If you have not been slapped, punched, shoved or physically threatened by a male relative or even a stranger, you are one of those one in 10 women who just escaped being part of a harrowing epidemic in Pakistan. Go celebrate. Go celebrate that you...
When a report comes out naming the worst perpetrators of oppression of any sort, expect Pakistan to take a sizable share of the cake. Picture this: 2,058,200 has been the number revealed by the 2014 Global Slavery Index of Pakistanis under modern slavery. Can we...
Some 150,000 schools across Pakistan commemorated I Am Not Malala Day. Walks and press conferences lit up the educational landscape of this country. It blacked everything else out though. It darkened everything that Malala stands for: education of the girl child, education for all, books...
Walking the streets in Georgetown, DC and looking at the immaculate taste in shop fronts, the energy of young students and the general order, I feel so far removed from its grandeur because of what recently happened back home: brick kin workers Shyman Bibi Urf Shamar,...
As if it were not bad enough that Pakistan has always shown a dismal performance when it comes to the gender gap, there is more bad news: it is getting worse, not better, over the years. Either these indicators are being ignored by the people...
Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man had a young girl in it called Lenny as its central character. The only one good thing that came out of this girl contracting polio was that she got to stay home and listen in on all the grown up...
This is not a piece about finding justice for Aasia Bibi. God knows it would be very costly if that were so. Aasia Bibi has indirectly cost Pakistan a brilliant governor in Salmaan Taseer and a valorous minority’s minister in Shahbaz Bhatti. This is a...
When Hassan Nisar, social commentator and journalist, says that the most worthy thing the Muslims of the subcontinent invented was the charpoy (traditional, woven bed), he is not too far off the mark. The fact is that mainstream Muslims have even less to be known for:...
Anyone who is oblivious, callous or uninformed about how crucial Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is to Pakistan should be awarded the kind of treatment tribals reserve for adulterers. This delicate thing we call FDI has raised many countries from South Korea to Bangladesh out of the...
Pakistanis have the equivalent of a drug addict’s deviated septum when it comes to overdosing on simplicity. Recently, a graphic image has been designed and can be seen on social media that compares India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) to the metro bus project in Pakistan....