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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin |Tariq Khosa
TO enjoy any LitFest, one needs to be a hyperactive octopus, with eyes and ears at the end of every tentacle. The Lahore LitFest 2025 — the last in a trilogy before the abstinence of Ramazan — offered a banquet of intellect, spread over four halls in cruel competition. To attend one was to forgo three equally interesting subjects. Dr Ayesha Jalal — to Pakistan’s early history what Dr Romila Thapar is to India’s more ancient one — opened LLF with a discourse on Muslim enlightened thought.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin |Zahid Hussain
ANYONE who attended the ThinkFest on Jan 11-12 in Lahore hoping to walk away with a panacea to Pakistan’s ailments, must have been disappointed. The ThinkFest was a master class in dissection of a living corpse. The discussants — scholars, politicians, a former prime and finance minister, serving and retired government officials, artistes, cricketers, financiers — came from diverse continents and disciplines.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
TO reassemble the origins of Pakistan, one needs time, money and luck. Collectors of deltiology (the study and collection of postcards) need all three to make sense of Pakistan’s jigsaw chronology. Our country’s visual history is a scattered puzzle, with pieces that are 5,000 years old with an undeciphered alphabet, a millennium-plus old invasion with Arabic consonants, and more recent ones that speak through Mughal, Sikh, and British monuments.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
GWADAR has been a fishing village since history began. Its location on the southern coast of modern Balochistan meant that its inhabitants had to live off locally caught fish and depend on seasonal showers for potable water.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
THE main title is misleading: Dear Mr Jinnah. It implies a familiarity between the book’s author Salman Faruqui and the Quaid. In fact, Faruqui was only eight years old in 1947, when he and his family migrated from Patiala state to settle in Sukkur and then in Karachi. He had a forceful academic career and as a student leader in Hyderabad, he interacted with H.S. Suhrawardy and Z.A. Bhutto (then a minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet).
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
COULD this space be better used than to pen a requiem to a fellow writer and columnist? Khaled Ahmed passed away last Sunday, in Lahore, just as the suffocating smog lifted, making life for those who have survived him livable. Inevitably, any memoir of a friend must begin with one’s first encounter. I met Khaled in the winter of 1966. I had returned from London after qualifying as a chartered accountant. Khaled was still studying at Government College, Lahore.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
HOW could 74.5 million Republican voters in the US have got it right, and the rest of the world got it wrong? Nothing in recent history can match Donald Trump’s dramatic re-entry into the White House. Adolf Hitler’s success in the federal German elections of 1933 offers a pale parallel. Hitler’s impact though was local, European, until it exploded across the globe. Trump’s effect is ab initio international, with domestic undertones such as immigration and jobs. Hitler never disguised his intentions.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
HOW many deaths give a single life meaning? In Pakistan, even the massacre of 150 APS students and teachers in Peshawar in 2014 was not enough. They have become a statistic. To the Chinese, every national is priceless. This was brought to the fore at a conference in Islamabad on Oct 29 to celebrate China’s 75 years of ‘Progress, Transformation and Global Leadership’. During the conference, Deputy Prime Minister & Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar dilated for over an hour on Pak-China ties.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
ONE would need more than 10 fingers to count the number of lawyers who have governed Pakistan since its inception. Our founder was a lawyer; our first prime minister a lawyer. Our former prime minister, sentenced to death by a court of law, was a lawyer. Others with law degrees have appeared in court, either as plaintiffs or as defendants. And a few have applied their juridical talents to bending or subverting the law. One would imagine that Pakistan is awash with lawyers.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
dawn.com | F.S. Aijazuddin
PERHAPS the inspiration came from milking the buffalo his father-in-law gave him. Or the hardships he endured during his training for the Olympics 2024, in which he won the gold medal for his record-breaking javelin throw. It is said that recently, when invited to be a motivational speaker at a school in Lahore, someone on his behalf demanded a fee of Rs50 lakhs. Instant celebrities have just cause.
