MUHAMMAD UMER QUDDAFI
Kharian
Voting age for referendum
TO elect a president, a voter has to be 18. To elect a member of the national or the provincial assembly, a voter should be 21 years of age — or more wise!
SARDAR ABRAR RASHID
Abbottabad
Role of columnists
COLUMNISTS influence their readers’ opinions. Each has a style of his own for doing so.
Omar Kureshi’s sense of outrage at anything he discerns as an inequity or trespass is not unlike that of a prudish woman’s first exposure to Playboy magazine. His columns have woven into them, some say snarled, a strong strain of fair play and morality.
Ayaz Amir has a way of making words flow, which few can approximate. His readers, however, get so doused by the flow that they often lose their way. They have to go back and read again, or consult others, and find that Ayaz is often against everything that everyone else is for.
Kashmir is never out of Khalid Hasan’s mind. When he worked for OPEC in Vienna he almost got that body to discuss Kashmir. Khalid Hasan’s bonnet is seldom free of a bee. He is either eulogizing someone or something to high heaven, or going hammer and tongs after someone or something. Khalid does not believe in middling, he goes for the jugular, or for the potent ego massage.
What would Sultan Ahmed, or Rambler, do if there were no parties, or if the economy was alive and not on a respirator? Sultan probably has the answer but he is not telling.
What the worst sorry mess would KDA, or the Cantonment Boards, or ABAD be, if there was no Ardeshir Cowasjee. What he writes are researched and documented facts which the transgressors are hard put to counter.
We are all for peace, but Irfan Husain is more for it. We don’t dislike the Indians, only the fact that they want to be not only more equal amongst equals but the regional godfather. Irfan has a point that peace with India would benefit us more than it would them and we should, therefore, try harder. The Indians know this as well, and they want us try so hard that there is nothing more left for us to give, except what the Indians want, total submission. A line has to be drawn at some point. Where is that point, Irfan?
Kuldip Nayar works hard at being a liberal. The only time he unfurls the true colours is when Pakistan becomes projected and is in world focus. Indians are not used to Pakistan being treated at their level or a notch or two above by the world community. Whenever they perceive this happening they begin to ‘gyrate their hips furiously’ as Arundathi Roy put it, to divert the world’s attention back to India, the ‘secular’ and largest democracy of the world. When the rest of India is gyrating, Kuldip Nayar waddles too. His peace agenda is trimmed.
Then of course Dawn has a largish assembly of latter day columnists, the retired generals, air marshals, mercifully no admirals, and a bevy of retired bureaucrats.
Kunwar Idris, or Roedad Khan, has all the answers. What were they, and their other writer colleagues like Ahmed Sadiq, doing when they were governing? The answers appear to have been a trifle late in coming.
Why does such a welter of joint cackles from former bureaucrat-writers against the new local government system being brought in? It may or may not work, but the system Idris and Roedad and their colleagues are products of, and functioned within, was definitely not working, the proof of that is the state of the country.