We had a roundtable conference this afternoon, with the contractor, his architect daughter and our local friend. It was a very good meeting: much was clarified and agreed and we now know what the next steps are likely to be. There is one neighbour who is likely to cause trouble, even though we have all […]
Goodbye sunshine
After a warm, sunny long weekend, today the clouds have returned. It is grey and heavy outside, befitting Turkey’s coronavirus figures, speeding towards the top of the global charts. It would be quite something if the GF and I were to have stayed in both the best and the worst places to be during this […]
Impressive
I listened to an interview with Arafat Mazhar, a very impressive young man indeed. His new film, Swipe, is genuinely very good, as was his first one (Shehr-e-Tabassum) and it was such a pleasure to listen to a Pakistani who was intelligent, well-spoken, well-read, and trying to draw on indigenous ways of understanding the world.
Happy world toilet day
Happy world toilet day. Here’s looking forward to the next wave of excrement.
Things that are keeping me up at night
Will there be an earthquake and the flat fall down? Will something go terribly wrong with the renovation? Will it go over budget? Will there be a problem with our visa application? Will someone in my family get COVID and I won’t be able to travel to them? Will there be a hard lockdown here […]
Camels in the sea
Read a fascinating article today about seafaring camels in Kutch. I wonder if there are some in Badin, where my family has some lands but where I’ve never been.
گوشت کی دکان
Horror in Lahore as a woman driving along the Motorway with her children stopped as the car broke down, called for help, and before help arrived was accosted by several men who gangraped her. The horror of that is bad enough, what is worse is the response – of the police, of the politicians, of […]
The virtues of lockdown
I have been mulling for some time now, perhaps since the start of the pandemic, on the moral attached to being in lockdown. The GF and I were talking about it this morning, of how locking down, of shutting down, was given a sort of moral weight, and more a political weight: we care for […]
Flooding
Karachi is flooded. There are some truly remarkable images and videos online: of shipping containers floating down Bandar Road as the Urdu-speaking videographer morosely invites Imran Khan to take his place on it. A fire engine going down a quiet Defence street, its lights on and sirens blaring, sending waves that push open gates of […]
Looking glass histories
Pakistan and Turkey seem to me to have very similar histories in a number of ways, in terms of civil military relations, how restive areas are treated, etc. Given the long history of closeness between the two, I wonder how people who matter in Pakistan have learned from those in Turkey. The memorandum of 1971 […]