The frequency with which you get to know how phenomenal a person was by reading their eulogy is increasing. First it was the marketing director of a popular English daily, Masood Hamid, for whom there were only words of admiration: the people he mentored and...
For a country that shuns sex education on the basis that it erodes moral values, the number of unwanted pregnancies in Pakistan are staggering. According to a 2012 figure by the Population Council, 4.2 million of the nine million pregnancies were unwanted. As much as...
Just like Edward Said in his work Orientalism talked about a distance and patronisation with which the west referred to the east as servile to power, German anthropologist Johannes Fabian penned the concept of the “denial of coevalness”. This is when anthropologists defined people they...
In the four minutes that the Vogue #MyChoice video was played online, many critics missed the 3.8 or so minutes that talked about various options women exercise over their bodies: to have children, to travel, to love or to eat in quantities they like, and...
Pakistanis turn vicious when forced to conform to the diktat of the US. They call any such attempt to alter Pakistan’s foreign or domestic policy imperialist and hegemonic. Yet strangely, replace the US with Saudi Arabia and it almost reads like it is supremely ordained...
Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar called the lynching of two Muslims by Christians in Lahore “the worst kind of terrorism”. This is binary thinking: Muslims lynching innocent victims being a lesser form of terrorism versus Christians lynching innocent victims being an insult to our intellect and...
It was in 1787 that British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft published a strong case for women’s education in her book: Thoughts On The Education of Daughters. Two and a quarter centuries later in Pakistan, a girl child is shot in the head for advocating for the...
It is odd that the protection this country provides its citizenry is directly proportional to their power. The most vulnerable are left to the mercy of chaos: the Ahmedis, Shias, Christians and those random trespassers who are falsely accused of blasphemy either because they did...
The modifications outside my children’s school are seemingly significant: fortified walls, concrete barriers, barbed wire and the ageing sniper who is often caught scratching his ear, but the reality is different — the walls are just as penetrable and the children just as susceptible to...
Someone once said that Heera Mandi was the least hypocritical place in Pakistan, as if they were referring to a taskforce or a think tank. Everyone has an opinion on Heera Mandi, the red light district of Lahore, and lately politicians too have brought the...