Syed Mansoor Hussain

Is liberalism really winning out in Pakistan? Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) government seems to be pushing a ‘liberal’ agenda. Here I think it is important to make the point that all we might be seeing is a slight shift away from the obscurantist ideas that seemed to pervade in the past. Considering women’s rights especially, […]

Recently, there have been quite a few columns on these pages about matters pertaining to health and healthcare, and even about heart disease. When I first started writing for this newspaper I made a deal with the then editor of the op-ed pages that I would avoid writing about medicine, especially about medicine from a […]

There was an interesting news report recently on how our Prime Minister (PM) has so far spent 200 days out of his two-and-a-half-year tenure in countries other than Pakistan. And that excludes private visits. It would seem that the PM does not believe his presence in Pakistan is too important as far as running this […]

The US elections for president are a long drawn out and relatively convoluted process. Before the actual elections take place, first the nominees of the two major political parties have to be chosen. This happens through a process that involves every state through a caucus(do not ask me to explain that) or a primary election. […]

Before I continue with predictions about some other countries, I would like to point out that in my predictions last week for this year I had predicted that General Raheel Sharif would neither ask for nor be offered an extension of his service as the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS). Almost within a day […]

For many years my first column of the New Year in this newspaper was about my predictions for the year coming up. But then I stopped doing that. The reason was that some ‘learned’ and well-researched papers were published in the US demonstrating that political predictions made by pundits of the press were true only […]

Time creeps up on us. The first week of the new year is already dead and gone. And as we wrestle with our new year’s resolutions, at least I keep asking myself the big question: are we in Pakistan better off than we were this time last year? For somebody living in Lahore, the answer […]

On December 14, 2015, the online New York Times published a news story titled ‘Thai man may go to prison for insulting king’s dog’. Evidently, a Thai worker was charged with ‘disparaging’ the aforementioned dog in an internet post and he will be tried in a military court for this heinous crime. As I read […]

The ‘shooters’ responsible for the latest mass killingin the US are of Pakistani origin. The woman was a Pakistani citizen and the man an American of Pakistani origin. Obviously, their actions have no direct relationship toPakistan. In the US, the question comes up on why such seemingly normaland quite well off people are ready to […]

Ever since our Prime Minister (PM) uttered the words “liberal” and “democracy” in the same sentence, the commentariat has gone berserk. Islam, Jinnah, the Constitution, Pakistan’s ideology and a slew of other shibboleths have been dragged in and around to oppose or agree with the PM. Personally, I think it is quite obvious that the […]