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Gen Z, the Emergency, and the Making of a Usable Indian Past B I have spent enough of my writing life asking history to help me understand the present to know how tempting it can be. An earlier event steadies what feels uncertain now. It gives us names, sequences, people we already know how to…
In recent months, Islamabad has occupied an unusual place in international headlines, emerging as a focal point of global diplomacy as Pakistan sought to mediate between the United States and Iran, hosting negotiations and facilitating dialogue aimed at reducing tensions in one of the world’s most volatile conflicts. International media outlets portrayed Islamabad as a…
Christopher Nolan returns Homer to the scale of cinematic spectacle. More than half a century earlier, Sitanshu Yashaschandra’s Odysseusnu Halesu followed the oar beyond Ithaca, using its estrangement to rethink homecoming, poetic authority and the unequal life of world literature. Christopher Nolan has returned Homer to the scale at which contemporary culture most readily recognises…
India’s Gen Z revolt did not stop at mocking Modi. It entered the home, broke the family relay through which Hindutva reproduced itself, and turned inherited obedience into open political defiance. To understand the language of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), one must resist deciding in advance what kind of politics it represents. The movement…
At around 6:30 p.m. on April 21, 26-year-old Fozia was startled by a sudden commotion inside her family’s home in Abdul Rehman Goth, a predominantly Baloch neighbourhood in Hawke’s Bay, Karachi. Armed men stormed the house, she recalled, their voices cutting through the panic, ordering everyone to remain where they were.Fozia said the men were…
Paper Leaks, Hunger Strikes, and the Politics of Exhaustion “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” —Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 I. The Temporal Constitution Every democracy possesses a temporal constitution. Like every political order, it distributes time before it distributes resources: deciding who must wait, for how long,…
On a late summer evening, my eyes vary from life itself; it’s often the case, a cloudy malady. I was on the hunt for writers on Balochistan when I came across a blog by a journalist. It was 2013, the blog was called Terra Incognita. I read the biographical note on the blog first: Sajid…
Pakistan’s YouTube philosophy boom marks the rise of a vernacular counter-university: born of educational failure, religious anxiety, youth precarity, creator culture, and algorithmic theatre. Its promise is access. Its danger is the glamour of certainty before the discipline of thought. A recent graduation speech by Dr Nauman Naqvi at Habib University gives us a precise…
In this paper I will try to answer very important questions related to the Baloch struggle and the toll it has taken on lives and the importance those lives have gained for they sacrificed not for personal benefits but for the Baloch nation. Questions were proposed and posed by Saeeda Mengal w/o Shaheed Faisal Mengal.…
On Inherited Unfreedom in Pakistan A few days ago I was in Lahore. We walked to Aiwan-e-Iqbal in the evening, air thick with smoke from grills and passing cars. The day wound down with freckles of orange light sprinkling across Mall Road, gentle against the rush of the city. The endless sprawl of asphalt and…
