Owais Mughal

This is the third part of the 5-episode series on travel through Pakistan by national highway N5. Our idea is to introduce smaller cities and towns while skipping the introduction of bigger cities enroute as most people already know about them and they are also covered separately at ATP. Today we will start our journey from Bahawalpur and by the end of this post we will reach Lahore.

See the map below which shows our proposed journey today. Bahawalpur is at lower left and Lahore at upper right.

Raza Rumi

The current political dramas, uncertainty and confusion seem to be extraordinary. But is this really that unusual?

History, if anything, has prepared us for the bizarre and the peculiar. I was therefore prompted to jog my memory and dig out snippets that remain semi-buried in my fallible mind.

Colonel Ilahi Bux, the personal physician of Quaid-e Azam M.A. Jinnah recounted in his little book, With the Quaid-e-Azam During His Last Days, how our executive machinery treated the Quaid when he returned to Karachi after his recuperation in Ziarat. This is a scene from Marquez, the head of state, Governor General and Pakistan’s real, and perhaps the only principled advocate lying in a broken ambulance on a road side and the Madar-i-Millat (mother–ofà ƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“theâà ¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“nation), his sister, waving a copy of the newspaper to keep the heat and flies away! And this was no ordinary VIP. The rescue ambulance arrived hours later but the damage had been done.

Beyond belief? Yes.

Bilal Zuberi and Adil Najam

ATP takes pride in highlighting the successes of Pakistanis in many different realms of life, locally and internationally. Just yesterday we all read about the uplifting story of Pakistani entrepreneurs who had reached a succesful climax in their venture by taking their company to a proftable IPO.

But the following news is something that shames all of us Pakistanis. It is indeed the doing of one person but one can see how it reflects badly on all of us Pakistanis. At ATP, our stand is that we are always for Pakistan, which means that when things are wrong we write about them in the spirit of improving them….and highlighting why they should be improved. That said, we also realize that so far the case has not been proven in a court against Mr. Naseem, and until then, he remains just a suspect.
According to the reports (here, here and here):

A Credit Suisse investment banker was charged on Thursday for an insider trading scheme linked to acquisitions involving nine publicly traded U.S. companies that netted a co-conspirator more than $7 million.

Hafiz Muhammad Zubair Naseem, a 37-year-old Pakistani who worked for Credit Suisse’s Global Energy Group in New York, has been charged with one count of conspiracy and 25 counts of securities fraud, prosecutors said in a complaint.

Read Full Post