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Things you see on the streets of Karachi: a motorcycle with five people on board (a father driving, a child in his lap, a child behind him, wife behind the child, riding side-saddle, holding a baby); donkey pulling a cart laden with 30-foot steel girders; motorized rickshaw with six or seven schoolkids ...  (Read more)

Last night I attended a fashion show, and a few nights earlier I attended a fashion show. That’s two more fashion shows than I’ve attended in America, or anywhere. The shows took place by an outdoor pool at a luxury hotel in the center of Karachi, and they seemed the real thing (Fashion ...  (Read more)

The News is a leading Pakistani daily, in English, and today it had a scoop—an exclusive interview with President General (that’s his title) Pervez Musharraf. The story, under a headline that stretched across seven columns, included the following passage: “In a 90-minute wide-ranging ...  (Read more)

You are caught in a traffic jam in Karachi and a beggar raps on your window. He displays a withered limb or (take your pick) a twitching stump, a bleeding abscess, an arm bent like a question mark, hands with no fingers, a goutish tumor, a cleft lip, a scorched face. The look in his yellowed eyes ...  (Read more)

The following titles are in the display window at London Books, a store in The Point, Karachi’s trendiest shopping mall:

“War of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Trial of Henry Kissinger” by Christopher Hitchens
“Buddha” by Karen Armstrong
“The ...  (Read more)

Just had my first encounter with brain masala. Not a joke. Quite popular in Karachi, and not at all bad; soft in texture and gentle in taste, much like tofu, though high in cholesterol, I’m told.

Most technological breakthroughs are not breakthroughs in all ways; there’s often a drawback of one sort or another. As has been noted widely, PDAs are great but they don’t have the permanence of datebooks. A few years ago I leafed through my grandfather’s datebook from the 1950s; ...  (Read more)

I walked into a drugstore in Islamabad yesterday and noticed, in a proud stack by the cash register, a dozen cans of Slim-Fast. A few yards away, on the street, was a montage of Pakistani misery—street kids, homeless men, hunger. This might be an economic indicator in the era of globalization, though ...  (Read more)

The headline over an opinion piece in The New York Times asks a good question: “Is America Abandoning Afghanistan?” Several thousand U.S. soldiers are in Afghanistan but the country is slipping into chaos and needs ...  (Read more)

I arrived in Islamabad two days ago, and the 16-hour journey from New York gave me the time to begin reading Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” which is a treat. ...  (Read more)