On February 12, 2012, two high profile literary events graced Karachi. One was the Karachi Levitation Festival (KLF) and the other, Difa-e-Difa or Defence of Defence Festival (DDF). As Karachi’s pompous lot drove down to the luxurious 9-star hotel, ‘Burj Al Second Hand Arab,’ for the KLF, the more genuine intellectuals, artistes and audiences of [...]
Every now and then the now dead-and-done-with Pakistani film industry (cheekily called Lollywood) threatens to revive itself with the appearance of a sudden hit. There are still idealistic young film directors out there fascinated by those nostalgic tales about a film scene that till 1979 was dishing out an average of 25 films a year, [...]
Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister of Pakistan, is a stark reflection of the surprising staying power that his government has demonstrated in the always topsy-turvy political scenario of Pakistan. Belonging to the ruling leftliberal Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Gilani has been heading a fragile coalition government ever since March 2008, when his [...]
The United States first established diplomatic relations with Pakistan on 20 October 1947. The relationship since then has been based primarily on US economic and military assistance to Pakistan which Pakistan never seems to get enough of. Pakistan is a major non-Nato ally of the United States, even though, for some odd reason, it keeps [...]
In the last few months I’ve been receiving a number of emails from some young Pakistanis asking me to define ‘Bhuttoism’. Interestingly, most of them seem to be Imran Khan supporters. An ‘ism’ is a noun-forming suffix denoting a specific doctrine or theory — Marxism, Leninism, fundamentalism, monarchism, communism, capitalism, Zionism, Islamism. These are only [...]
In July 2007, during their visit to Iran, iconic Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara’s son and daughter were invited to Tehran University by an Iranian Islamic organisation. The organisation described itself as an Islamic revolutionary internationalist outfit and it was the ‘academic wing’ that had invited Guevara’s off-springs. The founder of the organisation began quoting from [...]
Former Prime Minster Z A Bhutto has got a lot of flack by a number of Pakistani historians for enacting certain constitutional amendments and laws that went on to add a thorny dimension to the politics and sociology of Pakistan. His government’s constitutional move to declare Ahmadis non-Muslim (in 1974) and then (in 1977) the [...]
Over the years many Dawn readers from within and outside Pakistan have been emailing me complaining that whenever they tried to look for pictures of Pakistan on the internet that have little or nothing to do with vicious looking mullahs, suicide bombings and mutilated bodies, they have failed. I’ve been scouting newspaper libraries and personal [...]
The Sunni Tehrik (ST), a Barelvi Islamist organisation, announced last Sunday that it was converting itself into a political party. To quite a few Pakistanis the ST comes across as being another sectarian outfit triggered by the controversial Islamisation process of the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s. It is true that the ST was [...]
Last week, The Baloch Students Organisation (BSO), threatened that it will suspend transmission of private television channels across the province to protest the media’s ‘failure to properly highlight the plight of the people of Balochistan’. What or who is the Baloch Students Organisation? BSO has been around since 1967 and has continued to be an active and [...]
