By Muhammad Munaeem Jamal | Karachi | Updated August 19, 2026 A few days ago, I read a comment on Pakistan’s political situation that made me stop. Raja Saad Khan argued that disturbing the present hybrid system could send the economy downhill and push Pakistan towards default. Sitting in Karachi, I found the implication more troubling than the prediction itself. What if Pakistan has built a political arrangement that has become too expensive to change? The question matters as debate grows around another constitutional amendment and the future shape of Pakistan’s federation. No published constitutional text currently proves that a 28th Amendment will permanently embed the existing hybrid order. I am examining something different: whether the direction of the political debate, combined with Pakistan’s economic dependence on continuity, could gradually turn an informal distribution of power into a harder constitutional structure. Pakistan escaped the immediate default fears th...
My international travel backup system after 60 combines two smartphones, multiple roaming SIMs and a paper notebook for essential information when travelling from Karachi. I was thinking about an older passenger at Jinnah International Airport when I watched a travel video about keeping essential information on paper. I know the scene well: passport in one hand, cabin bag hanging from the shoulder, spectacles coming on and off while somebody searches a phone for an address. The battery shows 12 percent. Suddenly, a small problem feels much larger. At my age, I see international travel differently from the way I saw it twenty years ago. A younger traveler can lose an hour at an airport, walk quickly between distant gates, fight with an eSIM and still treat the experience as an irritation. After 60, the same chain of small failures can become physically exhausting during a long journey from Karachi to Europe, Britain, Canada or the United States. I have reached a simple conclusio...