* Another week goes by and the optics keep getting worse and worse for Donald Trump.  More and more women are coming out of the woodwork.  As it turns out, Mr. Trump was quite a randy fellow back in the days.  I think the third and final debate between him and Clinton is just a formality.  The writing is on the wall, and I also think that he knows that there is a sense of inevitability about him losing this election in a landslide.

* In 1975 when the then prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency in the country, she wanted a ''committed bureaucracy and judiciary'' and she duly got it.  And we all know how things have panned out since then.  In 2016 the present Union Government without overtly saying so, expects ''committed journalists'', whatever that means!  During the emergency, press was asked to bend, but it was (with few exceptions) willing to crawl.  In today's technological age of visual media, even though we don't have a national emergency, the news channels are perfectly happy to crawl and be more loyal than the King.

* Meanwhile, I've been watching season 4 of 'Masters of Sex'.  This season is even better than the previous ones.  In terms of tonality and aesthetics the show borrows quite a lot from ‘Mad Men’.

Like artists from any other countries, Pakistani artists are just that.  And like any professionals, they will go where there is opportunity and appreciation for their talent.  As it happens, India seems to be their number one choice for obvious reasons.  I am frankly disgusted by this jingoistic frenzy against allowing actors or anybody from the civil society from across the border from working in India.  These people are not the representative of their government or their army.  They are thinking people in their own right.  Any creative or business person coming to India from Pakistan in not the proxy for terror infrastructure in that country.  If you have to take on Pakistan at the military, diplomatic and political level, please do that in all your wisdom, but don’t be so petty minded as to go after soft targets like actors, musicians and writers.  As a country, we have to establish ourselves in direct opposition to everything that Pakistan stands for, by which I mean Indian people and the media, have to be more confident and less paranoid, more open and liberal and less intolerant.  Everyone from any country should be allowed to live and work lawfully in India, and that’s the only civilized and sensible way to go.

After receiving some sound pummeling from Hillary Clinton in the first debate, Donald Trump is smarting and hurting big time and no doubt he’ll come out swinging the next time.  I got a distinct feeling from his body language the last time that he was somehow trying to restrain himself from saying some real nasty things about Clinton, as he himself admitted afterwards, even though this was portrayed as a kind of magnanimous gesture on his part.  But now you may rest assured that he’s not going to be allowed himself to be bound by any nonsense of good conduct and gonna come out all guns blazing, he ain’t takin’ no prisoners that’s for sure.