Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.

When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

I think that things were getting really very bad a couple of years ago, and there's been a very significant change in response to that on the part of the security forces and the government, but particularly the army. And you see Pakistan actually fighting terrorism and terrorists in a much more wholehearted way than had been occurring previously. It's not anywhere close to over yet, but you've seen a big change in the antiterrorism campaign here.

The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.

If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.