White Lies

0
184

Mian sb got some good advice despite the sombre backdrop of the APC in Peshawar. His old information minister Mushahid Hussain was there, and the prime minister’s long face did not escape him. Where’s the fire in the belly gone, he asked the prime minister, who typically tried to smile it away. Then Mushahid offered some Nike advice, that the PM should ‘just do it’ to escape his worries. And he seemed to do just that as the PTI delegation walked in, meeting Imran Khan and Shah Mahmood quite warmly. But the chill returned with Jahangir Tareen, apparently. Perhaps the cold shoulder implied that the PM still holds him responsible for his PTI troubles, as the man with the line with the boys that matter?

*****

There’s this new entrepreneurial venture in Karachi that’s all the rage. They are Princely Jets, and they give the city’s who’s who a heli tour of the metropolis at $250 per head. So they invited some journos for the maiden flight; nothing like good press to launch a business, quite literally in this case. All was well till the ASF had a problem. They wouldn’t let the cameras go along, for security purposes, of course. If you’ll give anybody with a smart phone the opportunity to snap away at our sensitive locations, where would we be, with the terror war and all? And the security boys wouldn’t brush up on Google Earth, etc, even if it hit them in the face. It took a different kind of enlightenment – a call from the PM’s aviation advisor Shujaat Azeem – for them to give clearance.