Published on Chowk.com on Dec 12th 2011 You don’t know till you are half way through the book that the protagonist in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, is beautiful – and you don’t figure out till the end how symbolic her beauty is. The novel...
Published in Dawn Newspaper and Chowk.com on August 7th 2009 Prof. Ayaz Ahmad Khan recounts the horrors of his son’s death Capt. Jonaid Khan: Special Services Group in the Pakistan army was born in Quetta in 1983, with his primary education in Ankara, where his father...
Published on August 5th 2010 Pakistan is looked at as a country on edge, a country where a fanatic is a breath away from detonating a nuclear device. The potential for that is not the debate here. What really indicates the direction the country is taking...
Published on Chowk.com on May 31st 2010 Militants gunned down and attacked two Ahmedi mosques in Lahore and Pakistan has tied its panties in knots trying to figure out if the places of worship should be called mosques and if the terrorists were funded by the...
Published on Chowk.com on March 8th 2010 The topography of women’s empowerment in Pakistan is a treacherous terrain, harsh on the eyes. It is often marked by subjugation, lack of education and basic literacy, utter neglect of health; for instance, Pakistan has among the highest occurrence...
Published on Chowk.com on May 29th 2007 “No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you.”-Mohammad Ali Jinnah “This is why I am not in favor of working women.” Said the Colonel and security incharge of one of Lahore’s largest office blocks. “Excuse...
I am buried in an Ahmedi graveyard. My tombstone doesn’t have the first pillar of Islam engraved on it, because the Pakistani government doesn’t think I am Muslim. I know I am, but there is absolutely no point fighting the state for it now. When I...
Published on Chowk.com on May 9th 2008 What are the odds that I move into a house in the elite F/11 sector of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad and our land lord turns out to be a wife-beater – I in 4, according to the United Nations report...
Published on Chowk.com and The Friday Times on November 25th 2005 Out of all the tragedies this earthquake has brought, the loss of an educated and inspiring Junaid Jamshed is very dehumanizing. Losing a national hero to a world of cynicismWe’re a society in scarcity of worthy...