But we always kill those good guys who try to tell us that and we let the demons run amok. But it doesnt matter, because it’s just a ride – and we can change it any time we want. All we need is the choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings or money – just a choice – right now – between fear & love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns and and close yourself off, the eyes of love instead, see all of us as one … Bill … Continue reading Follow as sheep or think for yourself!

Zaair Hussain In a country where a Senator has stood before the House and declared, with a gall that must surely have blotted out the sun, that the respectable tradition of burying women alive should not be unduly interfered with, it is the trappings of westernisation that are still the object of venomous ire What is it to be a ‘true’ Pakistani? The appropriation of this term by the conservative wing of this nation is staggering in its vulgar daring, and in its unqualified success. By and large, the liberals of this land accept this annexation of ‘Pakistani-ness’ with either … Continue reading The New Pakistan

Farrukh Khan Pitafi Those who advocate negotiating with the Taliban have actually been brainwashed by them and are still labouring under the delusion that somehow Pakistan can control Kabul through such groups. The only way Pakistan can play a role in today’s Afghanistan is by winning the hearts of the Afghan people Bonds are important. In Philip Pullman’s legendry trilogy His Dark Materials, the bankers of Cittàgazze invent a knife that, among other things, can cut through the bonds of nature to such an extent that they manage to create windows between parallel universes. In ‘Avatar’, on planet Pandora every … Continue reading Sleeping with the Takfiri Mullahs in Pakistan

Joseph Mitchell McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a redbrick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in New York City. In 88 years it has had four owners — an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter — and all of them have been opposed to change. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the … Continue reading The old house at home

Miranda Husain The inquiry surely demonstrates Downing Street’s unwavering commitment to grassroots democracy, while silencing those who claim that Britons are, perhaps, still unready for democracy, given their spectacular re-election of the Blair Witch Project two years after the fall of the Saddam regime So, here we have it. A decade in power and the legacy is still being reinforced, if not redefined. And while he may not have been a chap of the officer-and-gentleman variety, he was certainly of the dove-among-hawks sort. Or at least that was the public façade. The subliminal undertone being that he had been thrust … Continue reading Chilcot Inquiry — wagging the poodle

Syed Talat Hussain For all the rhetoric of ‘politics of reconciliation’ that we hear from everyone who takes the podium, national politics is badly fractured. Sindh, which is the stronghold of the PPP, was supposed to be a haven of political peace. Yet it is this very province that has become the most hurtful Achilles heel of this government Just when rescue workers were pulling the dead and the injured from the rubble of the Girls School in Lower Dir, Pakistan’s interior minister was on his way to the Governor’s House in Karachi. His agenda was obvious: to broker a … Continue reading Politics of survival