CONVERSATIONS about Pakistan easily and comfortably slide into clichés. The phrase ‘land of the pure’ is a personal favourite. Different generations — from boomers all the way down to the millennials — are perhaps equally familiar with ‘Pakistan at a crossroads’. Used as a headline or caption, it can be comfortably deployed to describe the state of affairs within, regardless of the context — be it the time of the Cold War, or the post 9/11 world, or from democratic interludes to hybrid times.

The guilt is not just of Pakistanis but also the rest of the world which sees the country through a fog of clichés. Within this hard country, or the most dangerous country in the world, are the leafy streets of Islamabad, the port city of Karachi and Lahore with its Mughal past. Politics is military-dominated, and people have a penchant for strongmen in uniform, while political parties are family enterprises. KP is known as the province of the warrior-like Pathans, and Balochistan is tribal. Sindh is feudal territory where generations of peasants have worshipped Sufis and the Bhuttos. While the descriptions may vary a bit, they all portray societies frozen in time where little has changed, politically and socially.

Agreed that many of these clichés are the result of foreign coverage of a country that has been, for various........

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