Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

Leaders come in all shapes, sizes, types and calibres. Some excel at leading people out of morass while some manufacture quagmires. Sycophants of the latter type create a fictitious aura for themselves hoping their mediocrity will go unnoticed. They also depend on someone else’s ‘personality’ or ‘legacies’ where they contributed nothing. While they mess up […]

If size really mattered, Singapore, which is hard even to find on the map, would be a non-entity, an easy to bully and trample upon place. Its total area is a tiny 274.2 square miles making it about three-and-a-half times the size of Washington DC. It has a population of five million only but it […]

Pakistan’s politicians, politics, realpolitik, institutions and rulers defy definition and comparison and, therefore, defy comprehension. They are an oddity and are very much the creation of a particular mindset and beliefs that exist only in the ‘land of the pure’. This creature, usually called the ‘establishment’, is unique; had it had a counterpart, the situation […]

Recently General Ashfaq Kayani while inaugurating the Kassa Hills Marble Project said that there was “no military operation in Balochistan”. The fact is that such projects demand extensive and multi-tiered army involvement and if that is not “operation of the army in Balochistan” then what is? Does this involvement in typically civilian and business ventures […]

Propitiously, February 20 is celebrated as the World Day of Social Justice to be followed on the 21st by celebration of an equally important and sensitive issue, the International Mother Language Day, but unfortunately observance is limited to paying lip service without effort or attempt to further these sacred causes in their true spirit. These […]

The unbridled expenditure on militaries and weapons by countries to create ‘national security states’ not only promotes war-mongering and indiscriminate use of force but also leaves people perpetually tottering on the brink of an abyss. This folly is akin to credit card use: carefree fun initially and desperation at payback time. Unfortunately, it is the […]

Some decades ago, it was fashionable and even politically correct to condemn the arms race and demand global nuclear and conventional weapons disarmament but, of late, it seems the people have meekly resigned themselves to their fate and have accepted the curse of an arms race as something beyond their ambit of interests. People, if […]

The present uprisings in the Middle East have baffled all and irked many for their inordinately late coming and their intensity and ferocity. The people were extremely submissive to these vicious autocrats whom Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, termed “monarch-type figure”. This apparently contradictory behaviour should not have surprised anyone at all because this […]

In his book, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) tells about a Roman emperor who, angered by the actions of his favourite jester, orders that he be put to death. The jester, hearing this, mournfully shakes his head and says that a wish of his would remain […]

People and events invariably conjure up images in our minds, some pleasant, some disagreeable and some downright ridiculous and outrageous. Pakistani rulers and leaders remind me of a Charles Dickens character called “artful dodger” from the novel Oliver Twist. The troupes of clowns who pass muster as rulers and leaders here have an uncanny character […]