Ardeshir Cowasjee was a renowned Pakistani newspaper columnist from Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. His columns regularly appeared in the country's oldest English newspaper, Dawn. He was also the Chairman of the Cowasjee Group which was the financier of many scholarships for students wishing to pursue higher education. These included grants for both local and overseas education. Due to his philanthropic activities he became widely regarded as an old "guardian" of the city of Karachi. Cowasjee owned a family run shipping company that at the time of Partition was Karachi's largest, but was later nationalized by the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime. Bhutto later appointed Cowasjee as Managing Director of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC) in 1973, but then also jailed the author for 72 days in 1976 for which no explanation has been given to date; some suggested it was for Cowasjee's increasingly vocal critique of the Bhutto regime. Cowasjee subsequently started writing letters to the editor of Dawn newspaper, which led to him becoming a permanent columnist. Since then, his hard-hitting and well-researched columns on Sundays continued to expose corruption, nepotism, and incompetence in different local, provincial, and national governments. He was summoned to the Supreme Court for contempt following one such publication, but the author's unapologetic defence led them to drop the issue. In 2012, Cowasjee died at the age of 86 from a chest illness.