Moborate

It's been a busy day for lovers around the world. In Malaysia , authorities arrested 80 umarried Muslims from budget hotels and parks . The catch would no doubt have tripled if they'd dared to go upmarket. In Pakistan, the transgendered community distributed flowers and luddoos in a hospital. And in Uzbekistan , the state picked bromance over romance and cancelled an annual Valentine's Day concert and aggressively promoted the birthday of the Mughal Emperor Babur instead. But you know the world really is going to hell in a handbasket (with a little red bow and some flowers) when you turn on the TV to cleanse your palate of the faux-sentimentality of February 14th with that most bitter of things, local politics, and find Hamid Mir on Geo's  Capital Talk wearing a red shirt and talking about how what Pakistan needs now is love, sweet love. If that isn't surreal enough for you, consider the intro, in which some of our elected respresentatives unite to wish us Hap...

If you thought Pakistani society was polarized, take a look at the open warfare going on under the same media house roof. The issue being discussed was, of course, the sudden release of the man known as Raymond Davis from jail after the payment of diyat or 'blood money' to the relatives of the deceased. What better time than that, thought Geo's analysts with wildly divergent points of view, to attack each other in the most personalized manner possible? First up, Geo's Capital Talk programme, where host Hamid Mir assembled a long list of panelists and commentators he knew (or hoped) would raise a hue and cry about the release, among them the odious Irfan Siddiqui , the slippery Mohammad Mallick , the dissenting lawyer for the victims' families and former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi . But star attraction was of course the once journalist-now-self-righteous turd known as Ansar Abbasi . Abbasi had made his contempt for the result of the case known earlier...