What Holds My Village In Balochistan Back From Achieving Its Educational Potential
Herronk, a village some 60 km from Turbat city, has a population of more than 10,000 people. Although the villagers...
Thursday, February 2, 2023
Perspective
Parity Not Partition: The Vision That Drove Mr. Jinnah’s Politics
I came across Dhruv Rathee’s video that equates Jinnah with Savarkar based on communalism. Rathee is young YouTuber with a...
Fundamentalisms And Bigotry Could Take India And Pakistan To A Common Destiny Of Despair
Pakistan’s Islamist and India’s secular experiments both turned out to be failures. In the case of Pakistan, the modernist form...
Khaled Hosseini’s Depiction Of The Plight Of Afghan Women Remains Painfully Relevant
Khaled Hosseini, a famous Afghani novelist, migrated to the United States of America in 1980 after the Soviet military intervention....
Taking Stock Of The Pakistani Christian Experience This Christmas
A few years ago, I intended to walk into the Christmas season with fresh ambitions, and dreams. However, I was...
An Ill-Fated Merger: The Pitfalls Of Sacralising The Secular In India And Pakistan
Sacralism is the merger of Church and State wherein one is called upon to change the other. It is not...
Fires Of Fanaticism – And How We Might Put Them Out
Extremism is a state of mind where a person holds extreme and narrow-minded political and religious views of their own...
Fear This Fire: It Is No Ordinary One
Days after a deranged mob of at least 4,000 people in Charsadda set a police station on fire for refusing...
Gladly Becoming The Other: The Oddities Of Self-Orientalism
In his hugely influential book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said — a founder of ‘post-colonial studies’ — demonstrated how the West...
Pakistan’s Two Biggest Political Leaders And Their Revolutionary Pretensions
In the post-Musharraf period, Pakistani politicians have been behaving as if they are revolutionaries. Their self image as political radicals...
Playing The Fiddle While Dhaka Burned: How We Ended Up With A Leftover Pakistan
16th of December 1971: General AAK Niazi receives a telegram from President Yahya Khan which reads: "You have fought a...
Can ‘Khel Khel Mein’ Help Us Come To Terms With The Injustices And Trauma From 1971?
Brothers were separated. Both the Eastern and Western wings of the country were stained by blood. Relations between them changed:...
How Interference ‘From The Top’ Unfairly Distorts The State Bank’s Performance Grading For Staff
Aslam Khan, an Assistant Director in State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), is visibly very happy. His hard work throughout the...
Impunity For Religiously-Charged Mobs Is Now An Old Problem For Pakistan
The riled-up mob was chanting. They wanted to avenge themselves on him, they wanted him to come outside. Locked up...
While Bollywood Toes The Hindu Nationalist Line, South Indian Cinema Takes Up The Real Issues
India’s versatile Bollywood industry has not only entertained people but has also worked as a powerful medium to broadcast social...
Another Route To China: Can CPEC Open Up More Secure Alternatives To The Khunjerab Pass?
The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a very well-thought-out and executed project. The various road networks – many of...
Foucault’s Political Spirituality, Punjab And TLP
Just before the 1946 general elections in ‘British India,’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s All India Muslim League (AIML) was poised to...
Talking Across The Barbed Wire: Are Two Rivals Entering A New Era Of Military Communication?
One of the remarkably depressing features of the Pakistan-India military equation is the absence of any effective and elaborate structures...
Economic Meltdown Coupled With Mounting Debt
That which is titled “Public debt (Gross),” and also commonly known as Sovereign Debt, is the result of a country’s...
Over-Smart Kids And Pakistani Politics
They say that university life is the best time of your life. It is a time when you are in...
Insecurity At The Top Of The Power Pyramid And Courting Extremist Outfits: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
I vividly remember the days in March 1993 when the Supreme Court was holding contempt proceedings against former Chief of...
Maududi’s Leviathan: From A Political Ambition To A Cultural Pursuit
The American historian Richard Wolin in his book The Seduction of Unreason wrote that after being disillusioned by the collapse...
Digging Up Neighbourhoods With Hammers To Lay New Water Lines In A Purposely-Designed City
Islamabadis probably do not have much right to complain given how green and clean their city is compared to other...
Of Festive Feasts And Historical Narratives
Turkeys do not look forward to November and December. We do. Thanksgiving has long been my favourite holiday tradition in...
An Era Of Judicial Populism
‘Judges rule on the basis of law, not public opinion.’ This is a famous quote of the former Chief Justice...
Happiness And Healing: Deloms And Storytelling In Bhutan
Our culture thrives on the art of stories. It has been embodied by story tellers who wove magic and created...
THE TRUTH WILL OUT
Tyrian White Case: IHC Constitutes Larger Bench
The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has decided to...
Peshawar Blast: KP Top Cop Vows To Avenge Every Drop Of Martyrs’ Blood
Inspector General of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Moazzam Jah...