Aasim Sajjad Akhtar Many readers will recognise that the title of this column is borrowed from an online marketplace that is increasingly popular in Pakistan. This refrain is emblematic of the ideas that dominate our society and world, ideas that most of us endorse uncritically on a daily basis. My question is: what’s the difference between the slogan ‘Bech de!’ …
The stories of murdered women are recorded with grim regularity in one and half inches of a single newspaper column Mohammed Hanif You can find the news about Pakistan’s war on women buried deep inside the metro pages of Urdu newspapers. I stumbled upon it a few years ago. I noticed that I could pick up my newspaper and almost …
Dr Reshma Perveen-Mosofir Today I woke up to photographs on my newsfeed on social media showing women sitting in a ground with flour bags distributed on behalf of Saudi King Abdullah under Ramazan Package to the people of Hunza and Ghizer, prompting an uproar on social media raising many questions. Although, for people outside Gilgit-Baltistan and across Muslim world, this …
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 …
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar IT has been a decade since the political uprisings known as the Occupy movements burst onto the mainstream of Western societies. The backdrop was the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the slogan of the ‘99pc vs 1pc’ captured the sentiment of people whose lives were in ruin due to the collapse of major financial …
Maria Tirmizi When she tweeted out a customary Arabic prayer to mourn for the victims of the New Zealand mosque attack, Ilhan Omar was singled out by a major news outlet. A click-bait headline read, “Ilhan Omar shares Muslim verse….” The Democratic Congresswoman from Minnesota is frequently over-scrutinized, misrepresented, and vilified, just for being who she is. She is the …
By Noor Akbar Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training, Shafqat Mahmood after taking the oath of office and on a number of occasions had vowed to introduce a uniform syllabus under a new education policy during the tenure of the incumbent government. This was published by mainstream media including Dawn. PTI had been making such statements long before …
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 …
Shahzaib Hassan “Man is by nature a social animal and that one who does not socialize in society is either a beast or a god.”—Aristotle It is a universally accepted fact that we are nothing if we are not interconnected, interdependent and interlinked in a chain and does not feel each other’s pain, sorrow, and agonies. According to a research …
Saad Sayeed ISLAMABAD: Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Friday that he would not hesitate to make more changes to his cabinet if required a day after a major reshuffle that saw the appointment of a new finance minister and nine other ministerial switches. The cabinet shakeup, which comes eight months after Khan took office, included the replacement of …
