COMMENT The subject of renowned Indian journalist Mobashar Jawed Akbar's talk at the Royal Lake Club last Tuesday was Pakistan - not the territory of Rudyard Kipling's affectionate gaze in the novel ‘ Kim ', but the turbulent present-day polity concerning which Akbar had several coruscating observations to make.

Not least among these concerned the notion of an Islamic state and what that bodes for multi-confessional nations with Muslim majorities, an issue of no small import to Malaysians, poised as we are on the hinge of fate, to borrow from the title of one of Winston Churchill's books on the Second World War.

The fact that the talk came in the context of the launch of Akbar's latest book, ‘ Tinderbox, The Past and Future of Pakistan ', by Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, lent the occasion more than adventitious significance because the nation-founding issues he would have to deal with in the event he becomes prime minister, would not be unconnected to what Akbar said at the talk and mulls over in the book...