Mehboob Qadir

Pakistan is a magnificent country and its people are made of the strongest clay in Almighty’s mud factory. He must have injected infinite elasticity into the country’s structure and fixed quite a few extra bones into our shoulder blades. Otherwise how could a country still be standing after being dismembered barely 25 years after its […]

Mothers’ Day came quietly this year among a series of commemorative days, which followed each other in succession, quick enough to leave hardly any footprint in their wake. Then there is that ever-present maddening turmoil around us, which degrades and dilutes one’s power of reflective thinking. It is a tragedy of our times that even […]

After a swift and unexpectedly successful march on the capital city Sanaa early last year, Houthis emerged as the new predominant force in Yemen, creating serious security concerns in neighbouring countries, particularly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the UAE and Oman. Tremors were so powerful as to force an unusual scramble by the KSA and […]

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, its society quickly disintegrated into a number of resistance groups, disjointed and disparate. While most of the Pashtun resistance regrouped in Pakistan for a guerilla war, the Hazaras reached out to Iran, which effectively disentitled them to material and financial help from the US-Saudi-Pakistani troika. However, by 1984, […]

On January 17, 2013, a spectacle of sorcery, deceit and Machiavellian political manipulation dramatically came to an end before the Parliament House in Islamabad. In that comedy of the abject and the absurd, centre-stage was held by one man, Allama Tahirul Qadri. The country, its capital and its hapless people were held hostage to the […]

The Indian Congress leaders in their formative years of struggle for independence had realised the perils of a theology/ethnicity-based state comprising a huge and nearly impossible mix of religions and races in the South Asian British colony — the Indian subcontinent.In the history of the subcontinent there has been no political precedence for such an […]

Now the sad part. There are kilometres upon kilometres of spacious green belts along the Islamabad Expressway between Zero Point and the airport intersection. A request in the public interest was made to the Chief Executive who never tired of rattling off, ad nauseam, his deep feelings for the youth, the poor and the country. […]

The evening of January 17, Pakistanis saw another of the familiar farces called negotiations with the authorised representatives of the ruling coalition in full view of TV cameras in the well-furnished sitting room of the famous container. This was a strange but instructive sight. Against nine very seasoned politicians of various shades, the great Allama […]

  Somewhere in the childhood books one had read the story of the infamous bird king who had brought about untold misery to his subjects just because he could not see beyond his own beak and because he had grown fond of his own plumage. More than that, he was not prepared to listen to […]

What you see is past is a perplexing notion with an implied message of mirage or a reality check from Stephen Hawking, a uniquely gifted British physicist. Hawking had no desire to indulge in embroidered prose in his masterpiece A Brief History of Time. He was, in fact, explaining a purely scientific phenomenon of light […]