A captain, not a cynic
June 30, 2021
Sometimes your column is a blissful two weeks out, but the prime minister puts his foot in it on day two. Alas, you sigh…carpe diem.
The fact that our PM is not the smartest cookie in the jar is conceded even by many of his most ardent sympathizers. But empathy is something entirely different – he usually overflows with it. The ability to feel genuine pain at the loss and suffering of others – orphans, refugees, drone victims, the poor, the diseased – is what makes Imran Khan Imran Khan. His range is so broad that he even gets worked up over the ‘martyrdom’ of Bin Laden.
وزیراعظم مافیا کے سرغنہ ثابت ہوئے، عظمیٰ بخاری
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پانی بحران مزید سنگین ہوجائے گا، پاکستان کا 80 فیصد پانی گلیشیئر سے آتا ہے جو گلوبل وارمنگ سے متاثر ہورہے ہیں، عمران خان
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Opinion
May 4, 2021
Some of the more effusive opponents of the current regime are prone to exaggeration. A most amusing bit of hyperventilation is when some claim with great confidence that the current era is worse than the Gen Ziaul Haq dictatorship.
This is pure nonsense, but not because the protagonists of the current scenario are necessarily trying for things to be any better than the darkness of the 1980s. The comparison with the 1980s is nonsense because turning down the volume of the national discourse in Gen Zia’s era was just so much easier than it is today. In an era of a seemingly unlimited number of newspapers, television channels, social media feeds and angry, underserved citizens, the feeble attempts to ‘manage’ the national discourse only expose the limited imaginations of the protagonists of this unique time in Pakistan’s political history.