Review of Red Birds Author: Mohammad Hanif Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2018 Red Birds is about the destruction that inevitably follows love. Many say this Mohammad Hanif novel is an anatomy of the wars men wage and the carcasses of pain women and their children must sweep up, each with...
What is it about a woman that makes her jeer worthy? I wonder because the Chief Justice of Pakistan decided to open his speech last week with a statement that compared the length of an ideal speech to that of a woman’s skirt length. Winston...
Tharparker is a forgotten speck in southern Pakistan. It is defined by grass thatched roofs and a dysfunctional feudal-electoral system that has always undermined 1.6 million of its residents. Then, of course, there is the fact that half of its population is Hindu in Muslim...
I grew up in a school where corporal punishment was the norm. Another norm was I being on the receiving end of it. Teachers were almost always displeased at my reading and writing ability. It took me longer than my classmates to read a passage. Words...
Antara Ganguli’s Tanya Tania is like being in Karachi and Bombay at the same time. It is like being there at a time when these two cities were both ugly and beautiful. Reading it you have that same feeling you have when you butter your...
I am not ashamed of taking some of my inspiration from Facebook memes. They are no New Yorker Magazine cartoons, granted, but they sometimes can be pretty astute. This particular one said: Women belong in the kitchen; men belong in the kitchen, we all belong...
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...
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...
Published in Daily Times on July 13 2014 Operation Zarb-e-Azb has cost Pakistan at least two billion dollars thus far. This, according to one of Pakistan’s most astute military commentators who is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army, Samson Simon Sharaf. The operation’s effectiveness is now...
Published in the Daily Times on October 29th 2013. Any exposition on the murder of Salmaan Taseer points to the fact that the Pakistani media was squarely responsible. Not just that, the pundits made a hero out of the killer. It’s déjà vu. In a ratings...