Mast Qalandar

Geo News is back on cable TV in Pakistan! It was banned along with two other popular TV channels on November 3 last year when Emergency was imposed in the country.

We don’t know on what conditions the channel has been allowed to operate again. We also don’t know how much dent the 77-day ban must have made in the profitability of the news company — it must be pretty huge — or to the livelihood of the journalists working for it.

But we do know that the ban made a huge dent in the government’s credibility and the image of “enlightened moderation” that it was so eager to project. It also left in its wake numerous angry messages and slogans on the wallboards outside the Geo office in Islamabad. They do give you a flavor of the general feelings prevailing at the time in a large segment of the civil society.

Owais Mughal

ATP is always searching for tips on good Pakistani food (see here), and as I have a long history with food experiments myself (see here). So here is my new discovery.

On our last trip to buy oriental grocery we were surprised beyond words to find ‘Tsingtao Curry Samosa‘ and ‘Paratha – which taste like authentic Indian’ in a refrigerator.

Both of these items were made in China. We immediately bought both items and I must confess they both tasted very good. Samosa filling was made of Chinese curry and Parathas were puff Parathas. You gotta taste them to believe me.

Adil Najam

Our friend Babar Bhatti reports on his blog State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan that in 2007 the total number of mobile subscribers in Pakistan reached 76.6 million. He is reporting from an interesting statistical compilation of achievements compiled by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA); (more number from this report are included below).

I ask the questions I do in the headline not out of cynicism but out of very honest inquisitiveness. I deal a lot with development related statistics in my professional work and for many reasons the number seems rather surprising to me. It probably is that the meaning of “subscriber” here is different from what I would have expected or that I am unfamiliar with the specifics of how this number is calculated and what it signifies. If so, I am eager to learn. I also wonder to what extent massive growth in mobile phone subscribers is necessarily good for a developing country like Pakistan?