Individual Counts

I have been reading with interest the comments to the Say No to racial bias.All of the comments  so far have  condemnded the  Daily Times  editorial. However there was one comment that raised an interesting question.  This was :

“The editorial mentioned was undoubtedly distasteful and amateurish, and indeed reflected the insensitivity of the editorial board. It was if I may say a blatant use or misuse of media to colour, reiterate and opinionate the public and collective conscious and a violation of public space.

But pray, tell me is the identity of a Pushtun or any community so delicate, so fragile that it can be and is threatened by two paragraphs? Do those 234 words stand so true that the reality of being a Pushtun gets endangered? Threatened?“

Anyone  care to  venture an answer  to this ?

Milton Friedman is dead. As I read reports about his death, these words of his echo in my mind :

President Kennedy got it wrong when he said:Ask not what your country can do for you.Ask what you can do for your country. This indicates that the government is the patron , the citizen the ward.

The correct formulation is: What I and my compatriots can do through government to help discharge our individual responsibilites , to achieve our goals and above all to protect our freedom”

May he rest in peace.

Is  the  Pakistan International Airlines   running  into a loss ?   Or   are they  just rumours? Why  is it  that PIA engineers have to  get  each and every part   repaired from the UK  ? I’ve written  about  all this  in my weekly  column   in the POST . Read   it  and tell me what you think .

Was   in Gujranwala  over the weekend . I was invited to speak   on   Pakistani women  political participation. The  Assistant  Election   Commissioner … . forgot  the guy’s  name   was also there. Poor  guy. .  to everything  that  the participants  or I said   he  went “ Yes that  is right !” 

Anyways,  one thing that he said needs to  shared with  people.   Out  of  188 Union Councils in Gujranwala, there  are   20 UCs where the  women reserved seats are empty.

Hmm……   that is why I  say.. lets “revisit  reservations“

Poet Allama Iqbal was secular and this quote perhaps says it all

The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the secular. All that is secular is therefore sacred in the roots of its being.

The greatest service that modern thought has rendered to Islam, and as a matter of fact to all religions, consists in its criticism of what we call material or natural — a criticism which discloses that the merely material has no substance until we discover it rooted in the spiritual. There is no such thing as a profane world. All this immensity of matter constitutes a scope for the self- realisation of spirit. All is holy ground. “