New Delhi, Feb. 16 -- In a striking juxtaposition, in the week that the news came of Imran Khan, Pakistan's most celebrated cricket icon and its incarcerated former prime minister, practically going blind in his right eye, the country's cricket team trucked under to India in the T20 World Cup match in Colombo.

The sorry twin spectacles of Pakistani cricket team's 61-run defeat and Khan's tragic loss of eyesight in prison are in a way manifestations of a society long trapped in deeper and nearly incapacitating crises across a spectrum of life. From the existential dangers posed to the state by the violent Baloch subnationalism to its unending economic pauperization, and from its leaders indulging in acts of embarrassing ingratiation to th...