Deeda-e-Beena

The menace is growing to awesome proportions while efforts for finding solutions are miniscule. How could we ever win this fight? The Nation is at war and needs to act at war footing as a whole. Post-factum izhar-e-muzzamat is all one hears from those who are responsible to deal with it! You and I can do it too!

The Government, the Media and the People themselves – its singular victims, are woefully remiss on what each of them can and should be doing to subvert this mayhem. There is no evidence even of any serious and systematic thinking by all the pundits, the political leadership, the so called thinkers, columnists and even the self-proclaimed “Think Tanks”. All of them are defaulting.

(A) The Government is firstly responsible for the safety of all its citizens and has miserably failed. Granted, terrorists and suicide bombers act in secrecy. Also granted, that it is extremely difficult to prevent a determined terrorist. But, by now there must have been enough knowledge and experience available about their profiles, backgrounds, origins, modus-operandi, gadgetry, materials and equipment used, to greatly minimise their activities. In reality, both the geographical spread and intensity of their attacks has increased.

Owais Mughal

I never met Gul Hameed Bhatti. But when the news of his sad demise came on February 4, 2010 it made me sad. He was 63 years old.

While I never met him, I knew him from my childhood and always regarded him as the one who was a walking encyclopaedia on Pakistani Cricket. He was a statistician par excellence and wrote for ‘The Cricketer’ magazine whose editor-in-chief was Hanif Mohammad and which was run by Riaz Mansuri.

The mid-1980s was my own ‘alam-e-junooN’. I had got myself into this hobby of collecting scorecards of all the One Day Internationals played by Pakistan. It meant collecting scorecards of matches since February 11, 1973 (when Pakistan played its first ODI) to date. I bought myself a thick register (large size notebook) and from cricket magazines I used to hand copy the scorecards. Most of these score cards and their related statisitics used to come from Gul Hameed Bhatti. Therefore I regarded him as my ‘maseeha’ and was very impressed by his work.

Adil Najam

Daniyal Noorani’s song and video - Find Heaven - has a thought-provoking but eerily disturbing quality to it. Anything that makes you think hard is bound to be disturbing. And for that reason alone this is worth a very careful listen, and an even more careful watch.

Given the news and events of the last few days this song and video take on a profound relevance and poignancy. But then, that relevance and poignancy could have come from the events and news of just about any week in recent memory. And that, really, is the whole point.

Here is a song that takes on the subject of violent extremism head on. With introspection and thoughful analysis rather than with mere slogans and platitudes. It is straight-forward and it is simple. But it refuses to make the complex simplistic and it does not simplify that which is, in fact, profound.

The song does not require any commentary; it is commentary itself. For me, the animation speaks as profoundly as the song; if not more. So let me urge you, once again, to take a careful listen, and an even more careful watch. This is not meant to be ‘background music’; nor are these stock visuals. This is a ‘package’ that needs to be seen and heard as one.

And then - once you have done that - it needs to be pondered upon. Pondered hard.

Adil Najam

Pakistan remains at war. Whether it is schoolgirls in Lower Dir or Shia mourners and those waiting outside Jinnah Hospital in Karachi. All Pakistanis everywhere are targets for these murderous enemies of Pakistan.

It may be true that we do not have many friends abroad. But it is certainly clear that our cruelest enemies are all amongst us.

Day in, day out, they kill and maim and terrorize Pakistanis all across Pakistan. No city is safe. No Pakistani is safe. The ritual is now well entrenched. We mourn our dead. We cry. And just as the tears begin to dry, we are called upon to mourn some more. To cry, again.

The tears are unavoidable, and maybe even necessary. But they are no longer sufficient.

Bilal Zuberi

Somewhere around class 6 I realized that I needed to have a hobby?

Playing cricket on the streets or reading Ishtiaq Ahmad novels were not considered real ‘hobbies’ in my peer group. Popular hobbies were: stamp collecting, coin collecting, paper plane making, collecting dinkie cars, or drawing transformers in your school notebooks.

Well, I chose stamp collecting to be my hobby for two simple reasons: (a) an aunt gave me a stamp collecting book as a birthday present, and (b) I realized I could start a collection right away by simply going through letters mailed to my family over the past few years.