The Murder of a General by Generals

* Who're the two generals who killed V.S. Naipaul's brother-in-law Gen. Faisal Alvi?
* Why British journalist Carey Schofield is hiding names of the accused generals?

By Habib R. Sulemani

A criminal gang of serving generals of the Pakistan Army first humiliated and then allegedly killed a fellow general who wanted to expose the gang’s involvement in terrorism—secret deals with the Taliban.


The assassinated officer, Major-General Ameer Faisal Alvi (1954-2008) is said to be a unique general of the Pakistan Army who considered himself a professional soldier not a power-broker.

General Faisal Alvi was the brother-in-law of British writer Sir V. S. Naipaul who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Lady Nadira Naipaul, sister of General Alvi, was a glamorous journalist in Pakistan. Her column,Letter from Bahawalpur, used to appear in a daily English language newspaper of Lahore. However, she left the profession and country after her marriage to the Trinidad-born British writer in 1996.


General Faisal Alvi was a former chief of the Special Services Group (commonly known as SSG or commandos). He had joined the Pakistan Army in 1974 and was forcefully retired in 2005.

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It's said that General Kayani mysteriously kept silent as Dawn newspaperdubs him the silent soldier. When General Alvi didn't get any response from the Army Chief (General Kayani has not responded to my letter either for the last 15 months), he smelt threat to his life and gave a copy of the letter to a British journalist, Carey Schofield.

"It hasn’t worked, they’ll shoot me," General Alvi reportedly told Ms. Schofield.

The Pakistani General obviously trusted a British journalist than a local scribe in the militarized and Talibanized media of Pakistan. But General Alvi didn’t know that the self-styled independent journalist/writer (Ms. Schofield) would breach his trust—was it for the big bucks? Let's discuss it later. 

Anyway, on November 19, 2008, General Alivi along with his driver was shot dead in Rawalpindi. In a typical action, the authorities immediately blamed the Taliban and al-Qaeda for the assassination, and picked some former military-officials-turned-militants according to the written script—but later they were set free for “lack of evidence" as it happened in the assassination case of Minority Minister Shahbaz Bhatti recently.

The British government just paid lip service! Unfortunately, the literary circles, especially in the West, didn't take notice of this gruesome murder of a relative of a Nobel Laureate. May be thinking: a bloody civilian has no right to meddle in the affairs of a militarized Islamic country—it's the Murder of a General by Generals (I’ve no plans to write a novel with this title currently. Fromsolitary confinement, I can write blogs only).

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The Mission to Drug-Test William Shakespeare

Ujala Sehgal reports for The Atlantic:

Anthropologist Francis Thackeray, director of the Institute for Human Evolution in Johannesburg, South Africa has said he formally asked the Church of England to green light his exhumation of the Bard, Fox News reports. In part, Thackeray wants to determine the cause of Shakespeare's death. But that's not all -- him and his team are looking to resolve his own suggestion of over a decade ago that Shakespeare was an avid marijuana smoker. Thackeray had uncovered "suggestive evidence of cannabis" and "signs of what looks like cocaine" on clay pipes found in the garden of Shakespeare’s old house. His allegations of Shakespeare as a drug addict gave rise to "disbelief and anger" among Shakespeare's fans, and this could put the speculation to rest. "If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray said.

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2012 - The Revolution Has Begun

An excellent montage of key positive and negative energy manifestations on our planet right NOW. Visually powerful. Spiritually Inspiring. And great music too. Thank you Mrrockitman.

People & Power: The Indignant

Demonstrations, marches, rallies. For months now hundreds of thousands of Europeans have been expressing their anger at government imposed austerity measures. So what is driving them? And what do they hope to achieve?

Images from one month of protest at Syntagma Square in Athens:

And a musical score by a supporter:

The Story of the Story of O

From Guernica Magazine: 

The Story of O shocked readers worldwide with its sadomasochistic love affair written in a style “too direct, too cool, to be that of a woman.” Carmela Ciuraru examines the life of O's author.

Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos.

All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel Histoire d’O, the full truth was finally made public. Even then, some still considered it the most shocking book ever written. When the book came out, its purported author was “Pauline Réage,” widely believed to be a pseudonym. Although shocking for its graphic depictions of sadomasochism, the novel was admired for its reticent, even austere literary style. It went on to achieve worldwide success, selling millions of copies, and has never been out of print. This was no cheap potboiler. There was nothing clumsy, sloppy, or crude about it. Histoire d’O was awarded the distinguished Prix des Deux Magots, was adapted for film, and was translated into more than twenty languages.

Desclos (or, rather, Aury, as she became known in her early thirties) was obsessed with her married lover, Jean Paulhan. She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter.

Whips and chains and masks! Oh, my. When Histoire d’O appeared in France in the summer of 1954, it was so scandalous that obscenity charges (later dropped) were brought against its mysterious author. Even in the mid-twentieth century, in a European country decidedly less prudish than the United States, the book struck like a meteor. That the writer had evidently used a pen name provoked endless gossip in Parisian society. Speculation about the author’s identity became a favorite sport among the literati: was the author prominent, obscure, male, female, perverted, crazy? The authorial voice was too direct, too cool, to be that of a woman, some argued; others insisted that no man could have offered such a nuanced exploration of a woman’s psyche. One thing was certain: the person who wrote this novel had no shame.

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