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Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The Express Tribune

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Monsoon red wedding

The monsoon session of the Indian parliament has just begun. And so far, it is shaping up to be an event reminiscent of the Red Wedding from the Game...

yesterday 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Hope.exe: critical error

Just let the weight of this moment sink in. We are on the cusp of total human transformation. In one generation, we have gone from fixed,...

20.07.2025 50

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Cut it

There is a macabre sense of satisfaction in holding a mirror up to a society that has let itself go. When closely guarded orthodoxies of piety and...

13.07.2025 60

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Cruel to be kind

As with any old animosity, the 'Tom & Jerry' show between Pakistan and India has continued since independence. Call it competition, identity clash or...

05.07.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Order out of chaos

Master disclaimer: If I manage to cover all disclaimers in this piece, I will get to the core of my argument today. Otherwise, perhaps I will rename...

29.06.2025 70

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Death wish or stress test?

In the past three years, humanity has seemed to teeter on the brink of extinction. When the war in Ukraine began, many of us struggled to visualise...

22.06.2025 50

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Optical delusions

Within the past thirty days, we have witnessed two wars waged to consolidate power and for optics. India tried to invade Pakistan for all the worst...

15.06.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Apple of discord

When Jon Stewart does a segment on international politics or economics, you pay attention. My apologies for the double negative in the next sentence,...

08.06.2025 100

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Stupidistan

This piece seeks to expose a key contradiction between form and substance — between aspiration, machinations, desperation, incompetence, and...

01.06.2025 40

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The prompt theory

Are we living in the most oppressive timeline or the most fascinating one? It is hard to tell. One minute, technological breakthroughs take your...

25.05.2025 50

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

New normals

In his long-awaited speech, the Indian Prime Minister claimed to have established a new normal — on the lines of a forever war — through the...

18.05.2025 90

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Hallucinations

What is the difference between AI hallucinations, synthetic data, and emergent misalignment? AI hallucinations: The generation of incorrect,...

11.05.2025 70

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Short fuse

Writing last week, I wondered if my imagination had the escape velocity to leave behind the ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan. It turns out...

04.05.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Conscious or unconscious?

Will it surprise you to know that this piece is not about the ongoing India-Pakistan tensions? It will? Well, for an average Pakistani, this should...

27.04.2025 40

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Point of no return

Why do nations fight? Land, honour, glory, God, revenge or grievances? You can give me a million excuses, but I will always posit that it is...

20.04.2025 40

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Rumours of American decline

12.04.2025 50

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Red alert!

04.04.2025 10

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Future loss

28.03.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Sociology of dissonance

22.03.2025 60

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Canary trap

15.03.2025 40

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Trump, Musk – and system latency

07.03.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Passive-aggressive World Order

01.03.2025 50

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Working into extinction?

22.02.2025 30

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Breaking news – theirs and ours

15.02.2025 30

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Happy are we now?

08.02.2025 70

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Deeply sought

31.01.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Trump 2 Pro Max

24.01.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Survival guide for the populist age

10.01.2025 20

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Grand national dialogue

A new year brings new hopes and fears. I must confess that since childhood, on every New Year's Eve, my pulse would quicken at midnight, and my...

03.01.2025 6

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The year of future invasion

This is the time for the yearender. 2024 should be remembered as the year when the future invaded our lives and when we were too busy to care or...

28.12.2024 8

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

What's eating populist billionaires?

Nobel laureate and celebrated economist Paul Krugman recently wrote his last column for The New York Times, concluding his 25 years of association...

20.12.2024 5

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Quantum leap into oblivion

America's counterculture seems to have run amok. And it manifests a unique case of cognitive dissonance. Arguably, you could say that this is what...

13.12.2024 6

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The rise of anti-corporate terror?

Crimes are usually not meant to be too farsighted. Yet some crimes, especially assassinations, serve as a warning for the coming times. The...

06.12.2024 5

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Luxury of time

Science fiction writers and Hollywood both know the art of reminding what could go wrong. But only pseudoscientists or at times alarmist scientists...

29.11.2024 10

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The panopticon of your own device

While we were learning about the Shariah compliance of virtual private networks (VPNs) and how a single typo can lead to a full-blown religious...

22.11.2024 10

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The shock doctrine's populist twist

The surrealism of the enforced populism seems to be hitting people just now. But we have known it to be a clear and present danger for a decade....

16.11.2024 4

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Schadenfreude industry

Cruelty is a complex emotion. It does not seem to come naturally to humans. A basic instinct may combine with another to momentarily produce it....

08.11.2024 3

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Intolerant perpetual motion machine

Last week, historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder spoke to CBC's Matt Galloway in Vancouver. The conversation available online is mostly...

02.11.2024 10

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The Overlook maze

The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 movie adaptation of the Stephen King novel, The Shining, has a maze. The purpose of this maze for the...

25.10.2024 3

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Teleological rationalisations

Karl Popper's readers know how critical he was of the idea of historicism. This scribe belongs to the same community. Any attempt to ascribe...

18.10.2024 4

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Democratic mass line

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," said John F Kennedy in his 1961 presidential inauguration...

12.10.2024 8

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Your oppression will not save you

Who are we without our identities, sense of self and social constructs? A brilliant TV series, Severance, offers an enthralling thought experiment....

04.10.2024 3

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

A thrown match

The media management team of the democratic ticket in the US elections cannot seem to catch a break. When President Biden was running for...

28.09.2024 30

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The house always wins

A regular casino goer readily attests to its overwhelming advantage over its customers. It is not easy to keep winning in a game. It is called the...

21.09.2024 10

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Why states fear complexity

Two features define our age. Acceleration. And complexity. Let's tackle acceleration first. Fifty-three years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote this in his...

14.09.2024 3

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Contaminated neoliberalism

We live in the age of great economic and political churning and tumult. A spectre seems to haunt South Asia - the spectre of instability. Our story...

07.09.2024 5

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Attention to detail

For a long time in my writing and journalism career, young people routinely contacted me, asking me for help getting published or finding exposure...

31.08.2024 4

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The unintelligible design

Are magic and espionage kindred arts? Former Deputy Director of the CIA John McLaughlin thinks as much. But do not take his word for it. Look at...

24.08.2024 4

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

A policy inconvenience

Policymakers around the world gravitate towards making one-size-fits-all policies. Through effective altruism, this approach has also found its way...

17.08.2024 3

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Bangladeshi whodunit

Bangladesh's simmering crisis and the ongoing transition have thrown many pundits off balance. This was to be expected. How often do you see such a...

09.08.2024 2

The Express Tribune

Farrukh Khan Pitafi