Death by taxes
It took a two page report and a video on their website by the New York Times to demonstrate to many young people the abysmal state of tax collection in Pakistan. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook were awash with outraged tweets and posts of the article which described how only 2.5 million people...
Absurdistan
We live in strange times in a strange country. Don’t get me wrong, I love Pakistan and have chosen to live here, pay my taxes here and raise my children here. But as a student of political science and history, and an interested observer, I have seen fewer countries more bizarre than us. Approximately 30,000...
INTOLERANCE AND HER CHILDREN
I couldn’t bring myself to write my column last week because of the rage I felt at our Government for censoring the Internet. It wasn’t that blocking Facebook or YouTube had brought life to an end but the sheer stupidity of the exercise coupled with the wider implications of censorship for the citizens of this...
The “But” Syndrome
The 27th of May bombing in Lahore, which has taken a minimum of 23 lives and wounded over 300 people can only be seen as a retaliatory strike by the Taliban who are finally at the receiving end from the Pakistan Army. The highly effective Army operation in Swat and Malakand Division now has the...
IMPEACHMENT SHIMPEACHMENT
There’s bad timing and then there’s bad timing. The Coalition’s joint press conference on the 7th of August to move to impeach President Musharraf has thrown the President’s plans to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics into a tailspin and he had to cancel. Prime Minister Gillani, the man whom President Musharraf had thrown...
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IMPORTANT
It may not be a purely Pakistani obsession, but we are terribly good at at the whole VIP thing. Pakistani citizens face the wrath of VIP movements almost as often as bowel movements in their daily lives depending on how much roughage they consume, and the latter being far less productive than the former. Yet...
LOTA SEASON AGAIN
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Land of the Pure, I am pleased to announce the commencement of lota season in our fair lands. For the uninitiated, lota season comes around every time elections are held, but it actually begins much before the actual election. For a foreigner reading this column who might be thinking that...
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO
If President General (retired) Musharraf has an ipod I hope that one of his children or grandchildren will burn “should I stay or should I go” by the Clash, a British punk rock band, for his listening pleasure. With the President back in the country after his European tour he has claimed that the tour...
BATTLE LINES
There are time to sit on fences and there are times where you need to pick sides, and I think the time has come to pick our sides without any ambiguous grey areas so familiar to Pakistani politics and drawing rooms. Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi on Thursday and the hundreds of thousands of people...
LOONEY TOONS
I think more has been written about the offending cartoons that the Danes have presented us than has been written on providing clean water and health care in the press for one year. And while I understand why Muslims around the world are furious about the offending cartoons, I cannot understand the level of violence...
