Columns

India’s true enemy is not Pakistan: it is hubris, the arrogance of a born-again bully. India emerged as a unified nation-state in 1947, the People’s Republic of China two years later. Both boast a heritage that is more than 5,000 years old. Yet each has spent the past seven decades struggling to resolve unfinished business […]

‘Jo ayega Nadaun, kon jaeyga Nadaun?’ This 19th century aphorism described the allure of the hill station of Nadaun, now in India’s Himachal Pradesh. In 1947, India got the Punjab Hill states. Pakistan received the equally irresistible scenery of Gilgit-Baltistan. Any disappointment at leaving Hunza is compensated by a cloudless view of Rakaposhi on the

The jury may still be out on whether India is an elected dictatorship, but it should be unanimous on the fact that it is a bureaucratic diktat-orship. For the last few few years our Ministries and their pen-pushers, denuded of any role in any sane policy formulation, have been passing their time in issuing all kinds of

Mountains measure time in millennia. The sight of Nanga Parbat’s peak from the plane as we neared Gilgit reminded me that PIA’s aircraft and I had grown older: the Himalayas had not. On an earlier trip to the northern areas years ago, I had missed a detour to Fairy Meadows. Guidebooks persuaded me that what

Elon Musk has just declared that there will be one million humans living on Mars by 2045. Perfect timing, you will agree, because by then Trump would have digested Greenland, Panama, the Gaza Riviera, maybe even Canada, and would, like Alexander the Great, be shedding tears because by then there would be no new real

WHICH school serves its country better — a single-sex school or a co-educational one? There are advocates for both. The most vociferous are the alumni of elite mono-sex institutions, amongst them Pakistan’s 139-year-old Aitchison College, Lahore, and India’s 89-year-old Doon School, Dehradun. Almost since their foundation, both have been haunted by the issue of gender

History has been in love with Lahore since forever. It was not its only admirer. The Mughals remained enamoured of it. Akbar made the capital of his kingdom for fourteen years, from 1584 to 1598. Jahangir chose to be buried within sight of it. Shah Jahan embellished its fort. Aurangzeb commissioned a magnificent mosque opposite

The generally received wisdom is that international affairs is so arcane a subject that it should be left to experts and diplomats to interpret. Which they usually do in language that no one understands. But even that is fine so long as we can make sense of the moves on the global chessboard. That is

Few writers can occupy Theodore White’s seat on the balcony of history. White is more famous for his quartet of books, each titled The Making of the President, covering the election campaigns of John F. Kennedy (1960), Lyndon B. Johnson (1964), and Richard Nixon (1968, re-elected in 1972). Less well-known was his memoir In Search