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F.s. AijazuddinDawn |
KHUSHWANT Singh would have been delighted. The latest Khushwant Singh Literary Festival (KSLF) revived his memory over two days at SOAS in London, the...
ONE day it was the cool comfort of spring. The next morning summer arrived with the force of an unwelcome intruder. Until October, life will be hell...
THEY are all dead: the feisty Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and her 14 interviewees — prominent amongst them Henry Kissinger, King Hussein of...
NARENDRA Modi and Sanjay Leela Bhansali have something in common: they both view Pakistan through warped lenses. Modi’s perception is of a country...
WITH the prescience that philosophers share with out-of-office politicians, a hundred years ago, a leading Indian scholar analysed the combustible...
THE tripartite Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline project (IPI) should have had a normal maturity, had it not suffered from a genetic defect. Physicians...
DEAD men do not write autobiographies. Someone in time will breathe life into their past. The first 12 Roman caesars — starting with Julius Caesar...
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...