After lunch, the GF and I took a ferry to Uskudar – I will never grow tired of the ferry – and then a taxi about 10km inland to Ataşehir, a satellite town full of skyscrapers. I understand it’s a fairly desirable place to live, but felt rather grotesque, with huge glassy skyscrapers and massive […]
End of an age
An elderly relative of the GF died last night, the last of her generation. So they are all gone now, the ones who grew up on pre-war country estates in an imperial age. She was one of those who flourished in the war, going from those country estates and palace receptions to intelligence work wartime […]
TV time
The GF had a late call tonight, so I had the ipad and watched a bit of I will destroy you. I think I am unused to watching anything on television, as I found myself looking at it rather than sinking into it, though I did start enjoying it partway through the second. Yet remained […]
Founding fathers
The other founding father of the nation had his folk artistic treatment. First there was Jinnah’s birthday cake in December, and now there is this rather splendid sculpture of Iqbal in a Lahore public park. The first still makes me laugh, but the second I rather like, and thought it was rather lovely that it […]
Old times
I have noticed more and more people around my age – or younger – talking about how free children used to be when we were all young, and how sad it is that children today don’t have the same liberties that we did. Certainly, times have changed; there was a single state TV channel until […]
A happy chance
We had to go to the flat today to discuss with the contractor and architect some decisions and instead of being the usual thing where we stared foolishly as the contractor tried to explain in Turkish, it turned out to be a very useful session indeed. This is because I overheard two of his workers […]
Moral degradation
I have not written here about the massacre of Hazaras in Baluchistan some days ago because what was there to say? And it was so ugly. Over the days it feels increasingly like (yet another) symbol of Pakistan’s moral bankruptcy, as the Hazara, who have been targeted and killed by Sunni militants for years, refused […]
Coups past
It’s hard in the moment to make sense of the significance. I see online the shock and horror people are feeling, and some of the images are as memorable as the grainy ones seared into my memory of soldiers climbing like rats over the walls of the PTV building, the state broadcaster in Pakistan. After […]
Happy birthday
It was Jinnah’s birthday on 25 December, much to the relief of Pakistani Christians as this means that they can have Christmas off without the mullahs screeching blue murder. This was doing the rounds on social media – a celebration of his birthday somewhere or the other. One understands the ‘get me out of here’ […]
Pardon power
One of the most intractable problems in Pakistani law is that the heirs the murdered can forgive murderers, and there is little the state can do about it. I know someone whose brother killed her father, but the son went unpunished not because the father was a terrible man (which he was) but because the […]