‘What good is a dead body if you can’t see the person alive?’

“One can only laugh at these restrictions as they stop only those who desire to visit legally. I have lost all hope now. Though I can visit Cairo with its pyramids, London, Moscow, Mashhad, I cannot visit Amritsar only 30 miles from Lahore.”

A Peace Convention and the wisdom of Ali Nawaz

The real issue is that of basic rights for the people of our countries, says Sobho ji. He notes that the term ‘national security’ is misleading and should be seen in the context of people’s security, of their right to food, education, shelter and clothing. The unlettered factory workers from Hub know this all too well

TED and Compassion, India-Pakistan joint defence, Zardari and conspiracies

Several links and news items I’ve been wanting to share and finally managed to compile – including news about Hassan Abbas and the QA chair at Columbia, Zardari, the army and the ISI, the Charter of Compassion – and a mind blowing TED talk by Pranav Mistry on SixthSense technology

Jinnah revisited, thank you Jaswant Singh

Jaswant Singh’s latest work on Jinnah had not hit the Pakistani bookstalls at the time of writing. But from reported and televised statements and published extracts his thesis appears to be similar to Ayesha Jalal’s seminal work The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

PAKISTAN-INDIA: The deaf frog approach

PAKISTAN-INDIA: The deaf frog approach just might work… The Indian media is gunning for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his stand regarding dialogue with Pakistan, just as the Pakistani media is gunning for the Pakistani leadership for their insistence on dialogue with India (going against long years of conditioning). Reminds me of the little frog [...]

PAKISTAN/INDIA: Citizens Push for Peace

The months following last year’s Mumbai terror attacks have seen a renewed sense of urgency among peace activists in Pakistan and India. Citizens are pushing their governments to resume the composite dialogue process between the two nuclear-rival nations.

A moment of silence and a ‘dangerous’ choreographer

On Jun 27, PPP minority member Salim Qureshi Khokhar, a Christian, asked the house to “observe a minute of silence for the entertainer Michael Jackson, internationally acclaimed in Pakistan,” as Gibran Peshimam, City Editor of The News, Karachi, told IPS.
What followed was even more unexpected. Another minister stated that since Michael Jackson was a Muslim, he could be included in the prayer. “Jackson’s brother may have been a Muslim but there’s no confirmation about Jackson having converted to Islam,” Minister of Information Shazia Marri interjected.
They settled on a minute of silence but it was probably just about 20 seconds. Five minutes later, the atmosphere became tense the House began discussing the finance bill.

Dr Sarwar blog; my ‘Media Matters’ chapter in new book on Pakistan India divide

Recently received a copy of the India International Center quarterly to which I contributed a chapter, published recently by Harper Collins, India. I dipped into it – loved the chapter by Sonia Jabbar & was happy to see that Mukul Kesavan, one of my favourite writers, also has a chapter, besides other luminaries like Urvashi Butalia, Amit Baruah (former The Hindu correspondent in Islamabad),and Pervez Hoodbhoy plus a short story by Danial Muinuddin.

India trip, the ‘attack’ and some articles

No Pakistani journalist was attacked or roughed up at the New Delhi media discussion. One man disrupted the meeting – briefly, from the back of the auditorium. Most papers and channels used photos and footage of the scuffle. The interruption lasted for maybe a minute or so. The heckler turned out to be from the Sri Ram Sene, which tried to prevent Valentines Day celebrations in India, to whom thousands of people sent ‘pink chaddis’ in response

A breath of fresh Kashmiri air

Basharat Peer’s ‘Curfewed Nights’ brings home the myriad nuances and human-ness of ‘the Kashmir issue’ – the main reason why, we are told, Pakistan and India can’t exist in peace. His first visit to Pakistan, he said, has been an eye-opener. “For a long time, Pakistan for me was Imran Khan. It was an abstraction, a collection of images. I couldn’t have imagined it was like this, or that there were so many multiple worlds in Karachi. I had no real sense of what Pakistan was.”