Adil Najam

As we wrote at the end of last year - whilst naming the Pakistani Policeman as ATP’s Pakistan Person of the Year 2009 - “the faces that represent the reality of Pakistan in 2009 more than any other, are the faces of the Pakistani police… All too often in this murderous year, the Pakistani policeman’s life - very literally - was the only thing between a suicide bomber and his would-be victims.”

And yet, it turns out that petty, even callous, bureaucratic delays are now putting the lives of NWFP policemen at real and immediate risk. It turns out that some 3,000 potentially life-saving bullet-proof jackets meant for NWFP policemen are sitting in a warehouse in Islamabad and the naukarshahi officialdom pushes files from one office to another.

Adil Najam

It is the Pakistani cricketers who are supposed to be erratic and unpredictable, disappointing one day and enthralling the next. But this time the Pakistan hockey team seems to be following a similar path at the 2010 Hockey World Cup now underway in India.

On the opening day of the tournament, Pakistan had lost decisively to hosts and arch-rivals India 4-1. Although neither country is today the hockey powerhouse it once was, Pakistan was totally overwhelmed by India. Placed in a pool that also has favorites Australia, Olympic silver-medalists Spain and England, this would have ordinarily have meant that Pakistan’s chances for a semi-final slot had nearly vanished entirely.

This, however, was not to be.

Izaz Haque

With following travelogue we are starting a new series to revisit how travel used to be in the years gone by. Izaz Haque’s father Sheikh Inamul Haque was an employee of North Western Railway (now Pakistan Railway). He wrote a manuscript about his railway travels from Quetta to the plains of Punjab in mid 1920s. The manuscript never made it to a book form but Izaz Saheb has been kind enough to share his father’s unpublished work with us.

The most persistent and vivid of my childhood memories is the one that relates to our annual exodus from the bitter cold of Quetta, which made our skin crack and bleed from the dry cold influx of air from the Pamir Plateau, commonly known as Kandhari wind, to the the Princely State of Kapurthala in the relatively balmy, plains of the Punjab.

Adil Najam

In both Faisalabad and Dera Ismail Khan, religious zealots turned Eid Milad-un-Nabi celebrations violent leaving at least seven dead and more than thirty injured. The irony, and sheer lunacy, of this criminal violence is that there are those amongst us who are so convinced that they and they alone are the “best” Muslims of all, that they and they alone know what “true” Islam is, that they are willing and ready to attack - and even kill - even those who profess the very same faith as them. And all in the name of “saving Islam” … from other Muslims!

(News photos of the violence in Faisalabad that left property destroyed and burnt, including the charred remains of a copy of the Holy Quran inside seen inside a house which was attacked by a religious mob during the clashes)

Owais Mughal and Adil Najam

Today was the 12th of Rabi-ul-Awal in Pakistan and Eid Milad-un-Nabi - marking the birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) - was celebrated across the country. ATP offers Eid Milad-un-Nabi greetings to all its Muslim readers. As pictorial special, we share these photographs from Dawn and APP of the different ways in which Pakistan prepared for the celebrations today.

Adil Najam

Mai Jori Jamali (Mijori) lives in Goth Ghulam Mohammad Jamali. She is an illiterate mother of nine children. She travels 2 kilometers to fetch water for her family. She and her husband farm a small piece of agricultural land. Mai Jori is also a candidate in the Baluchistan Assembly bye-elections for the PB-25 Jaffarabad-1 seat.

Reportedly, she hails from the village/area where, in 2008, three young women were brutally and barbarically buried alive on the pretext of criminal ‘honor killings’ which, in fact, were baighairati personified. Readers would remember how we were all horrified even further when two sitting senators - Israrullah Zehri and Jan Mohammad Jamali - shamed all of Pakistan by actually defended this horrible act in the Senate in the name of ‘culture.’

The PB-25 Jaffarabad-1 (old Nasirabad-1) seat became vacant after the killing of Baluchistan Minister for Excise and Taxation Sardarzada Rustam Jamali and the elections for the seat will be held on March 10. Mai Jori is running for this seat on a ticket from the Awami Party Pakistan, and she appeared before the Returning Officer accompanied by her proposers and seconders and her papers were found complete; her covering candidate, Abdul Karim, also appeared with her.