Greed — the biggest threat to national integrity on April 17, 2021If liberal intellectuals consider Socrates to be an opponent of democracy, it is not their fault. The greatest attack of its kind in modern times has been made by Karl Popper, who in his famous book “Free Society and Its Enemies” has called him the leader of undemocratic thinking. It is a fact that Socrates […]
KP’s burden of mental illness on February 12, 2020The World Health Organisation commemorated the annual mental health day in October 2012. It came with a warning that depression, apsychiatric illness and a major contributor to high suicide rates, could become a global crisis.The situation in Pakistan is quite alarming as far as the state of mental illness and the infrastructure to treat it […]
Back to the future on October 1, 2019‘Deconstruction’ is not merely a word recently introduced in the vocabulary of hydrologists, a class of scientists dealing with the movement, distribution and quality of water resources – watershed sustainability as well – but duly a measurable concept which the social scientists can use in exploring many dimensions humans can grow and prosper by ‘correcting’ […]
Let rivers flow! on September 28, 2019The British Raj, which had taken over Mughal India from the hands of the East India Company in the late 1850s, took upon itself the mission to prevent Afghanistan from falling into the hands of its rival power, Russia. It dreaded a situation, whereby the enemy could reach the warm waters of the Arabian Sea […]
Strategic notes on September 24, 2019The JUI-F had hardly spelt the word “Islamabad lockdown,” the strategic community–a new nomenclature for the establishment plus–started weighing the proposed mode of protest and the intentions attached, which are not less than overthrowing the PTI government, against the fluid strategic environment. Through this, India has strangulated Kashmir and the US hangs around looking for […]
The fault lies in elite capture on June 25, 2019The government has almost caved in to the pressure of the political system designed to serve the objectives of every power and entity other than the people of Pakistan. It has abandoned its election manifesto. It has neither been successful in its austerity drive nor has its frvour for accountability yielded great results. The budget […]
Combating the tobacco epidemic on May 29, 2019The World No Tobacco Day is observed on May 31. It has been a practice since 1988 when the 42nd World Health Assembly passed a resolution asking national governments to control the ‘tobacco epidemic’ by discouraging both consumption and production of tobacco. There are mind-boggling statistics that the World Health Organisation has projected about the […]
The way we go about governance on April 24, 2019The benefits we were promised when the Pervez Musharraf regime embarked on its reforms programme have yet to trickle down to the masses. The people, it seems, have yet to learn about the true spirit of democracy. Some sections of the society are painfully loud in cursing the parliamentary form of government and spoiling for […]
Ideal vs real on March 14, 2019It may sound little bit surprising if Pakistan declares its victory in war on extremism, which it launched over a decade ago. The speed in which the government is making arrests and seizing assets of proscribed organisations, its success against terrorism appears to be in a matter of months, if not weeks. We may term […]
Rethinking governance on September 21, 2018Dr Arif Alvi, a democrat par excellence and, the founding member of PTI, has assumed the office of the President of Pakistan. He will be holding this ceremonial office out of constitutional necessity. What he had desired once was a role in the nation-building drive his party has undertaken and his critical faculties will remain […]