Taken

When, last week, President Trump met eight Muslim leaders on the sidelines of the 80th UN General Assembly session, it was clear that something...

05.10.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Moral leadership

To a student of history growing up in Pakistan, France's outsized role on the world stage often felt like a historical enigma. Its permanent seat on...

27.09.2025 40

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Karma and do-overs

This week, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia forged a defence pact that redraws the region's security map, and it was triggered by a stunning miscalculation....

21.09.2025 50

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Edge of dusk

Charlie Kirk was thirty-one when he was shot and killed at a university campus in Utah. You can disagree with his worldview or legacy, but he never...

14.09.2025 30

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Shanghai by heart

We live in spite of history, not because of it. Nothing at birth can equip us for a past so full of suffering and in which we had no agency. When we...

07.09.2025 100

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Tariffied

Just when I thought I was out... they pulled me back in. Or, as they say, it is in the nature of bizarre things that you cannot look away. When I...

31.08.2025 50

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Modi's giant black box

India's Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, set himself on fire to distract media attention from Rahul Gandhi's protest campaign launch...

24.08.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

India's tipping point

It was a unique disruption. For a nation whose birth witnessed the displacement of 10-12 million on religious lines and the broad-day murder of 1- 2...

17.08.2025 60

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Fifty shades of saffron

Speaking to YouTuber Samdish Bhatia, Indian road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari made an illuminating statement on 15 December 2024....

10.08.2025 60

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The wish guru

India today is not ruled by a prime minister but by a wish guru. A leader fuelled less by policy than by image, less by competence than by dominance....

03.08.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

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...

26.07.2025 30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Rumours of American decline

12.04.2025 50

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Red alert!

04.04.2025 10

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Future loss

28.03.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Sociology of dissonance

22.03.2025 60

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Canary trap

15.03.2025 40

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Trump, Musk – and system latency

07.03.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Passive-aggressive World Order

01.03.2025 50

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Working into extinction?

22.02.2025 30

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Breaking news – theirs and ours

15.02.2025 30

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Happy are we now?

08.02.2025 70

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Deeply sought

31.01.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Trump 2 Pro Max

24.01.2025 20

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Survival guide for the populist age

10.01.2025 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories

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Taken

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Moral leadership

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Karma and do-overs

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Edge of dusk

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Shanghai by heart

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Tariffied

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Modi's giant black box

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

India's tipping point

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Fifty shades of saffron

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The wish guru

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Monsoon red wedding

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Hope.exe: critical error

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Cut it

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Cruel to be kind

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Order out of chaos

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Death wish or stress test?

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Optical delusions

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Apple of discord

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Stupidistan

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

The prompt theory

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

New normals

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Hallucinations

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Short fuse

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Conscious or unconscious?

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Point of no return

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Rumours of American decline

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Red alert!

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Future loss

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Sociology of dissonance

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Canary trap

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Trump, Musk – and system latency

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Passive-aggressive World Order

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Working into extinction?

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Breaking news – theirs and ours

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Happy are we now?

Farrukh Khan Pitafi

Deeply sought

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Trump 2 Pro Max

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Survival guide for the populist age

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Grand national dialogue