As anticipated, the political masters of Pakistan have finally directed its national cricket team to lift the boycott and play India on 15 February, 2026, as scheduled in Colombo . The Masters must've thought the money at stake is too lucrative to continue indulging in such kind of grumpy politics. Of course, they had imposed some pre-conditions that included making the 'handshake' a mandatory protocol, but the ICC looked the other way. So, the PCB takes it as protecting the 'spirit of cricket'. The Indian cricket board , the sponsors, the TV channels and millions of fans who do not necessarily mix patriotism with sports, if it's cricket in particular, must be deliriously ecstatic that all the revenues and hype and excitement shall be there for harvest thr oughout the ICC Men's T20 World Cup-2026 , co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka . Most of the Indians fans must also be ecstatic to have their heroes go on vanquishing the enemy neighbor and humiliating t...
We’ve been very much used to lament ‘all the taxpayers’ money’ whenever we come across some embezzlement of public funds or plain acts of bribery and corruption. In this piece we’ve decided to confront a new but emerging phenomenon as should be clear from the title given. That day during a writer-authors’ conference one author made a disturbing observation on or perhaps lamented that ‘nowadays the number of authors has exceeded the number of readers’! That observation instantly found a sympathetic supporter in none other than this writer; because I’d dwelt on this post-modern phenomenon quite often and I’d even extended this realization to ‘there are more singers than listeners nowadays’ and of that kind. However, I don’t intend to analyze the nitty-gritty of such phenomena here apart from just saying that such brazenly emerging facts of life have been owed entirely to the social media and all digital formats that convinced a huge chunk of the users that they could indeed write and ca...