by Raza Naeem “I am the trader of sighs To versify blood is my mission Remaining winds of the garden! Gather your refuges…for My fiery songs Are about to cause an upheaval within depressed bosoms” When the Jallianwala Bagh massacre occured in 1919, Saadat Hasan Manto was nine years old. The hero of Jallianwala Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew was a close relative …

Najam Sethi reviews Nasim Zehra’s book From Kargil to the Coup: Events that shook Pakistan The Kargil story or “misadventure” is now well known, thanks in no small part to Nasim Zehra’s chilling thriller From Kargil to the Coup: Events that shook Pakistan. The book was published last year, twenty years after the event. You can understand why it took so …

Writing is the most appropriate way of expressing trauma and complications, and I will be the last one to make rules for writing in terms of impression and style, said acclaimed Indian Booker-winning author Arundhati Roy. She was speaking on her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness while addressing a conference at International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) through Skype. The conference, ‘Getting …

The legacy of Bhagat Singh and his comrades serves as a reminder of the revolutionary zeal that thrived in this region not long ago. They were committed to and sacrificed their lives for an ideology and a society that was not restricted by artificial boundaries of language, race and religion, but for the entire working class of the world.  By Waseem …

Arley Titzler India and Pakistan were separated at birth, established in 1947 when they gained independence from Britain. Since then, these two countries have been engaged in a violent, 70-year-long dispute over control of Kashmir, waging three wars, countless skirmishes, attacks, and subsequent retaliations. Today, India occupies 45 percent of Kashmir, Pakistan occupies 35 percent, and China occupies the remaining 20 percent. …

HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY Counterrevolution has taken hold across much of the region, but uprisings in Sudan and elsewhere show the potential for the tide to turn, writes Egyptian journalist and socialist activist Hossam el-Hamalawy, in an article published at Al Araby. Eight years after the explosion of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, the situation in the region looks bleak in the eyes of …