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By Dr. Khalil Ahmad
April 24, 2011
The demise of the Pak Tea House is symptomatic of the crisis of intellectual independence and private initiative in Pakistan. The premises is still there, existing with its symbolic glory, waiting for someone with entrepreneurial spirit to make use of its huge potential, who would turn it once again into Pak Tea House? Let’s see who reinvents and relives the Pak Tea House!
We are not a normal nation and live down inside the proverbial well made of our own presumptions. Thus we are a perfect subject matter for psychologists to study. In addition, we are never ready to admit that, instead declare others abnormal. That makes us own a stinted mindset in our heads. What’s wrong with this mindset is that it never allows us to live normally, to have introspection, to see ourselves in a critical mirror, to identify our mistakes, to understand our inconsistencies, to grant others the same rights and freedoms that only we rightfully claim to possess and enjoy. It is this mindset that does not let us come out of our obsession of a charismatic nation (for whom things will happen on their own without any effort), and finally it is this mindset that never permits us to move ahead and improve ourselves.
May 27, 2010
Now after the banning of the Facebook and Youtube I feel extraordinarily passionate about the watch-dog living inside me. I am feeling nostalgic how I brought this watch-dog up, how I institutionalized it into The Watchers. Alas, in my absence The Watchers could not survive long. But now I see how many The Watchers have sprung up in Pakistan. The courts too are playing The Watchers. I am happy how people campaigned against the Facebook, and finally got it banned.
May 02, 2009
Our share of the terrorists or Taliban has perfected what we have been suffering in our country at smaller or somewhat larger scales for the last six decades: the moral policing. Sometimes it was individuals or well-knit groups, and sometimes it were governments that resorted to moral policing. However, now in the shape of Taliban, the moral policing has reached its climax, i.e. it has become top most duty of the Taliban type state.
April 20, 2009
Under the present circumstances where the perpetrators of terror have unleashed a most brutal war the hidden agenda of which is ultimately their own political supremacy, we have two options clearly open to every one of us: kill each other, or live in peace with each other.
The institution of government was founded to protect the life, liberty and property of citizens from the usurpers be they individuals or conutries. Or, what purpose could or does it serve? Surely, people did not and do not need somebodies to rule them? But, with the passage of time, various ambitious individuals, elites, representatives of this or that class, and organized political/religious parties, monopolized it to rule the people, to regulate their lives according to their philosophies, ideologies, visions, wishes and tastes. Thus, the institution of government started losing its rai-sons d'e-tre.
