Countdown!

Stories

Uh-oh.
As if Taliban and three hundred million refugees weren’t enough. Talat Hussain has been one of the finest television hosts I have seen in a long time. And I don’t count Hamid Mir to be a fine television host. He can write all he wants in Jang but he acts like a buffoon in Capital Talk. He can barely get his participants to give him a straight answer and he’s almost always trying to get his own two cents in at the end of the program which I think, he hopes will shape the public opinion. And while other television anchors follow a similar suit and even educated telly anchors seem to be losing their ground in front of crazy politicians (a part of m

7 Overrated Things.
The tag as put forth by Specs. Shah Rukh Khan, Atif Aslam and Himesh Reshammiya. I’ve written about them before and I really think it’s a waste of time to talk about them again. Democracy. Yes, we get it. It worked wonders for America. It probably will do great for a lot of other countries like Canada and Britain and Australia too. But for the likes of Pakistan, we’re still halfway in trying to get kids to school without contracting hepatitis and more than half of our most prominent l

Part 3: Taliban.
Part 3 of this. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what a mess the world is right now. We may not want to call it a world war because of negative associations with the term itself – but that’s what it’s pretty much turned into. People like me who didn’t know who or what Taliban were, began to get familiar with the phrase post-9/11. Before that we were all oblivious to many subtle references in our Pakistan Studies books that told us the litany of problematic relations we had had with A

Part 2: Music.
Part 2 of this. When Khuda Ke Liye was released, a lot of drawing rooms and classrooms sprung into the ‘music is halaal or haraam?’ debate. Lot of people had a lot of opinions, as always, but the greatest words of wisdom came from my then-19-year-old brother, Ali. “There are a lot of things forbidden in Islam. Lies, bribery, cheating, killing, murder, rape, adulte

Literature, music and Taliban.
Part 1: Literature. Peter loves Jane. Jane loves Peter. And they all loved a dog – whose name I can’t recall. That was the first encounter I had with books. Two pre-pubescents painted charmingly across 20 odd pages with that orangey dog and their attempts to make ice cream at home or the theme parks or whatever. It’s been a while since I saw those. Following that were more