Another Pakistan We're in Pakistan at mid-summer 2011 - "the country that could kill the world," in a native line that lingers. Or maybe the new normal. Think of Pakistan, we're told by Pakistanis, as a model or perhaps a warning of the rising, rough, tough inequalities in the world, even in our embattled United States…

Early on we planned to see this nightmare aslant - less with oft-quoted strategists, more with the imaginative class, so to speak: with the typically grim but mettlesome singers, story-tellers and artists of Sind and the Punjab. They are wonderfully available, individual, candid women and men who have their own dark, truth-telling traditions. They each tell different stories, of course - and almost all of them different from the standard line of an "Af-Pak" crucible of global terrorism. Many of them point rather to "Indo-Pak" roots of the modern turmoil, in the Partition that carved two wounded and unequal sibling rivals out of the British Raj in 1947.

I am deeply interested in the anxiety that has escalated in 2011, in the assassination of Salman Taseer and the official murder of the Sy Hersh of Pakistan, Saleem Shahzad, which has rattled our best friends in journalism. In general, though, I'm drawn to Pakistanis who can think about the long story, as far back as birth by partition, and who can think of Pakistan's trajectory ahead for a generation. It's part of the lure for me that Pakistan has a booming literary culture that is more and more linked and noticed in the West; also that it has a talented modern pop music culture that is heard all over the Indian airwaves, and all over Asia.

"Another Pakistan" is a co-production of the Watson Institute and the Asia Society; Zarminae Ansari helped produce the series in Pakistan. Beena Sarwar and Aman ki Asha provided essential insight and support.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Aman ki Asha exists on both sides of border: Pak MPs LAHORE: Members of a Pakistani delegation, comprising parliamentarians who returned home via Wagah border after paying a five-day visit to India, said on Sunday that 'Ama .....more

Pak-India have 'Aman Ki Asha': Lawmakers LAHORE: A Pakistani delegation comprising Parliamentarians that returned home via Wagah border after paying a five-day visit to India said that Aman Ki Asha (desire for p .....more

Plant in India, Pakistan helps fight cancer LONDON: Scientists have discovered that extracts from a plant, found in arid regions of India and Pakistan can kill cancerous cells and produces no harmful side-effects a .....more

In bad weather, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus make good friends NEW DELHI: In a country where religious intolerance and communal hatred dominate the news nowadays, here is something that goes to show that all is not rotten and ugly.more