Here I was about to write of Karachi – the title floating in my mind “How Stalin would have resolved the situation”, standing up against a wall the entire Karachi administration and not a few of its political leaders – and here something has occurred in Chakwal to claim my flitting attention. I have been accused of various things in my time – heresy to personal failings, from homage to Bacchus to philandering (this last vastly exaggerated …often the quietest souls are the most successful in this field while those who strut about or thunder the most are like dogs whose bark is worse than their bite). During the last elections my embittered opponents, expecting a free run but not getting it, would buy entire pages of the local press to recount my personal failings, culled mostly from my own columns over the years. Which, in a way, was flattering. Who cares about yesterday’s columns? But my opponents, or their local hirelings, would go through them with an avi...