Ali Malik's blog

Dear Members of Civil Society, Writing this letter to you kind of puts me in a moral dilemma. I, with all honesty and sincerity, think that terms like Civil Society are discriminatory and are a miniature of the concept of Brahmanization in which educated elite classes (Lawyers, Journalists, Students etc) try to set the agenda for the rest of the nation and want the nation to abide by it. It is not the setting of agenda that bothers me. These are the hijacking tendencies of Civil Society that are troubling me. It is this sense of superiority in which one takes the whole moral authority to define what is right or what is wrong for Pakistan is what I have problem with. So just when I am someone who refuses to accept that there is any role of "Civil Society" in any democracy, my dilemma is that gravity of the issues facing us makes me right to you all who bracket yourselves as "Civil Society". Secondly, let me confess that I actually have high regard for quite a few i...

A clarification: Following hypothesis is for establishing a truth and it in no way compares personalities (and I have to give this explanation because 60s style Ikhwan inspired rightists treat any such logical reasoning as blasphmy. Also, comparing personalities is not my purpose here so I am making clarification to avoid digression, otherwise I would not shy away from it.). When I learnt how to interpret poetry, and it was the idealist teenage, I always wondered how Katl-e-Hussain asl main marg-e-yazid hai (Hussain's killing, in reality, is death of Yazid) could be true? I mean ultimately Hussain died and Yazid and his system triumphed at least for his life time. An idealist that I was back then, I grabbed the concept as is and moved on without thinking about it much on the course. Then in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto I found the true meaning of this verse. For in a time when we, the society, start thinking that principles do not matter and there is always room for complace...