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What It’s Like to Fail
On Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.” It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children, and it was as happy a Christmas afternoon as I would ever have. Read More
SHAUKAT KHANUM KO BACHAYEN – JAVED CHAUDHRY شوکت خانم کو بچائیں
SOURCE: http://www.javed-chaudhry.com/shaukat-khanum-ko-bachayen-javed-chaudhry/#_
I transferred N-technology to two countries on Benazir’s orders: AQ Khan
ISLAMABAD: Benazir Bhutto had asked for the transfer of nuclear technology to two countries that she had named, said Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the renowned nuclear scientist who is regarded as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, in an interview with The News/ Jang. Responding to different questions, Dr A Q Khan said that the transfer of nuclear technology was not so easy that one could put it into his pocket and hand it over to another country. “At least 800 people are used to supervise the process. The-then prime minister Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto summoned me and named the two countries which were to be assisted and issued clear directions in this regard,” Khan said. “I was not independent but was bound to abide by the orders of the prime minister, hence I did take this step in compliance with her order. The prime minister would have certainly known about the role and cooperation of the two countries, mentioned by her, in our national interest,” he explained. Dr A Q Khan said that Nawaz Sharif, who now claims credit for the nuclear tests and tries to become a hero, was absolutely not ready to conduct the nuclear tests and did not want to do so because of the fear that the United States might be annoyed and his government might be threatened. He said through some of his aides, who were also his (Qadeer’s) friends, Nawaz Sharif tried to convince him to win international sympathy by staying silent in response to the Indian nuclear tests. “But I made it clear that if he did so, I shall put the facts before the media. After this, Mian Nawaz Sharif was compelled to conduct the nuclear tests,” he said. The noted nuclear scientist said the delay in the decision by Mian Nawaz Sharif had paved the way for international pressure on Pakistan. “Had he immediately decided to respond to India, there would have been no time to pressurise Pakistan whereas we had made it clear that we can conduct nuclear tests on a notice of half-an-hour.” Dr Khan said today some people were making efforts and even telling lies to claim credit for achieving nuclear capability but they were not being asked whether any country or personality had credited them with the development of the atomic bomb or accepted their status in this regard. In response to a question, Dr Khan said he had many expectations from Imran Khan but was disappointed after a few meetings with him, as his political thoughts were still immature and those pinning hopes on him would be let down. He opined that Imran Khan does cosmetics politics. As a resident of the area, Dr Khan has made the last sector of the federal capital, along the Margalla Hills and its beautiful road, respectable for the residents. The security measures in the surroundings have definitely created a little mystery but when the people are told that the father of the country’s nuclear bomb Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan lives here, a devotion to this environment also makes way into their hearts. Although, years have passed since he achieved the feat of making the motherland the first nuclear power of the Islamic world, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan is still the heartbeat of the living nation. His achievement is acknowledged not only in Pakistan but also throughout the world. All foreign dignitaries who met with Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan till 2000 mentioned him as a personality that made a great achievement for Pakistan and he earned immense acknowledgement and appreciation in the Muslim Ummah as the father of the nuclear bomb. About the drone attacks in the tribal areas, Dr Khan said these were being carried out with the consent of the political leadership and the military. “The political leadership is responsible for the drone attacks in the tribal areas while the military too cannot be absolved of the responsibility because it swears to protect the soil and frontiers of the country but it is not abiding by its oath by not stopping the drone attacks on the soil of the country,” he argued. “There is no need to order the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) in this regard. If we provide indigenously-developed shoulder-fired small missiles to tribesmen, they will shoot down the drone aircraft. This is wrong to say that drone planes cannot be downed,” he opined. Dr Khan, who is also known worldwide as AQ Khan, said that only poor and innocent citizens are being killed in attacks by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). He argued that if terrorists were being killed in these attacks, why were their bodies not being shown to the media? He said the United States would not withdraw from Afghanistan completely, but would maintain its real strength there. “The US agenda regarding Pakistan is very clear. It wants to divide Pakistan and wants to limit the country merely to the Punjab. The US wants to get a no-war pact signed with India after naming the Punjab as Pakistan whereas we should improve relations with and adopt a friendly attitude towards India, instead of signing a no-war pact with her,” Dr Khan said. Dr Khan said that Pakistan’s relations with India were heading in the right direction nowadays. He said Pakistan should promote friendly relations with India while sticking to its stance. He said he does not want to play a role in national politics but has launched the Tehrik Tahaffuz-e-Pakistan party to protect the country. He said he does not want to assume power, rather he wants to bring good and clean people in power. He said that President Asif Ali Zardari was even far ahead of General Ziaul Haq and had badly beaten Mian Nawaz Sharif in the political arena. He said a government, which has a democratic face and acts upon the dictates of the United States like the present government, is highly suitable to Washington. About the political situation in the country, Dr Khan said that whereas the government was definitely responsible for the present unrest, lawlessness and instability in the country, the opposition too was equally responsible for it. He was of the view that the political ineptness, lack of strategy and wrong decisions on the part of Mian Nawaz Sharif had a a major role in making President Asif Ali Zardari so strong. Nawaz cooperated with President Zardari under the Charter of Democracy of Benazir Bhutto he had signed in London. “He believed that the government of Asif Ali Zardari will last just a few months or a maximum two years and then he will be the only successor. Because of the same confidence and misunderstanding, he did not even get his share for extending cooperation and did not demand the offices of the prime minister, speakership of the National Assembly or the office of the Senate chairman,” he opined. Dr Khan said Nawaz Sharif started waiting for the fall of Asif Ali Zardari-led government after getting power in the Punjab only whereas he should have formed the government with the PML-Q and MQM and parliamentarians from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Maulana Fazlur Rahman would have automatically joined him. But, he said, the PML-N chief weakened himself and strengthened Asif Ali Zardari by displaying a lack of political wisdom. Regarding the general elections, Dr Khan said the stance of the Supreme Court that it had closed all doors for the army to come into power was meaningless because if the army wants, it can assume power and then it could also create a justification for assuming power and constitutional protections. If the army wants, he added, it could also hold elections on scheduled time. “When the aircraft of General Ziaul Haq had met an accident, the chief of the army of the time had decided to hold elections in the country without delay of even a moment. He reached Islamabad from Bahawalpur and decided to make Ghulam Ishaq Khan president of the country and directed the chief election commissioner of the time, Justice (retd) Nusrat Mirza, by summoning him to the Army House the same night to make preparations for holding elections in the country,” Dr A Q Khan recalled. “Some quarters had advised him to put off the elections, saying that in this way Benazir Bhutto may come into power. On this, Aslam Beg said that if the people wanted the rule of a woman in the country, then who we are to stop them,” he added. Dr Khan said General (retd) Pervez Musharraf presented him before the masses as a criminal to turn him from hero to zero to please the United States. He said the military ruler sent Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and S M Zafar, who took him to Musharraf. He said Musharraf told him that the United States wanted to clamp sanctions on Pakistan’s nuclear programme and for the purpose, she was making a justification of the alleged involvement of the Pakistan government in nuclear proliferation and she could get Pakistan declared a terrorist state by raising the issue in the UN Security Council. “General (retd) Pervez Musharraf paid me glowing tributes, lauded my services for the nuclear programme and requested me that if you accept the responsibility of nuclear proliferation as a personal act, our nuclear programme may be saved and I did the same. But in fact Musharraf wanted to please the United States for prolonging his rule and the same happened,” he said. Dr A Q Khan said the nuclear programme of the country was currently 100 percent safe, but if any dictator assumed power tomorrow, nothing could be said about the safety of the nuclear programme.
SOURCE: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-13-17471-I-transferred-N-technology-to-two-countries-on-Benazirs-orders-AQ-Khan Visit me on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ameerahmadmirza
Ahmadiyya khalifa writes to Israeli PM
A spicy menage …
A spicy menage a trois: The shocking love triangle between Lord Mountbatten, his wife and the founder of modern India
‘At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’
Those powerful words, memorable to everyone who loves India, were uttered by the father of the modern nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, when the country became independent more than 60 years ago.
Behind this famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech lay a deeply personal fight to escape the domination of the British Raj, a struggle all the more meaningful because of Nehru’s private life.
Special relationship: Lord and Lady Mountbatten with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
For the handsome widower had formed a more than usually deep bond with, of all people, the beautiful wife of the chief representative of the occupying power, Edwina, Lady Mountbatten.
If you came across their romance in a novel, you would dismiss it instantly as fiction.
But the fact is the couple shared an extraordinary love. Their deep attachment lasted from the moment they met in 1947 in New Delhi until the day Edwina died 13 years later.
It was such a meaningful relationship that even Lord Mountbatten himself found it best to turn a blind eye.
Perhaps he even encouraged it, so that he could benefit from any insight into the Indian mind that his wife could pass him at this pivotal time in their history.
This fascinating personal intrigue was to have been the basis of a new film, Indian Summer, starring Hugh Grant and Cate Blanchett as Lord and Lady Mountbatten.
As for the handsome Nehru, rumour has it he was to be played by Irrfan Khan, star of the hugely successful Slumdog Millionaire.
But so concerned are the Indian government to protect their favourite statesman’s reputation that, after nine months of costly pre-production in Delhi, filming has been dramatically ordered to cease.
Indian politicians have demanded to see the script to know just how explicitly the relationship will be portrayed.
Hitherto, those who know the truth about the relationship between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten (including Mountbatten’s two daughters) have always insisted the couple never consummated their great love, and that it was more spiritual than physical.
But what is the real story? Certainly, there are aspects of Lady Mountbatten’s early life that will shock India’s ruling elite, who even today do not allow their Bollywood stars to kiss on screen.
The spoiled favourite granddaughter of a Jewish financier close to the royals, Edwina Ashley was the richest and most glamorous deb of her time.
In 1922, she married the handsome, though impoverished, 21-year- old Lord Louis Mountbatten. Known in the family as ‘Dickie’, he is nowadays best remembered as Prince Charles’s great-uncle and mentor, tragically killed by an IRA bomb in 1979.
Ostensibly it was the perfect match, but the sexually inexperienced couple had little in common.
Perfect match? Lord Mountbatten and Edwina Mountbatten were married in 1922 but had little in common
After a fumbling honeymoon, some of it spent in Hollywood, Mountbatten resumed his career as a naval officer.
Meanwhile, the stylish Edwina, described as one of the six best- dressed women in the world, shopped at Chanel, played bridge, and danced the Charleston until 3am, sometimes with Fred Astaire.
At weekends, their country home was full of guests (including the Prince of Wales) arriving in fast cars and even aeroplanes.
Vain, charming and boyish, Dickie was devoted to Edwina, but still awkward in bed. He famously named her breasts Mutt and Jeff – the nicknames that World War I soldiers gave their campaign medals.
To him, sex was unromantic, ‘a mixture of psychology and hydraulics’. There were also mutterings that he preferred men.
Things went downhill after their daughter Patricia was born in 1924.
While Mountbatten doted on the new arrival, the passionate Edwina was pathologically jealous of her own child being the centre of attention.
‘A divine little daughter. Too thrilling, too sweet,’ she trilled to her diary – but then packed the baby off to nannies on the South Coast. The highly sexed Edwina then proceeded to look for lovers from all walks of life.
Her first was the aristocratic Lord Molyneux. He was followed by a rich, polo-playing American, Laddie Sandford, and then by Mike Wardell, the good-looking manager of a London evening newspaper. At times, she juggled all three at once.
‘Lord Molyneux is in the morning-room and Mr Sandford in the library, but where should I put the other gentleman?’ asked a desperate flunkey when they happened to visit together.
While her husband was posted to Malta in the early Thirties, she turned to American golf champion Bobby Sweeny.
Next came playboy Larry Gray, before she went on a Mexican cruise and jumped into bed with the elder of two Californian brothers, Ted Phillips, quickly followed by his sibling Bunny.
This serial sexual gallivanting went on until the birth of her second daughter Pamela in 1929.
By now, Mountbatten, too, was seeking other women. In 1931, he was flirting with the 18-year-old future Duchess of Argyll and even kept her photo in his cabin.
‘The only photo of any girl!’ he wrote to her. Later, there was Barbara Cartland and the Frenchwoman Yola Letellier, on whom Colette based her novel Gigi. Edwina was fiercely jealous, but she didn’t think to change her own habits.
Throughout the Thirties, she had dozens of admirers, known in the private slang of the Mountbatten circle as ‘ginks’.
As Mountbatten himself once put it: ‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.’
She even dallied with conductor Malcolm Sargent, and then embarked on her most adventurous affair to date, with the bisexual West Indian cabaret pianist Leslie Hutchinson.
Forbidden love: Edwina and Nehru in the Moghul Gardens of the Viceroy house during celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the Republic of India in 1960
Although Edwina successfully sued a newspaper for saying she had a black lover, there is not much doubt she conducted an on-off relationship with ‘Hutch’ for 30 years.
She famously gave him a gold bracelet bearing her name, a gold cigarette case and, conclusively perhaps, a jewelled penis sheath from Cartier.
This sexual track record seems like an unlikely apprenticeship for a woman to become the great love of the socialist founder of modern India.
But Edwina, the social butterfly, also had a strong streak of idealism. Never one for empty titles, she seems to have climbed in and out of bed looking for a cause.
With the onset of World War II, her tireless work in the bombed- out East End was followed by a spell in South-East Asia repatriating British refugees from prison camps and hospitals.
Not for nothing did the blood of her great-great-grandfather, the distinguished 19th-century reformer Lord Shaftesbury, run in her veins.
Mountbatten’s war service culminated, of course, in the recapture of Burma from the Japanese.
Indeed, both had such a successful war that in 1947 they were posted by the new Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee to Delhi, as the last Viceroy and Vicereine of India to facilitate the smooth transition of power to Nehru, the country’s nationalist leader.
While the young Edwina had been playing the field, the patrician Nehru had been working hard for his country.
Born in 1889, son of a leading lawyer, he came from a rich and influential family with distinctly Anglicised tastes in clothes and culture.
The boys were educated in England and the girls had English governesses who gave the children English names. Jawaharlal became ‘Joe’, his sisters ‘Nan’ and ‘Betty’. After Harrow and Cambridge, Jawaharlal was called to the Bar in London, but he soon returned to India.
In 1916, he had married the high-born Kamala, riding to his Maharajah-style wedding in Delhi on a white horse.
But he had already come under the spell of the charismatic Gandhi, at the time a failed lawyer who, having been shabbily treated in British-owned South Africa, returned to his own country fired up against social injustice and determined to free it from foreign domination.
Nehru sympathised with Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy. At home, meanwhile, his frail wife started her own radical crusade to improve women’s rights.
Interestingly, the Nehru marriage somewhat mirrored that of the Mountbattens. In her 30s Kamala developed into an irresistibly attractive woman who was always surrounded by infatuated young men, including Feroze Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma), the future husband of her daughter, Indira, who would of course later became the country’s fiery leader.
Many people are convinced Kamala and Feroze conducted a long and satisfying affair.
However, Kamala died at a young age of tuberculosis in 1936. And though Nehru had also had affairs, he never remarried. His only love now was his country – until he met Edwina Mountbatten.
It wasn’t Edwina’s first visit to India – she had engineered an invitation to the Viceregal Lodge before her marriage in hot pursuit of Mountbatten, who was also staying there.
Neither was it the first time she had met Nehru. She and Dickie had warmed to the man, whose aquiline features resembled Mountbatten’s own, in Singapore in 1946.
Deep attachment: Those close to the couple insisted they never consummated their great love, and that it was more spiritual than physical
Now, with Nehru’s mission to liberate his country at a time when war-weary Britain was desperate to get rid of it, the 47-year-old Edwina finally had a focus for her huge energy and political radicalism. Of course, British withdrawal did not go as smoothly as everyone hoped.
Mass migration and massacres followed as Indians fought for territory with the new Pakistan.
In this sensitive climate, Edwina put herself at great personal risk as she and Nehru tried to stop the looting and mob violence.
Working alongside him in hospitals and refugee camps, she was fearless. At one Muslim refugee camp, she found a gang of Hindus and Sikhs trying to set it on fire and kill the inmates.
Edwina stood in front of the crowd as calmly as though she were at a garden party, threatening to have her guards shoot the agitators. Improbably they backed off in the face of her natural authority.
After independence, the Indophile Mountbattens made many visits to the country, and Edwina spent more and more time with the new prime minister Nehru.
This is the point at which her younger daughter Pamela, the biographer in the family, acknowledges that love blossomed between the lonely Nehru and the Vicereine.
What’s more, says Pamela, her father condoned the friendship, even going so far as to call it a ‘happy threesome’.
‘My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru,’ she has written.
As Mountbatten himself wrote to her sister Patricia at the time: ‘She and Jawaharlal (Nehru) are so sweet together, they really dote on each other.’
Undignifed as it seems against the backdrop of the huge historic events in which they were caught up, there are those who suspect that Nehru, like both Mountbattens, had bisexual tendencies, and that Dickie, in a last attempt to establish physical intimacy with his unresponsive wife, may have joined them in a physical menage a trois.
Whatever went on in the bedroom, the Mountbattens joined Nehru in a very public romance with India.
This, though, didn’t go down well back in Britain, where disapproval came to a head after Gandhi was assassinated in 1948.
Seeing a newspaper photo of the grieving Viceregal couple squatting on the ground at Gandhi’s cremation, Churchill angrily concluded that they had gone native, disgracing themselves as royal representatives. When they returned home, the old war hero refused to shake Mountbatten’s hand.
The unconventional Lady Mountbatten, however, rose above all this. She visited Nehru every year and he (her soulmate) visited her in England, where his sister became High Commissioner.
When parted, they wrote to each other constantly – and Edwina made no attempt to keep the letters secret from her husband.
As she wrote to Dickie in 1952: ‘Some of them have no “personal” remarks at all. Others are love letters… though you yourself well realise the strange relationship – most of it spiritual – which exists between us.’
When the correspondence is eventually published in its entirety, perhaps we may know the whole truth.
Meanwhile, one of Nehru’s own last letters, written ten years after their first meeting, sheds a little more light. ‘Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you also did) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another.
‘I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery. We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other’s eyes without fear or embarrassment.’
Intense words, yet Nehru was now 68, his romantic friend ten years younger.
No longer in the first flush of youth, perhaps there was no great urgency to climb into bed.
Little did they realise how little time was left. A year later, in 1960, 58-year- old Edwina, by now leading a selfless life, died alone in her sleep while on a trip to Borneo on behalf of St John Ambulance Brigade. Beside her bed was her collection of Nehru’s letters.
And the love affair was not over yet. As her body was taken by the Royal Navy to its sea burial off Britain’s south coast, Prime Minister Nehru made his last and most public declaration of his devotion, sending his own Indian Navy frigate to cast a wreath into the waters on his behalf.
Such a dramatic farewell would make a stirring finale to any film. But as the director Joe Wright, who was behind the scheduled movie says, it will be a long time before it gets made, thanks to the explosive mixture of politics and forbidden love.
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Imran khan’s latest Interview, explaining his policy stand
Inspiration of Imran Khan
Inspiration of Imran Khan
Terrorism alert: ‘Punjab is home to banned organisations’
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By Rana Tanveer
LAHORE: The city witnessed two explosions in 2011 which left 13 people dead and 112 injured. More than 250 were killed in 18 terrorist activities in 2010. In the first incident, on January 25, at Ghora Chowk, Urdu Bazar, a suicide bomber killed 10 people and injured 85. The second incident, on February 3, a bombing, killed three people and injured 27 near Haider Sayeen shrine. Shahbaz Taseer, son of late Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer and US citizen Warren Weinstein were kidnapped for ransom during the year. Shahbaz was abducted from Gulberg on August 27, while Weinstein was picked up from his Model Town residence. Security officials have claimed that Al Qaeda operatives are behind both abductions. The police have still no clue to the whereabouts of Amir Aftab Malik, son-in-law of Gen (retd) Tariq Majeed, who was kidnapped at gunpoint on August 25, 2010. Some defence analysts hold the view that the operations in Tribal Areas have effected the network of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which had resulted in a lull in incidents of terrorism. They say there is no evidence to conclude that the terrorists have changed their policy permanently. Prof Hasan Askari Rizvi said overall incidents of terrorism had decreased but noted that some high profile attacks had occurred. He said the reduction was due to the operations being conducted in Tribal Areas. Rizvi added that TTP apparently lacked training facilities as many suicide attackers had been arrested last year. He said recruitment of suicide bombers had likely been denied by the operations in Tribal Areas. Rizvi said Aiman al Zawahri had claimed to be behind the kidnapping of Weinstein. He said it was evident that Al Qaeda and TTP were involved in these high profile kidnappings. Rizvi noted that last year several banned organisations, like Sipah-i-Sahaba and Jamatud Dawa, were allowed to continue their activities. He said although these organisations were limited to the Punjab they could surprise and harm to the security establishment, which currently is patronising them. He said because the Punjab was relatively more conservative and had more of an ‘anti-India’ element than other provinces, these banned organisations had settled here. He said intelligence agencies were using these organisations to put pressure on the US and the Pakistani government against drone attacks and granting Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India. He said these organisations were also opposed to the military for its role in the war on terror. A Counter Terrorism Department police officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Express Tribune that terrorists had suspended operations in the settled areas. He said it was evident from intelligence reports that many TTP leaders and operatives were alive and in regular contact. He said even Lahore was not free of TTP operatives.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 30th, 2011.
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Pakistan bans zakat, fitrana collection by militants
By Zia Ur Rehman
KARACHI – The Pakistani government has imposed a nationwide ban on collection of zakat and fitrana donations of food aid by banned outfits during Ramadan, Rehman Malik, senior advisor to Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf on interior affairs, said.
“Any social and welfare organisation willing to collect zakat and fitrana has to apply and acquire permission from the government; otherwise, no one will be allowed to indulge in these activities,” Malik said July 22.
“Directives have been issued to police and law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on fund-raising activities of banned militant outfits during Ramadan,” he said.
Banned extremist groups pose as charities to rake in millions of rupees that fund terrorism instead of helping the poor, charity activists say.
HNisar’s Most Personal Interview Secrets got Opened.
Hassan Nisar Opening his heart and giving glimpse of his personality for the first time. Hassan Nisar gets really emotional specially in last 15 minutes of interview.
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