COVID-19, an improvised explosive device, eight bullets, and a photograph of a blood-soaked young man bracketed by his parents. This is how dreams have died in a series of events that appear random but are not.

If revolution is a word from the 17th-century, then one of the buzzwords of our age must be disruption: a disorder or a disarrangement, a shakeup or a shakedown, both destructive and creative.

It was February 1947, the struggle for independence from the British and the civil disobedience movement was at its peak. 

Once, during an informal meeting with Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal, I asked him why the ruling party Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz’s central executive committee hadn’t yet endorsed Chief Minister Punjab Shahbaz Sharif as the party’s next prime ministerial candidate.

Honor killings in Pakistan are so commonplace they have become something of a media cliche. There are nearly a thousand reported cases every year and, eventually, each becomes a number stripped of humanity.

When an Islamabad court gave the government 24 hours last Friday to deal with protesters led by a group of religious parties occupying one of the main entry points to the capital city, the residents of Islamabad and its twin city, Rawalpindi, held their collective breath.