Moborate

Credit for digging up this Video of the Day, and even inspiring the title should go to @shahidsaeed on Twitter... This is from the anti- Zulfiqar Mirza protests outside the Karachi Press Club on October 10, which followed the return to Pakistan of the former Sindh Home Minister and his attempts to stoke controversy yet again by bilious rants against his bete noire, the MQM and its leader Altaf Hussain . The MQM castigated the media for giving too much importance to the "nobody" Mirza and pretended it had nothing to do with the "spontaneous" protests while at the same time, through its testy reactions, it probably gave Mirza exactly the importance he craved. In any case, do not miss this hilarious clip where the chant leader begins with slogans of ' Altaf Kutta ', which he belts out twice before realizing what protest he's at, upon which he slaps his head and does a 'tauba '. Unfortunately, it still doesn't prevent him from receiving a repro...

For the last five or six days I had been contemplating how best to present the information contained on a website that someone had stumbled upon and forwarded to me. Not because one did not believe the authenticity of the information on it but because it left unanswered a number of questions. Not least of which was who was behind the website and to what end. I could make a fairly straightforward and educated guess about the persons behind the site even though the site's owners had chosen to disguise their ownership while registering it. Zulfiqar Mirza swears on the Quran (Photo: PPI) After today's "atom bomb" presser by the redoubtable former Sindh Home Minister / PPP Senior Vice President / Sindh MPA Zulfiqar Mirza , I think it is quite obvious who is behind the site. The site of course is the imaginatively titled terroristleaks.com and contains pretty much all the information Mr Mirza spoke about and brandished in his presser today. Not only does it have the facs...

The recent spate of violence, mayhem and bloodletting in Karachi has drawn a number of responses, ranging from the outraged to the resigned, the depressed and confused . And all of them are understandable on their own terms. It would be fair to say, however, that in a city as teeming, complex and diverse, there is no single truth about the causes for the flare-up that trumps all others. Every actor in this sordid saga can (and does) point to the actions of other actors as an excuse for their own villainy. 'The burnt out ends of smoky days' (Photo source: Times of Karachi) If the MQM operates like a mafia, there is also no denying the underworld nexus that parties like the PPP and ANP are using to carve out their own slice of turf in the city. If Karachi's law enforcement is inefficient, corrupt and politicized, it is not an aberration from the rest of Pakistan where the writ of the state has been steadily eroded. If politicians are venal and self-serving about their po...

Just when you think Pakistani political discourse cannot sink any lower, your delusions are undermined with even more sleaze. Our SleazeMaster of the Day is none other than Sindh Home Minister, Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza , who has never been a stranger to spouting crude diatribes in an 'I'll say what I want and I don't care what you think!' fashion. He has understandably been under some pressure recently since his party, the Pakistan People's Party 's (PPP's) main parliamentary ally, the Muttaheda Qaumi Movement (MQM), had sort of made his removal from his current post or a restraining order on his mouth a precondition for continuing support to the government. He seems to have been particularly irked by a story in The News and Jang  on March 14 that he was about to be shown the door as Home Minister within 10-12 days and it was partly the intervention of his wife, Fehmida Mirza , the current Speaker of the National Assembly, that prevented an immediate boot. Nothi...