It is the 20th of November. If you look out the window you may notice that heavens have not fallen nor hell frozen over. Today marks Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s 37th death anniversary. While he…
Who rules Pakistan?
Tribalism in Pakistani political discourse obscures a wide array of dynamics that play a disproportionately bigger role in our daily lives. And yet you will hardly ever hear political pundits comment on…
The world order grift
“Dialogue is useless”. Did you know Charlie Chaplin barely escaped an assassination attempt by sheer dumb luck? No, it is neither revisionist history nor any form of alleged Mandela effect. It is…
Prognosis negative
Full disclosure. The title of this piece is borrowed from one episode of the legendary sitcom series Seinfeld. In one episode this is the title of a fictional movie that Jerry, Elaine,…
Why I deactivated my Facebook account
To be honest, I never thought that one day I would be writing an exclusive piece on a social media app. But it shows you how the world has changed. This seemingly…
Lessons from America and Afghanistan
Let’s face it. There is no comparison between the US and Afghanistan in terms of state power. America remains the most powerful country on the planet, Afghanistan one of the weakest ones….
Forest for trees
Renowned Urdu writer, playwright, and broadcaster Ashfaq Ahmed used to give long talks on PTV. A collection of these talks called Zavia was later compiled and presented in a multi-volume book series. In one…
Crouching tiger or hiding dragon?
The world was bracing for the new cold war. AUKUS became a reality. The QUAD leaders met in DC. News outlets were already churning out stories against China’s alleged ambitions. Stories about…
Anticipatory anxiety, technophobia and proactivity
The Future of Life Award is something I probably wouldn’t have heard of, had it not been for a lucky coincidence. On April 26, 2018, I wrote a piece in this space…
The Indians in the lobby
There is a short-lived but hilarious Jack Black and Tim Robbins starrer series called “The Brink”. Be warned. It is not for the faint of heart. Or for those who were tragically…
Salem witches and global trials
What do you know of the touch test, witch cakes and spectral evidence? An answer would take us to 1692 colonial America. The New England settlement was still young, obstinately religious and…
Fake news
On January 12, 2018, only four days after his 76th and last birthday, British tabloid Daily Mail carried a remarkable headline about renowned physicist and pop-science legend Dr Stephen Hawking. “Has Stephen Hawking Been Replaced…
Shocks become us
The collapse of reality is an atrocious experience. An ordinary person treats at least a few things in life as fixed, immutable anchors to reality. Until the fall of the Twin Towers,…
How wars hurt us
As the American media continued its unrelenting coverage of the fifth day of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban, Floyd Ray Roseberry, a 49 years’ old North Carolinian, pulled up his muddy Dodge…
Seventy-four
How does one even begin to express one’s love for a homeland that is everything? Alpha and omega. Home, journey and destination. A sandbox where you make all mistakes and in a…
Behold the wooden horse
Virgil’s Aeneid tells the tale of an ingenious plan the Greeks came up with. After 10 years of unsuccessful siege of Troy, they built a massive wooden horse hollowed out from within,…
The myth of privacy
The Pegasus Project, as it is being called now, has blown the lid off of the Pandora’s box of fears and doubts. Since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the predatory nature…
Space — the final frontier?
After remaining rather uneventful for decades, outer space is again seeing a lot of action and interest. There are many reasons for it. NASA is under presidential orders to land humans on…
Cost of a divided world
Let me draw your attention to four of my pieces that appeared in this space in the past two years. On June 1, 2019, in my piece titled “The Huawei Inflection Point”,…
The South Asian tamasha
“The common law of the Asiatic dynasties,” wrote Edward Gibbon in his magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was “the unceasing round of valour, greatness, discord, degeneracy,…
Know thyself
For the third time in two years the short-form video sharing portal, TikTok, finds itself banned in Pakistan. The ban came as a result of a case that is being heard in…
Zen and the art of rising from ashes
The phoenix, as an idea, has a recorded history of seven to eight thousand years. Yes, roughly seven to eight thousand years. The earliest designs were found at an archaeological site in…
The flattening of the Pakistani mind
When was the last time you saw a science show or documentary on a Pakistani television channel? It is a serious question. There was a time when an effort was made to…
What’s eating Narendra Modi?
India’s Narendra Modi is in a pickle. When he declared victory against the coronavirus this January, he wasn’t just tempting fate but revealing the largest chinks in his armour — ignorance, and…
Boring world order
Disambiguation first. This piece has nothing to do with Elon Musk’s The Boring Company. Despite its ingenious name the company remains known for tunnelling and digging holes in the earth. This article,…
Shades of conspiracy
Not a day passes by without a new set of totally crazy conspiracy theories reaching us. Now that Pakistan is making strides in vaccinating its citizens, you might have come across a…
Told you so!
The recent 11-day conflict between Israel and Gaza reinforces what I have been saying all along. While preparing for this piece I noticed that in the past three years Benjamin Netanyahu’s name…
Implications of one banned tweet
If you are interested in South Asia, you might have come across a news report about Indian actress Kangana Ranaut who was permanently suspended from Twitter. Reason? Hate speech. Given the amount…
Wages of pseudoscience
In February this year, Coronil kit by Yoga guru Ramdev’s company Patanjali Ayurved got a formal nod by the Indian government as an evidence-based ayurvedic cure of Covid-19. The event launch of…
The conversation we never had
As a powerful blast rocked Quetta’s beautifully built Serena hotel, and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility, one was reminded of our commitment to fight extremism and terrorism by all means necessary. It…