Years later, as the security issues became complex, I for one was simply […]

“Have I done anything unconstitutional and illegal? Yes, I have. On November 3.” Imagine the horror, utter disbelief and immense amusement I felt as I watched General Musharraf’s blatant confession in an interview he gave to the BBC in November 2007. And I thought then, only in Pakistan can one take an oath under the […]

Pakistan has always been on the ‘hit-list’ of western countries when it comes to being labelled, whether it is for terrorism, corruption or for having discriminatory laws against its female population. Not that I disagree with them totally but I do feel that in order to criticise someone else, one needs to clean their own […]

In our culture, a lot of emphasis is placed on having children. Barely a couple of months pass before inquisitive relatives start asking whether any ‘good news’ is expected; not only this, they go even further and equate any bout of food poisoning with the so-called good news! When a couple does have a child, […]

Memory can be a dodgy thing. If not refreshed often, we tend to either erase or put in cold storage information and images that are not really relevant to our present. Watching images of widespread riots in England, most particularly in London, has brought back memories from my past. In April 1981, we lived in […]

Much excitement has been created in Pakistan — not that we are ever short of exciting news in this part of the world, barring a few occasional lulls though — by what is now popularly being referred to as the ‘Memogate’ scandal. While the president seems to have fallen ill suddenly and had to proceed […]

In the film ‘Runaway Bride’, Julia Roberts plays the role of a woman who has an intense fear of commitment and has run away from several of her weddings — it gets to a stage that each time she decides to get married, the whole town turns into a bookie-zone! A recent judgement given by […]