By Zubeida Mustafa

THE recently launched report of the National Human Rights Commission’s Karachi chapter on health as a human right is indeed timely. The report seeks constitutional changes to make the citizens’ right to health justiciable.

Of great significance is the report’s redefinition of the term ‘healthcare’ which has conventionally been interpreted very narrowly in Pakistan as providing treatment for the illnesses that afflict people in the country. Preventive medicine and the social factors leading to diseases (termed as social determinants of health) are generally ignored by those managing the health sector. The fact is that healthcare in Pakistan is dominated by the pharma-driven allopathic medicine.

By Zubeida Mustafa

ADD ‘or commerce?’ to the question in the title. With the examination season in full swing, to be followed by college admissions a few months later, this is naturally the question being asked by many young people aspiring to higher education.

Gone are the days when the choice was more or less evenly spread across all disciplines, with arts having a slight edge over the others. Individual aptitude, the job market and the capacity available in colleges determined the ultimate picture that emerged.

by whom, for whom and, most of all, for what?

: By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Our ‘education’ — going to school, coming out of home, learning to be with ‘others’, making and losing friends — might well be the most significant as well as broadest range of social interaction for an individual in his lifetime. It prepares and defines the person for non-familial contact and the process of continuous learning that accompanies life. In that sense education is essentially non-finite.

By Zubeida Mustafa

KHAIRO Dero, gulan jo sehro/ Sajay dunya jo khair/ Khairo Dero maan theendo (Khairo Dero, a garland of flowers/ The whole world’s goodness will/ Start from Khairo Dero. (Nazar Husain Shah)

So sang the devotees of Nazar Husain (fondly called Jabal Shah) when they performed for me on a hot summer evening in Khairo Dero where I was on a short visit recently. Nazar Hussain, a Sufi, came to Khairo Dero from Layyah when he was 14 years old, after he fell into a well and was rescued. The legend says he received instructions to make Khairo Dero his home, and his dargah now stands here.

By Zubeida Mustafa | |

Nasim Zehra

When twice within a span of 10 days you are reminded of the ‘freedom of expression’ Pakistanis supposedly enjoy, it makes you wonder. First, it was a retired ambassador, Karamatullah Khan Ghori, who reminded the audience at his lecture on the Middle East at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA), that in Pakistan the press is more free than in the Arab world. He was right, but it irked me. If we need a yardstick, does it have to be a region which is the worst model of democratic freedoms?

Then came the Adab Festival’s debut in Karachi last month. In the session on Nasim Zehra’s outstanding book, From Kargil to the Coup: Events that Shook Pakistan, we were told by a retired general – Wasim Ghazi – that civil society had failed to present alternative narratives to the conventional stand adopted by the army on various issues. That was very surprising.