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F.s. AijazuddinDawn |
IT takes three to tango in our part of the world. The US-Pakistan duo and the Saudi-Pakistan pair has become a threesome, choreographed by the US. In...
OUR new finance minister, Muhammad Aurangzeb, is preceded by a strong lineage. Our first finance minister, Ghulam Muhammad, began as an assiduous...
PAKISTAN is a judicial jungle, thick with laws, and inhabited by lawyers and judges. Justice lies hidden somewhere in the undergrowth. Even though all...
CANCER respects neither age nor position. One has only to visit a cancer hospital to realise how indiscriminate the choice of its victims is. Or read...
IF you can recall the Rubik’s Cube, you are a child of the 1980s. Its inventor Ernő Rubik (a Hungarian professor of architecture) perfected his...
IT is almost 45 years to the day that former prime minister Z.A. Bhutto was hanged on April 4, 1979, for a murder he did not himself commit. Since...
IN 1660, Charles II returned to England to reclaim his throne, after years of exile in France. This year 2024 marks the restoration of another...
THE advent of spring was celebrated each year with the Basant festival. Now, its arrival is heralded by cultural festivals — this spring in quick...
“WE wuz robbed!” Grammatically incorrect, perhaps, but a forceful outburst nevertheless, uttered first in the 1930s by Joe Jacobs, the manager of...
PAKISTAN is the only faux-democracy that holds general elections yet learns nothing from each experience. Many remember the general elections of...
HISTORY tells us more about Sita (the misjudged consort of Lord Rama) and about Shrimata Kasturbai (the suffering spouse of Mahatma Gandhi) than we...
MEMOIRS of retired Indian and Pakistani diplomats contain accounts of their postings to Islamabad and New Delhi, spent in professional pugilism and...
MODERN India’s founding father M.K. Gandhi was shot on Jan 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Pandit...
IT took termites to teach me non-attachment. Recently, I needed material on the 1971 East Pakistan crisis from a section in my library. There, I...
MANI Shankar Aiyar is the last Pakistani left in India. It is his ‘second favourite country’. It was once an option available to millions of...
WHEN grand homes outgrow their owners, they have no option but to become museums. Notable are the Louvre in Paris, Tsarskoye Selo outside St...
UNTIL the 1960s, no member of the British Royal Family could be portrayed on the stage or on screen. The character had to have been dead for at least...
DR Azra Raza’s name — a playful anagram — is nevertheless one of the most universally respected in oncology. Pakistani by origin, she graduated...
THE New Year was invented for those who need a day to bury wasted dreams. Each year, January heralds hope and then every December ends shrouded in a...
HEINZ Kissinger sloughed many skins in his 100-year-long life. He shed Heinz to become Henry, his German ancestry to become an American, his original...
POISED on the precipice of another Armageddon, one is reminded of the remark made in the 1940s by Sir Kenneth Clark, then director of the National...
“WHENEVER an elder dies, a library burns down.” When Dr B.N. Goswamy (India’s pre-eminent art historian) died and was cremated on Nov 17 in...
THE dead die when ceremony replaces memory. Ask the souls of those millions who sacrificed their lives throughout the history of human conflict. They...
IN the forthcoming 2024 US presidential election, no US voter with any sense would vote for Joe Biden. He is a heartbeat away from extinction. Those...
ANYONE hoping to understand Pakistani politics needs to believe implicitly in miracles. He must admit that resurrections can occur and could happen...
EVEN death is losing its appetite. It cannot digest any more casualties in Gaza. The United States should take apart the Holocaust Museum in...
IN 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. Seventy-eight years later, his destructive spirit has reincarnated itself in Benjamin...
ON Oct 22, Supremo Nawaz Sharif will wake up suffering from more than jetlag. He will feel the rust in his joints after four years of rest in London....
IN war, truth is the first casualty. In Third World countries, truth all too often is smothered at birth. Never more often than when general elections...
“WELL, he would, wouldn’t he?” That remark by Mandy Rice-Davies (an English model) became famous in the 1960s. She and her call-girl friend...
IT was a first in Pakistan. Begum Sarina Isa stood next to her husband Qazi Faez Isa while he was being sworn in as the 29th chief justice of Pakistan...
PAKISTAN holds an unusual pack of cards. It has no kings. They have been either deposed, exiled, assassinated, or hanged. It has no queens. One...
THE launch by India of its Chandrayaan-3 rocket and space probe on Aug 23, 2023, and, a few days later, its Aditya L-1 observation mission to the sun,...