I saw this recently: The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. - Benjamin Franklin I don’t claim to know what Mr. Franklin was thinking, but I find it telling that the quote works equally well if you leave out the second sentence. That, my friends, [...]
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
The cynic in me…
18Mar09…smirks that while we celebrate the birth of real democracy in Pakistan, the Pakistani people are already so thoroughly drenched in the gooey residue of their success that they don’t recognise the CJP is already installed in their minds as the next in the long line of saviours to whom we periodically hand over our [...]
Yo Dawg, blogging is hard work…
01Feb09Dang yo, I haven’t been blogging regularly. I might have mentioned this before, but the biggest reason I don’t blog is because I decide I want to edit something before I publish it; a few days later, I’ve lost my train of thought and the draft never makes it to the blog. There’s certainly a lot [...]
Corruption and Development
23Nov08I was quite excited to find this blog post but now that I’ve read it, I’m a little disappointed. It’s a bit wishy washy in the way academic articles can be and doesn’t really get much further than defining corruption and categorising it as high-level and low-level. The reason for that is probably the extreme complexity [...]
Whoa.
16Jul08Check this out. I need more time to process it (and read up on most of them)…but whoa. And there’s our man Aitzaz Ahsan at #5! (Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t trust Aitzaz Ahsan for a minute.)
The KSE bounces back
03Jan08…wow, what a surprise. So I guess we all really are as fickle and callous as I suggested in my last post. The good news from the article is: Pakistani stocks are cheap and still worth holding in spite of political uncertainty, Merrill Lynch & Co.’s chief Asian strategist Mark Matthews said in an interview yesterday. … The [...]
The Bhutto saga continues
01Jan08…and now the backlash has begun. DM sent me this really interesting article called ‘The Prodigal Daughter’ (capitalisation mine, because apparently newspapers can’t afford the extra ink). Written by an Oxford contemporary, Vir Sanghvi, the first half is a really fascinating summary of Ms. Bhutto’s personality and her activities at Oxford. The PPP media machine has [...]
Insanity
18Nov07There’s so much of it to pick from, but here’s a sampler: The IJT has expelled 17 members over the Imran Khan incident. Yay. But brace yourself now for the ‘operation’ that the IJT will launch to maintain its ‘hold on PU’. Na Islami, na Talib, siraf Jamia. Mr. Musharraf isn’t in right now. Choice quote: “Before [...]
BB speaks
16Nov07Benazir Bhutto – Musharraf’s Electoral Farce (washingtonpost.com) Oh, how I loathe BB. Even ignoring the Musharraf-size ego (regarding arrested political activists: “the majority [are] from my PPP”), she shows once again she’s perfectly happy to throw everyone and everything under the wagon to get her way, for example by implying that Musharraf could easily lay his [...]
Cowasjee on Pakistan’s leaders
25May07Ardeshir Cowasjee’s latest column in Dawn, ‘The maker and the shakers’ is a one-page summary of the presidents and prime ministers Pakistan has suffered since independence. Having heard Benazir Bhutto sing her father’s praises a few weeks ago here at the LSE, I was extremely interested to hear someone as blunt and (relatively) unaligned as [...]
If I remember right, the idea behind Chowk is to encourage dialogue and understanding between the peoples of the subcontinent (read: Indians and Pakistanis), and underline our commonalities rather than our differences. (I would confirm that, but Chowk has a remarkably useless ‘About’ page.) Anyway, the article on Shaukat Aziz’s press conference yesterday put me in [...]
Press Conference of the Year
08May07Shaukat Aziz’s latest is my nomination. Some highlights of Mr. Aziz’s comments: the Constitution allows for the option of imposing a state of national emergency ‘but its use depended on conditions and circumstances as laid down in the book’ [as reported by Dawn]. “the May 12 rally in Islamabad would be in support of the presidential reference [...]
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