There was a quite specific moment when I realised that I had very little knowledge or understanding of what I had got myself into. It was in a cinema at the top of Kashmir bazaar in Rawalpindi in the early ’90s. It was packed, literally not a seat to be had in the place. About [...]
Two events, one of which I attended in person and the other which I attended from the comfort of my own house, define the week. A hurried visit to a hot and sticky Islamabad and a meeting with fellow writers was a depressing experience at several levels. It is rare for me to meet other [...]
There is something of a slightly sinful pleasure in seeing the holders of fake degrees exposed, with the numbers going up by the day. It is variously talked of as a ‘scandal’ or a ‘crisis’ and those of us that scribble for a living have had great sport sticking pins in the [...]
Barely able to walk she struggled into the accident and emergency department at my local hospital. She had an infection on her leg that stubbornly refused to respond to treatment and I had brought Sakina for some ‘proper doctoring’ – or so I thought. Chaos prevailed. Relatives pushed trolleys around, a child with an airway [...]
Plan A was to write about why, though the F16 is a very fine aeroplane, and the Block52 version of it is state-of-the-art; it is not actually a terribly good aeroplane for the kind of war we are fighting in the tribal areas. I’d done all the research and made the argument that the A10 [...]
One of the challenges of writing a weekly column is not just finding something different to write about fifty-two times a year, but also finding something positive to say. The hunt is not always successful and there have been some gloomy pieces over the years – and this, Dear Reader, is going to be one [...]
It was whilst watching what was supposed to be a serious debate on the state of the nation on a private TV channel last week that I saw just how far standards had slipped in broadcast journalism. Perhaps before I go any further I will make it clear that there is some [...]
You don’t get many young, female, Pakistani bloggers in Santiago, Chile – but you got one last week at the Global Voices 2010 conference. She spoke for eleven minutes – one minute over her allotted ten but hey, she was using the standard Pakistani minute which has a certain elasticity about it – and was [...]
Enlightenment is often slow in coming especially as the years advance, and it has taken a while for the light to come on for me – but it has.
All of us live in bubbles – family, work, village, town — and we wander around in them bumping into other bubbles and interacting with them. But [...]
Great events tend to pass me by, as they do most people. We experience ‘the news’ as a set of stories and images that come from TV, radio or the newspaper – or as gossip which comes in a never-ending and rarely accurate stream. But ‘the news’ touched me peripherally last week in the form [...]
