It’s got 16 basketball courts, a Cybex fitness center, a chess club, a motorcycle club, aerobics classes, recovery meetings for alcoholics, financial planning seminars, a coffeepot that dispenses 5,000 cups an hour, and 403 toilets. That’s right, it’s ...
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
Looking For Something To Praise
From April 13 to May 4 I stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. The hotel is as ugly as a bunker, with unpainted cement as an exterior, and it feels like a bunker, too, because there’s no shortage of security around its perimeter. Private guards, police, paramilitary. Business was getting ...
The Best Drug
Are placebos more powerful than drugs? Today’s Washington Post looks into the medication of America:
“After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression: antidepressants ...
No Corrections Needed
On the flight back to New York from Karachi, I continued reading Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” and I continue to be awed by it. Franzen can write and think, treating you to style wrapped around ideas. Reading his book is akin ...
A Sufi Sensation
For a dose of sensory overload, Karachi style, a visit to the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi is highly recommended. I stopped by it the other night and felt pity for the photographer who was with me; there was no way a picture could absorb and express its beauty and chaos. (I also realized that words ...
A Night At McDonald’s
I am travelling with my digital camera, a Leica, but I tend to leave it in my hotel room on most outings; I’m not in Karachi to take pictures, and the presence of a camera can get in the way of things. But I shouldn’t ...
Calling Karl Rove
What do you do if the crowd at your rally is hoisting placards that bear the likeness of a political leader other than yourself? If you are General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, you ignore the pictures of Altaf Hussain, an exiled ...
A City On The Move
Things you see on the streets of Karachi: a motorcycle with five people on board (a father driving, a child in his lap, a child behind him, wife behind the child, riding side-saddle, holding a baby); donkey pulling a cart laden with 30-foot steel girders; motorized rickshaw with six or seven schoolkids ...
The Catwalks Of Karachi
Last night I attended a fashion show, and a few nights earlier I attended a fashion show. That’s two more fashion shows than I’ve attended in America, or anywhere. The shows took place by an outdoor pool at a luxury hotel in the center of Karachi, and they seemed the real thing (Fashion ...
Why Pakistani Newspapers Are More Enjoyable Than The New York Times
The News is a leading Pakistani daily, in English, and today it had a scoop—an exclusive interview with President General (that’s his title) Pervez Musharraf. The story, under a headline that stretched across seven columns, included the following passage: “In a 90-minute wide-ranging ...