JIT saga the great farce on June 18, 2017On June 14, Islamabad was buzzing with foreboding and dark expectations. Ruling party’s town criers were predicting and promising doom. On June 15 PM Nawaz Sharif was to appear before JIT for criminal investigation against him for funnelling off huge amounts of money out of country illegally. They also grilled him for the inexplicable but […]
The judge that never was on May 15, 2017From time to time, Pakistan has been hit by floods,famine,earthquakes,failed monsoons,locust and human-made disasters like war,and sectarian militancy.Al-Qaeda and all varieties of terrorism that followed were a direct corollary of the Afghan jihad, solely set up and nursed by the US against the Soviet Union.ISIL isa blood cousin of Al-Qaeda;set up by the US and […]
Last men standing on April 25, 2017 On 12 April 2017, humanity, a man’s right to life and belief and the passage to peaceful disagreement and constructive dissent, were annihilated in Wali Khan University, Mardan as the mob smoked out, chased and lynched Mashal Khan. They shot him, drilled screwdrivers into his skull and mutilated his dead body in a frenzy […]
Republic of forgotten truths and remembered illusions on March 27, 2017The other day while reading irrepressible Arunadhati Roy’s very substantive compilation The Hanging of Afzal Guruand the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament(December 2001), I came across Shudhabrata Sengupta’s masterpiece called Media trials and Courtroom Tribulations; a Battle of Images,Words and Shadowswhich reflects directly but unfavourably upon the controversial special court trial […]
Tell me where do I belong to on February 11, 2017Tall, strong and shady trees do not grow in thin air, shifting sands or swamps. Our sturdy Bunyan is a local tree which stands majestically in the firm soil through the ages and even centuries of ferocious storms, sun and shower. It goes on replanting itself where it originally grew out from. The result is […]
We have lost our marbles on January 16, 2017We lost our social cohesion and civil anchorage, in fact, our place in history, when River Hakra, the legendary Saraswati, turned away from us thousands of years ago. It was the mother river on whose banks Indus Civilization was born and prospered to become one of the largest and the most enlightened civilisations in the […]
The Mud Hut on December 2, 2016Somewhere in rural Punjab, a poor peasant family was moving from one hamlet to another in search of better opportunities to earn their meagre bread. As they trudged on their dusty, arduous trek, they picked up a disused window frame with a few intact panes of coloured glass from a debris pile outside a small […]
The unilateralism of divorce on July 12, 2016It has been reported by Al Jazeera that in India 50,000 men and women have signed a petition demanding a ban on Muslim divorce. Three different but expected reactions were noticed. Ulema (religious scholars) were the first to denounce it as “un-Islamic” and an “intervention in Islamic faith.” The Indian Supreme Court simply shied away, […]
Between perfidy and dignity II on July 5, 2016Our media and leadership relish deriding Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his unfriendly stance. Agreed, but see his remarkable grasp of national affairs with which he addresses his audiences locally and abroad for hours with great coherence and fluency. We too have one whose commitment to the vital issues of the country can be gauged […]
Between perfidy and dignity I on July 4, 2016As a rule wealth that is stolen is gleefully plundered once again by those left behind. Saddam Hussain’s famous palace, Muammar Gaddafi’s gold dinner sets, Hosni Mubarak’s billions of dollars stashed abroad and Shah of Iran’s kingdom were all left behind, like many mighty monarchs and billionaires before them. The kind of inglorious end that […]