This year’s IPL had everything: explosive starts (think of Adam Gilchrist) nail-biting finishes (Shane Warne), match-changing innings (Yusuf Pathan), unlikely hat-tricks (Yuvraj Singh), redemption (Bangalore), tragedy (Kolkata) and comedy (er, Kolkata again). Everything a spectator could ask for. Everything,...

This is how terrorists operate: They will identify a region where they feel they can bag sympathy for their ‘cause’ and try to construct ‘offices’ there. However, if and when they feel this sympathy is not enough to withhold the state and the government’s action against them, they will terrorize...

Pakistan’s melting pot and economic backbone, Karachi looked like a ghost town this past Saturday and Monday. The teeming metropolis, the size of a nation-state, came to a halt as the nationalist Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz and the ethnocentric Muttahida Qaumi Movement (despite its claims to the contrary)...

So the latest news from the Prime Minister’s garden is that professional hunters have been called in to catch or takeout, if necessary, the elusive leopard that breached a tight cauldron of security and crossed over from the woods into the PM house. The prime minster’s spokesman claimed ‘it was...

Nosheen Abbas shares memories of being stereotyped and struggling to erase misconceptions.   My family is scattered across the world and I am missing out on school. For the mean time I’ll have to go to high school in Chicago where I’m living with my aunt. On my first day of high school I realize...

Farzana Shah writes about misconceptions and false assumptions about life in Peshawar. I really feel very bad when the whole world reduces us to a place only inhabited by bearded men and buraq-clad women. True, they exist- but others do too. Things can get terrible and fear can take over us but people...

The Pakistan team recently took part in a training for the 20/20 World Cup at a mountain resort. This ‘conditioning camp’ (nothing, one assumes, to do with Shahid Afridi’s hair product endorsements) took place at the hill station of Bhurban: cool, calm, serene. Very conducive to reflection.   And...

For most Pakistanis residing outside the Sindh province, the Mutahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM), has continued to attract curiosity as well as suspicion. This is because a bulk of them have been somewhat slow to notice the many changes MQM has gone through. Their perception of the party still seems to be...

Shyema Sajjad questions the Taliban and their latest tactic for survival. Latest reports claim that the Taliban are shaving off their beards to escape the operation in Swat. The Taliban have maintained that the beards are a sign of being a devoted and true Muslim. Perhaps that is why the Afghani Taliban...

Nadeem F. Paracha explains what happens when the urban middle-class chooses to live in blissful ignorance. It was quite a sight watching Ali Azmat sitting with Zaid Hamid on TV, both passionately discussing ‘Hindu & Western Zionist aims to destabilize Pakistan.’ For those who might not know...