Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Ehsaas social assistance program on April 13, 2020I voted for Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in 2013. I voted for Imran Khan in 2018. He was the National Assembly PTI candidate in my area of residence in Lahore. Despite a few disappointments related to PTI government’s performance since Sepetmber 2018 after Khan’s swearing-in as the prime minister of Pakistan, there has not […]
Coronavirus, Pakistan and Punjab on April 5, 2020Time seems to have frozen into one moment. In that moment is the world hurdled in collective stupefaction. In the last one month, there appeared on the global consciousness a coronavirus shaped reality in its deadly enormity that with the calm assurance of inevitability slunk into countries that prided themselves on their strategic, political, economic, […]
The world and Coronavirus on March 22, 2020In 2020 it is one of the worst humanitarian crises of the world that grapples with man-made and natural tragedies of unimaginable proportions in many of its parts. The continuing effects of the five-year-old Yemen war are so huge their description doesn’t need any scary background music and images in slow-mo to encapsulate its inhuman […]
Chief Minister Usman Buzdar and the corona war on March 20, 2020One day ago, Editor Dawn Fahd Husain wrote an article, ostensibly, on coronavirus, quoting no one and Martians. The purpose, what it appears to any neutral reader, was to provide his personal views, daintily camouflaged in measured lexicon that is an advanced course in triple entendre, as the editor of, the newspaper with, reportedly, the […]
Ahmad Nawaz: the hero Pakistan needs on December 16, 2019On the fifth anniversary of one of the most painful and the most brutal terror attack in the history of Pakistan, the Army Public School attack of December 16, 2014, I spoke to Ahmad Nawaz. Ahmad, 18, is an APS survivor, currently a resident of the United Kingdom, is studying for his entrance exam for […]
The Sharif verdict on July 10, 2018On July 6, 2018, an accountability court in Islamabad announced a verdict that would beseen as one of the most important and one of the most controversial legal decisions of recent times in a strengthened but still a weak democracy like Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif, the three-time prime minister and the former head of the biggest […]
Khadija’s story on May 28, 2018It was just another hot, nondescript, bright summer day. Davis Road, one of the busiest commercial roads in Lahore, hissed with the noise of vehicles, incessant honking and aimless chatter of pedestrians, unhurried in their eagerness to reach nowhere. A car was parked outside the Ambassador Hotel, a Davis Road icon of bygone glory, the […]
Pakistans men in khaki on May 25, 2017‘Z A Bhutto hanged, buried in Naudero.’ This was the first sentence of my first-ever op-ed in December 2011. My elementary school mind in 1979 couldn’t grasp the enormity of the act that shadowed headlines in badly-printed newspapers and darkened screens of grainy, black and white television screens. All I remember feeling was a confusing […]
Pakistan and India: peace interrupted on May 27, 2016While the rational ones regarded it as what it was, the hardliners, opposition, and hawks on both sides did not lose a moment to deride the fine print of the five-point press release issued jointly by the foreign secretaries of Pakistan and India on July 10 at Ufa in Russia. The 55-minute meeting between Pakistani […]
Is India intolerant? on May 13, 2016The very word tolerance speaks of an environment where myriad and contrasting ideas, viewpoints, social ethos, ideological narratives, cultural dynamics and religious distinctions exist. From the fundamental grouping of family to community to society to nation, the entire edifice of human interaction stands not merely on the similarities between individuals but on the distinct differences […]