I think that right now, the global political crisis that we see all over the place has to do with virulent nostalgia. Everywhere, people are talking about taking us back to the good old days. Whether that's the "caliphate," or Britain before the EU, or "Make America Great Again." But, we can't go back and many people wouldn't want to go back even if we could.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

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 we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.