Justice

You know, it's a good time to talk about education in Pakistan--especially with the op-ed in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff a couple of days ago that's been so much the talk of the Pakistani chatterosphere (online and off) since. But this morning, the talk of the town is a piece of news that the Chief Justice (not Iftikhar Chaudhry, the person currently occupying that office) used his influence to get his daughter's grades/marks in High School "improved", to give her a better shot at various things one wants to do after High School and which are based, in Pakistan, often even more on that performance than it is in other places. [I pretty much started my journalistic career with a piece about that process; back in ... oh, another lifetime.]

The second largest Muslim nation--and one that is more often in the news nowadays than the largest one--having someone in the streets besides bearded folks chanting pro-Taliban stuff has to be, on balance, a good image. If for no other reason than to make the point that a large, large part of the Muslim world lives, and wants to live by laws and constitutions and yearns for proper, healthy institutions of state.