Adil Najam and Owais Mughal

Many of you have been writing to us today about the”disappearance” of the ATP page for nearly 13 hours.

We apologize for this inconvenience – believe us, we were even more concerned about this sudden “disappearance” than you were. It was caused because of technical problems at our server host, mediatemple, and not because of mischief on the part of government agencies or of hackers.

The government of the day in Pakistan should rightly be blamed for many things, but (despite the fears of some of our readers) cannot be blamed for this!

What is interesting, however, is that the dozens of messages we received (and even our own initial impulse) assumed that ATP had, in fact, been either blocked by the ‘authorities’ or hacked. This is important and worthy of note because we are either so very cynical as a people as to always assume the very worst, or because the probability of this happening is actually so very high that this becomes not only a probable but the likely reason for the inaccessibility of the site.

Adil Najam

I found this full page ad in Dawn very interesting. And also very democratic. Maybe a national conversation does need to be held on who (or what qualities) makes for a good prime Minister?

(click picture to see a larger, more readable, image)

temporal

Desicritic Raza Rumi introduced me to the cyber rebirth of Pak Tea House in these words:

Pak Tea House is a little corner in the blogosphere that will endeavour to revive the culture of debate, pluralism and tolerance. It has no pretensions nor illusions but the motivation of a few people who want to see Pakistan a better place – where ideas need to counter the forces of commercialism, adverse effects of globalisation and extremism. And, ideas must translate into action that leads us to an equitable, just and healthy society.

The moving spirit and the editor behind Pak Tea House is Raza Rumi who blogs at Jahane Rumi