Breakfast leads to better food choices

By Ayesha Khan There is a particular grief in watching something die slowly, in full public view, while those paid to save it look away. That is the grief I carry every time I drive along the foothills of Islamabad and see, a little further each year, where the green line ends and the concrete begins. An old forester once told me the Margallas are the lungs of the capital. Lungs don’t fail all at once. They fail breath by breath. We are now deep into the final breaths of the Margalla Hills National Park (MHNP).  “Yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazeeda sehar; Woh intezar tha jis ka, yeh woh sahar toh Nahin”  (Faiz) The numbers alone should stop us. Margalla Hills park spans 17,386 hectares. It is one of the largest national parks embedded within any capital city on earth. It is home to leopards that returned from near extinction to 38 species of mammals, to hundreds of bird species, and to a watershed that quietly feeds the city’s water supply. This canopy is not scenery. It is infrastructure. Every mature tree pulls carbon dioxide from Islamabad’s air, cools the capital against the heat-island effect that chokes cities like Lahore and Karachi, and generates the oxygen that lets Islamabad breathe more easily. This is not sentiment. This is measurable ecological service, and it is being dismantled in front of us. Year after year, the same pattern repeats. A road is widened. A restaurant is licensed. A “temporary” structure becomes permanent. Watchdog surveys confirm what our eyes already suspected. Between 2022 and 2024 alone, grass-covered area in the park fell from 38.47 percent to 31.90 percent. More than 180 illegal structures now sit inside boundaries that were meant to be inviolable. In April 2026, climate experts warned that development creeping into the park’s sensitive foothill zones poses “potentially irreversible risks” — habitat fragmentation, blocked wildlife corridors, a slow strangulation of an ecosystem centuries in the making. Every week, more than 17,000 trekkers and casual sightseers pour onto trails built for a fraction of that number, leaving behind mountains of waste. Add to this the wildfires — the most recent devastating blaze swept through in May 2026 — and you have a park being eroded from every direction at once: fire above, concrete below, waste in between. The law is clear. The Islamabad Wildlife Ordinance of 1979 exists for precisely this purpose. Pakistan is bound under the Convention on Biological Diversity to conserve representative ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss within protected areas, and MHNP is exactly the kind of site that convention exists to protect. Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, converting a carbon-sequestering forest into concrete runs directly against our own climate commitments. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion declaring that States carry a binding legal duty to prevent significant environmental harm and to protect the right to a clean, healthy environment. And yet Pakistan continues to draw down international climate finance — from the Green Climate Fund, from the National Disaster Risk Management Fund — under the promise of resilience, adaptation, and protection of exactly these ecosystems. Can we, in good conscience, say the money has bought the forest a single healthy season? Where are the audits — real, independent, published audits — of how this money is spent, by whom, and with what oversight and outcomes? The harder truth is that this is not a failure of one institution. It is a failure of collective responsibility. It is the quiet collusion of convenience between government approvals, private commercial interests, and institutions across the public and civil society space that choose silence over confrontation. A report is launched. A file is moved. A license is issued. No one says no, because saying no is costly. Inquiries appear and then vanish into silence, with no public finding and no accountability. Individuals questioned for past performance now chair the very funds entrusted with Pakistan’s climate resilience money. Days ago, the Interior Minister stood before an economic summit and declared that Pakistan’s governance system “has collapsed,” calling for new administrative units to fix what decades of the old order could not. The DG ISPR, more cautiously, agreed that governance “cannot remain static.” I fear that new provinces built on the same unreformed bureaucracy will only multiply the disease. The Margalla Hills are the proof sitting in plain sight, a few kilometers from where that statement was made. We do not lack laws. We do not lack international obligations. We do not lack funding. We lack the will to enforce any of it. I am a born environmentalist and a development economist by training. I have spent years promoting technology and transparency as the most viable tools for recovery and rehabilitation. Let the Capital Development Authority’s every land-use decision on these hills be published, timestamped, and open to public challenge before a single tree falls. Let every rupee of climate finance be tracked to the meter of forest it was meant to save. Let every public and private sector institution mandated to protect our environment report annually and in public on the state of the Margallas. Until such a day, I will not be mourning alone on these trails, watching the tree line recede a little further each year. Our future generations will stand and mourn too, maybe not with my quiet grief but with a violent grief at their barren future, wondering how their elders could allow their future to die a slow death from the accumulated cowardice of everyone who could have stopped it but chose convenience instead.

Since Ashura, the mothers of Sindh have been sitting in at Babarloi Bypass through suffocating heat and humidity, with one demand: return our missing and abducted children. For a mother, a child is her entire universe — and for years these women have lived in psychological anguish searching for theirs. Fazila Sarki of Thul vanished nearly seventeen years ago; her father named the local Wadero he says orchestrated it, yet she was never recovered. Priya Kumari of Sangrar is entering her fifth year missing — committees formed, updates promised, and still nothing, as if the earth or sky simply swallowed her. Sindh’s landlords and chieftains have built a parallel state, one that operates above the law. If not, why would fourteen children currently be missing, why would the soil be stained with young blood over trifles, why would mothers go blind from weeping and cemeteries keep expanding? Innocent young women are still declared Kari and honor-killed — denied even a ritual bath, shroud, or funeral prayer, sometimes dumped in rivers. The law exists on paper; hundreds of thousands of officials draw salaries and perks from public taxes to enforce it — yet ordinary people have no protection at any level. The papers are full of these stories daily. The law exists, but it is locked away in books. Are the hands meant to enforce it helpless, or simply indifferent? Sukkur Civil Hospital — the teaching hospital for Ghulam Muhammad Mahar Medical College, and once a lifeline stretching from Balochistan’s Sibi, Nasirabad, and Bhag Nari to Kandhkot-Kashmore, Shikarpur, and Ghotki — has sunk to the level of Shikarpur’s Rai Bahadur Udhodas Hospital. Department heads sit in name only; real control rests with a handful of favorites who have run these institutions into the ground. Road accidents are a daily occurrence on the highways, and while the Orthopaedic Department stays busy, its facilities inspire only regret. With Nasir Shah and veteran politician Khurshid Shah both present, this hospital ought to be a model for Northern Sindh — instead it is anything but. Law and order, and justice, are the pillars any civilized society rests on. Where they hold, life, property, and honor are protected, and social harmony follows. Where they fail, fear, distrust, and unrest take their place — and our own society is proof enough of that; little more needs saying. An educated person lifts not just himself but his society; where ignorance and social ills grow instead, it is education that has failed first. Healthcare here tells the same story: women give birth in Qingqi rickshaws, medicine is scarce, and families buy even a disposable syringe out of pocket — though the budget for it exists. Doctors draw government salaries while absent, some working in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, others running private clinics. A friend recently told me PPHI, on taking over a government health unit, found a stockpile of medicines for heart disease, diabetes, and stomach ailments — worth a fortune, and only months from expiry. What tyranny is greater than this: medicine sitting unused while the needy go without? It is nothing short of an atrocity against the public. Hunger, disease, unemployment, lawlessness, and ignorance have battered Sindh until its people’s capacity for critical thought is paralyzed. The state, along with conscious citizens, politicians, and the well-off, must turn to this crisis — urgently.

By Hamza Aman As people of an unprecedented era, we often pride ourselves on the immense progress that has been furthered in various frontiers; be it state-of-the-art technology, sophistication in medicine, ground-breaking research in natural sciences or advancement in ideals like democracy, free speech and human rights. Our age has truly witnessed the remarkable realisation of human potential, enabling us to navigate and progress in uncharted terrains. But as the adage goes, ‘there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’. This development came at an exorbitant cost. Modernity swiftly and discreetly robbed us of the most beautiful and human of experiences—love. A look into the annals of history suggests that love, especially in its romantic form, has never just remained an emotion. It has been a powerful unifying force that breathed meaning into life by offering to look beyond primitive human tendencies. The transcendence of social mores, as embodied in various celebrated stories, laid down a powerful moral framework of rising above oneself and praised classical themes of romanticism like selflessness, chivalry, and individual uniqueness. In philosophy, this notion of seeing people as ends in themselves was echoed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Rejecting instrumentalism, he argued every human was possessed of inherent worth, distinct value, and dignity. And they must be treated as such. However, these notions began to change in postmodern society—drastically. A plethora of factors contributed to it. Postmodern society was marked by the withering of traditional anchors like family, marriage, and community, while rapid change and the steep rise of consumer culture completely changed how we viewed love and romance . Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman employs the term ‘liquid love’ to describe this change. He argued that modern relationships had become synonymous with shopping, wherein people saw their partners as products, browsing options, comparing, and checking them out. And because that kind of relationship is based on a consumerist approach, when the initial novelty fades away, it is easy to just exit. Furthermore, in an ever-changing world, individuals fear commitment and deliberately maintain fragile bonds that can be easily discarded when inconvenient. This is exacerbated by the extreme uncertainty that characterises the culture. As everything remains in constant flux and people go through changes in job, identity or preferences, bonds remain light and flexible. The result is a hindrance in building long-term relations whose bedrock is trust, commitment, and love, as everyone becomes disposable and replaceable. Moreover, people have formed a distorted perception of love, viewing it as something that magically happens and never fades away. This is not true and only leads to disenchantment in the long term. As the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argues, love is an art that demands patience, discipline, and effort to cultivate. It needs constant nourishment. And true love can only flourish when it springs from abundance where you zoom in on ‘giving’ rather than ‘taking’. This kind of love not only enriches but also helps in building sound and enduring connections based on care, respect, and responsibility. Capitalist culture, however, perpetuates this need of being lovable rather than being on the giving side of the spectrum. It encourages us to market and commodify ourselves, to look good, possess status and wealth and/or cultivate certain personality traits. Thus, the culture stands in stark contrast to what is genuinely needed in fostering meaningful relationships. People have for centuries grasped the power and potential of this elusive emotion that we call love; but it went through radical change in the past few centuries. If we desire to truly develop and realise it, we need to abandon the consumerist tendencies that have become entrenched in our society. We need to give up seeing individuals as commodities or products and rather view them in a different light—as unique and irreplaceable beings with inherent worth that deserve love. Amidst chaos and change, what we need is stillness that is built on values like commitment, trust and responsibility. And finally, we, as a people, should celebrate love as a meaningful art that requires skills, refined through patience. Only then can we realise its actual potential, and its tremendous power, where it ultimately transforms into a symbol of rebellion in the face of alienation and meaninglessness.   Bio: Hamza Aman is a Political Science student at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) with a keen interest in philosophy.