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Slowly, in English
WHAT do Quaid-i-Azam, Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Dr Tahirul Qadri have in common? Each of them will be remembered for having made a seminal speech to a largely Urdu-speaking populace, in English. The...
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The new nouveau
POLITICIANS will never die of starvation; they can always survive by eating their own words. What causes them indigestion, however, is not having to swallow their own speeches as much as being made to...
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Laundering one’s sins
HAD our politicians been like their Indian counterparts, they would have taken a dip in the waters at Attock (the confluence of the rivers Indus and Kabul) or at Panjnad (where the rivers of the Punjab...
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The dogs of war
THERE was a time when wars needed to end before historians could begin writing chronicles about them. Today’s wars have become prime time television viewing. History is as immediate as instant coffee....
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Love as a counter
THERE are at least 100 Pakistani families who will not be voting in the forthcoming general elections. They no longer have houses that the Election Commission can visit to verify their home addresses;...
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The insolence of office
ONE thing is certain: Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘To be or not be’ could not have been written by a committee. It would have taken hours of wrangling before any committee agreed (if they ever did decide to...
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Return of an ex-king
THERE are two flights Pervez Musharraf will never forget. The first was flight PK 805 that brought him from Colombo to Karachi on Oct 12, 1999. It was prevented from landing at Karachi airport on the...
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The whirligig of time
EVERY general election in Pakistan is an exercise in self-flagellation. It provides an occasion for adult voters and their elected representatives, like contrite sinners, to scourge themselves in an...
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The circus of democracy
POLITICIANS invented democracy as a joke, and electorates have taken it seriously. One has only to follow the latest election campaign in Pakistan to be reminded that in politics, as in the theatre,...
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Sinking the PPP
THERE could not have been anything as distressing a sight as watching the Titanic, its hull ruptured by an iceberg, sink slowly into the Atlantic Ocean. Until now, that is. This month, another...
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View from the rooftop
ANY lecturer will recognise the species. They are to be found sitting in the front row of the audience or towards the back. They clamour to be recognised so that they may ask the first question, often...
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Genetic strains
IT was there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered. After centuries of infusion of blood obtained from the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Spanish, the Danes, the Greeks and even the Dutch,...
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Stealing a child’s future
OF all the forms of education, war is the costliest. Children may or may not learn their lessons; nations never do. In that sense, history as a teacher has failed. No better example can be found than...
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