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Look, another year

8 min 2 mths

0 8 min 2 mths

Histrionics as policy

In the age of gadgets and hyper-connectivity, where people spend more time with screens than themselves, mindfulness exercises and meditations make sense. You must have seen many examples of people walking around totally engrossed in something that is going on on their smartphones without any […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Look, another year

D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?). Important, existential questions. Apt to ask them at the start of the new year. But I have a better one: What’s the point? Every year we say […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Between a rock and a hard place, again

It is believed that during Imran Khan’s final year in office, two strong opposing pulls emerged within the ruling dispensation. One exceptionally placatory towards the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. The other, more cosmopolitan, tough on Afghanistan but highly conciliatory towards India. And these intra-podal […]

Farrukh writes

Histrionics as policy

0 8 min 2 mths

In the age of gadgets and hyper-connectivity, where people spend more time with screens than themselves, mindfulness exercises and meditations make sense. You must have seen many examples of people walking around totally engrossed in something that is going on on their smartphones without any […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Look, another year

D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?). Important, existential questions. Apt to ask them at the start of the new year. But I have a better one: What’s the point? Every year we say […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Between a rock and a hard place, again

It is believed that during Imran Khan’s final year in office, two strong opposing pulls emerged within the ruling dispensation. One exceptionally placatory towards the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. The other, more cosmopolitan, tough on Afghanistan but highly conciliatory towards India. And these intra-podal […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Algorithmic cauldron

What do you think these three clips, ‘pawry ho rahi hai’, ‘mera dil ye pukare aaja’ and ‘Lahore da pawa, Akhtar Lawa’ have in common? Yes, they all went viral on social media, but what explains this virality? Algorithms. We live in the age of […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Reading is forbidden

A big problem with Pakistani history is that huge chunks of it are missing from the public record. By this, I do not mean that chronology or publicly accepted superficial accounts of those periods have disappeared from the record. Certainly not. We lack granular details, […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Management style of supreme commanders

Almost the entire title of this piece is lifted from Tom Holt’s book, The Management Style of the Supreme Beings. Almost but for self-explanatory reasons, not quite. In my pantheon of modern writers, Mr Holt has found a venerated place. He sits right between Douglas Adams […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Playing defence

Forgive me if I do not mince my words today. We all like to believe that the forces of chaos and degeneracy have finally been vanquished. A Waterloo of sorts. But can we be sure? The decline is decline, after all, and to understand where […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Future cancelled

On November 15, Przewodów, a village on the outskirts of Poland neighbouring Ukraine, was reportedly struck by a missile. Early reports hinted at the possibility of the missile being of Russian make. For a heartstopping moment, it felt like the war in Ukraine was about […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Nation building in a fugue state

Every crisis presents an opportunity. It is a test of your wisdom to spot it in time. A few days ago, a corps commanders meeting concluded without any press note. Remember, issuing a ceremonial press release after such meets is a custom, not an obligation. […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

Imran Khan — signal and noise

How do you write a piece on the reasons behind Imran Khan’s meteoric rise when he has been pushed out of power, launched an agitational march which seems doomed to fail, and narrowly escaped a serious attempt on his life with a bullet wound? This […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

The Hindutva consolidation

Rome was not burnt in a day. Many thought they could stop it. But not our Nero. His fiddle is a metaphor for an unparalleled wild abandon and perhaps a tortured form of twisted wisdom. Embracing Murphy’s law. That which can go wrong will go […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 2 mths

What’s eating Gwadar

‘Dream big. But keep it simple,’ instructed Art Williams’ aspirational audio back in the 1990s. For those who don’t know, Arthur L Williams Jr is a school football coach turned insurance executive in Palm Beach, Florida. He made a fortune in his adopted career and […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Nightmares never end

Something needs to be said about one specific aspect of the human condition. A fear that refuses to go away no matter what you try. The fear of a sudden crash, a devastating shock to the system. A paralysing, catastrophic blow that breaks your back. […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Leaking

The priorities of a nation define its future. Let’s consider ours. The country’s poor people are telling you they are sunk, and if the flood were not enough, shrinking purchasing power would likely kill them. The elites of the country and the media tell you […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Put mud?

Back in school, a classmate asked a substitute teacher to translate the Punjabi phrase, mitti pao. If you are really interested in the expression, idiomatically, it will translate into something like: bury it, let bygones be bygones, or water under the bridge. The teacher, barely a […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

The happiness ceiling

It is not the first time I have asked you to pay some attention to the metaphor of man’s expulsion from heaven. Nor will it be the last. What does it tell you? Here is Adam, with a blank slate, with a partner made for […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

The empathy bridge

The question was chiefly about the west’s moral imperative to take responsibility for climate change and freak disasters like the flash floods that have inundated one-third of Pakistan this year. But in the run-up to the question much had already been said about the rise […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Circle of abuse

One step forward, three hundred yards back. Notice even in these desolate times, I have not lost my sense of proportion. For instance, I could have said one foot forward three lightyears back. But there is no frame of reference. At least three hundred yards […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Dogma and policy

To the reading world, Karen Armstrong needs no introduction. She is best known for her seminal works in the field of comparative religions like ‘A History of God’, ‘The Battle for God’, ‘A Brief History of Myth’, and ‘Transformation’. But it is her second autobiographical […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Don’t look down!

The title of this article is a play on the name of a famous apocalyptic Hollywood black comedy and political satire called Don’t Look Up. I have mentioned the film before and this is no time to reproduce the summary here. You can do it on […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

The problem with narratives

Power trips of political triumphalism can be more potent than any intoxicant. You do not want to stop when you think you are winning. Notice the emphasis on thinking. If perception and reality were the same, we would have found little room to disagree. But […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

UnSTEMmed

Many video streaming services have invested heavily in original South Asian content. Consequently, it is hard to open such an app and not find it overflowing with Indian content. Here and there, you may find something from Pakistan too, but it is rare and hardly […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

A word to the gatekeepers

They say divine providence granted a man two wishes as a reward for an act of selfless heroism. He wished for a tour of paradise, a wish that was instantly granted. He took the tour and spent time there to his heart’s content. When it […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Ancient sky, death spirals and pyrrhic victories

What is common between James Webb Space Telescope and former Trump NSA John Bolton? Nothing, to be honest. The first unlocks ancient mysteries without drawing too much attention to itself. The second, Bolton, is, pardon the rudeness, a prima donna, an attention hog. It is […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Talking to the Taliban

A week before the fall of Kabul, my piece titled ‘Behold the wooden horse’ appeared in this space on August 7, 2021. Bear with me as I quote from the article to see if I had a point. Kindly note that to improve the flow, […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Kobayashi Maru

As the tale goes, once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away there lived two unemployed brothers called Modified and Modied. One day the older brother Modified (let’s call him Mod) said to his younger, hey Mo let’s go search for jobs in […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Proof of synthetic sentience

Since AlphaGo defeated a human player some eleven years ago, the field of Artificial Intelligence or synthetic sentience development has covered the evolution of centuries. This is how it is supposed to grow. But about five years ago, when I was obsessively trying to write […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Seduced by the right

Conjure the image of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince in your mind with a few amendments. Our version of the statue is privileged, unpopular, high-strung, feckless, jaded and mostly fatigued. And in this version, the other character, the helpful swallow, is replaced by a selfish magpie. […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 5 mths

Between 2 Bushes

Two fundamental observations at the start. Human beings by nature are basically a decent bunch. That is to say that if there is no earth shaking crisis in someone’s origin story you are going to witness more decent souls. I know we can go on […]

Farrukh writes
0 8 min 9 mths

Slow cancellation of the future

At the outset, you will have to forgive this writer for a few underlying assumptions. The first assumption is that you are equally shocked by the developments of the previous decade. The second that, like me, you too cannot account for the broader contexts of […]

Farrukh writes