Syed Bakhtiyar Kazmi

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men,” John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, otherwise known as Lord Acton. So now everybody knows who uttered perhaps the most quoted quote in Pakistan, although another particular unknown gem from Lord Acton is perhaps more to the point: “The danger […]

“I am the one who starts this ‘fish’ storm. They don’t usually fight back. Most of the time they don’t even realise what we are doing. We have interests in this region, our countries. Corporations who run have interests here. So I show up all nice and friendly, all friendly to get them a loan […]

Canvassing for votes on a lazy Sunday is perhaps not the best of electoral strategies, and this was made abundantly clear to the gentleman standing at the gate soliciting a vote, pursuant of his dream of being on the union council of the concerned sector. Perhaps a man, who does not even know why Islamabad […]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) insists that all the structural reforms, designed and shoved by it down the throat of a desperate borrower, Pakistan, are actually making a difference; kudos to the government for successively passing the quarterly IMF exams. On the other hand, even if reforms were failing, the IMF, logically, would be the […]

No, the wrong spelling of exasperated does not in any way suggest lapsing into senility, thankfully. First of all, a review of previous articles highlighted that the only letter conspicuously absent as the first initial of all previous article titles was the letter X. Hence, nudged and annoyed by something known in the medical profession […]

According to Wikipedia, political doctrine is “[a] policy, position or principle advocated, taught or put into effect concerning the acquisition and exercise of the power to govern or administrate in society. And clearly to enforce a global doctrine, its expounder must necessarily enjoy the authority and wherewithal to dictate abject acquiescence from its vassals. Accordingly, […]

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it” – Frédéric Bastiat. Imagine that this remarkable utterance dates back to somewhere before the middle of the 19th […]

Perhaps a better title for today would have been ‘Memogate’ but that one had already been taken, and scandalously one might add. ‘Ambassadorgate’ was another option but was discarded because of the inability to validate the underlying assertion about the memo’s origins. The following excerpt was received on Whatsapp a couple of weeks ago, accompanied […]

“What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss.” The above is a personal favourite illustration of a paradox. And this paradox gets even more interesting when the “slice of bread” is substituted for anything; after all, anything […]

At the outset, bespeaking the preferment of actions to corral the untrammelled private schools’ tuition fee by the Punjab government is commonsensical to avoid being demonised on the basis of erroneous conflict of interest perceptions. Simultaneously, it is equally necessary to profess being a beneficiary of reduced tuition fees and to confess being supportive, at […]