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![]() F.s. AijazuddinDawn |
OVER the centuries, the value of gifts involving royalty have depended on their purpose. Between monarchs, gifts acknowledged equivalence; to...
ON Jan 23, at 7.34 am, the entire national grid system collapsed and the whole of Pakistan slipped into premature darkness. All Indian Prime Minister...
THE first revelation is his name. It is not Harry. He was christened Henry Charles Albert David. His memoirs Spare appear under his more popular...
RETURNING from Karachi to Lahore this week was like sliding down a thermometer from cool to freezing. One had forgotten how delicious the enervating...
MODERN Karachi is more than another city; it is another country with its own vibrant economy. Avoid approaching it via the Lyari Expressway, no matter...
FEW will shed tears at the extinction of 2022. It has been a strange, unhappy year for almost everyone. Perhaps the most disappointed is former prime...
IT was an incongruous sight: a security guard aimed his gun at every visitor who had come to hear Malala Yousafzai speak. It was a gun that had...
IN some ways, modern Islamabad is akin to 15th-century Ferghana in Central Asia. The novelist Lytton Strachey wrote of the first Mughal emperor Babar,...
HAD William Shakespeare been alive today in Pakistan, he would have given a different twist to his drama Julius Caesar. He would have reframed history...
NO US senator visiting Pakistan has been as engaging or as pregnant as Senator Kesha Ram of Vermont. She was in Lahore last week with her husband...
NEVER in Pakistan’s history has there been so much speculation swirling around the appointment of a non-elected public official as there has been...
IT is a rum thing when a three-time prime minister needs a diplomatic passport to re-enter his own country. A blue diplomatic passport is normally...
PAKISTAN is one of the few countries where political surrogacy is still legal, where a seed can be planted by the military to gestate in the womb of...
IN 2011, an American CIA contractor Raymond Davis charged with murder in Lahore bought his way out of custody. A Pakistani Saifullah Paracha, held...
EXACTLY 30 years separates the two occasions. In November 1992, the late Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto (then out of power) attended a function at a...
INDIAN nobility was known for its quirks. The Nawab of Junagadh celebrated the wedding of his pet dogs with unaffordable pomp and extravagance. The...
CARL Sagan’s book Cosmos (1960) tells us: “There are some hundred billion (10¹¹) galaxies, each with, on average, a hundred billion stars. In...
A CIPHER is designed to be a private language, to be understood by the sender and the recipient, unlike Esperanto which its proponents hoped would one...
PRIME MINISTER Shehbaz Sharif has attained nirvana. Within the same fortnight, he has met President Vladimir Putin at the SCO summit at Samarkand,...
NO monarch in history could have planned their own funeral in such detail (as Queen Elizabeth II did), and no subjects could have executed it with...
IT has taken 64 years and 44 days for him to become King Charles III. No heir apparent in history has had a longer period of training nor ascended a...
TO understand contemporary Pakistani politics, one needs to revert to kindergarten. There, life ran to the rhythm of nursery rhymes and fables. Which...
THOSE who survived the 1970s will recall an image of PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto standing on the rim of Tarbela Dam, watching its dangerous surplus...
HAVING driven past the imposing white building adjacent to Governor’s House on Lahore’s Mall for many years, I was intrigued by what lay within...
AT the age of 75, we deserve better. On this anniversary year, our country has for its 13th president (an ominous number) a partisan political nominee...
THERE is something Hitlerian in the United States’ ambition to dominate the world. It used the 20th century to show that during the First World War...
WHO runs Pakistan? This is a question every foreign government has asked since August 1947. It is a question for which 220 million Pakistanis await a...