Sunday Posts

The news from Iran is getting grim by the moment. The deep division in the Iranian Regime is now in the open. I am optimistic that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Iranian Regime, and its power will prove to be fictitious like that of other dictatorial regimes of the past. An iconic figure - Neda - has emerged in her death, an young lady shot by the hired assassins of the state, and hopefully the amateur images of her dying moments will stir an otherwise indifferent world into action. The lesson that the world's dictators don't seem to get is that technology has moved forward and the usual methods of gagging - banning the journalists, stopping the newscasts - are no longer good enough. As Iran continues to dominate Twitter and the blogs, and as the street videos shot on mobile phone keep leaking out on the Internet, the evil men of Myanmar will surely call the Iranian Elite to offer an word of advise - we told you to keep Internet out! We have seen this before,...

Nations are ideas. We try to fashion them as territories. But how can a river, a mountain ridge or sometimes an imaginary line in the middle of a field can explain the wide division in the lives, thoughts and futures of the people who live on different sides? Nations are not the people too. Indeed, people build nations and become its body. But the soul of the nation is an idea: People come together on an idea to build a nation. While that's what a modern nation is - an idea - and that way exceptionalism is not an American exception, very few nations are as completely defined by an idea as Pakistan. There was hardly any political, geographic or military rationale of Pakistan other than the idea of an Islamic homeland in South Asia. [In that way, the ideological brother of Pakistan in the family of nations is Israel] This, abated by the short term political calculations of some backroom colonialists, created a modern state which must be solely sustained on that singular idea. Religi...