The caged bird was banned by the Taliban back in the day because probably its chirps would awaken life and the desire of life among men who should be only thinking of the fire of hell in the afterlife. Now President Mamnoon Hussain, in what...
Macheavelli said it is better to be feared than loved. The current government must have made this a mantra. First it threatened to imprison any of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) employees who participated in any of the planned strikes against the ongoing push to...
Even in the most elite hotels and accommodations where politicians and intellectual royalty are in attendance the security protocols are laughable. I know exactly when the personnel are at their least effective: who takes off for long prayer breaks and who is really slow in...
Mumtaz Qadri is now very scared. He appealed the courts to spare his life for taking the life of Punjab’s sitting Governor, Salman Taseer in 2011. He is missing spine because he claimed that by killing Taseer he was serving God who would obviously keep...
If I had a magic wand, I would wave it over the hard working women of Pakistan so they walk the earth with the confidence of the mediocre Pakistani man. It’s endemic: women’s constant addiction to underselling themselves. Women at a performance of 99% will...
We were never good at taking rejection as a people, but as men, Pakistanis don’t even make it passably human. They retaliate with counter accusations and if that does not match the insult their deified egos faced, they resort to violence. Sometimes even violence is...
There is a lot of talk at the Stockholm Internet Forum 2015 (SIF15) about how Internet rights are synonymous with human rights. It may sound like a #FirstWorldProblem but here why it is not. The Internet is this one unique opportunity where the developing world...
When life takes you down, as it sometimes does, the two things that have brought me back to the light are classical music and knowing I live in the age of Margaret Atwood. Music, because well, there is this glorious instrument called the piano and...
Somewhere in Sahiwal when a woman would now jog at the Ladies and Children Park in Farid Town it would be an act of revolt and bravery. It would be this woman vs. patriarchy, vs. subjugation and vs. the culture of associating women claiming public...
On a TV show discussing if child marriages are kosher, I realized I should not have been there in the first place. It was like discussing if waterboarding, maiming or beheadings were a laudable method of bringing societal change. There can be no discussion when...
