I was invited for a talk to Ghazali Premier College  (GPC) and I was very surprised when I visited the place.  Without any doubt, it was one of the best institutions I had seen in years. GPC immediately became an inspiration for me. Muhammad Tariq, the director of GPC left a lucrative job in Dubai […]

Come, visualize with me.. Sakeena, a 10 year old who has never been to school, never enjoyed playing with dolls let alone the funky hi-tech gadgets,  is carrying a 1 year old in her lap, sitting on a table distant to begum saheba’s. Her dull glitterless clothes, unadorned arms and ears tell us, she’s the odd one. […]

Good Bye Mr.President. Those who announced to drag you on streets gave you an honourable farewell in the end. Five years of Zardari regime will be remembered in the history of Pakistan. Corruption, incompetency, lawlessness and ‘mofahimat’ (reconciliation) are the ‘golden’ words of Zardari’s era. If our memory is not too short, we must not forget […]

A while back, I was watching a morning-show when one of the guests on the show compared two very famous morning show hosts to Oprah Winfrey and called them the Oprah Winfreys of Pakistan. The next minute, I was cleaning the tea I had spilled on the table. As much as I wish with all […]

My home, my country is 66 years old today. Come August and we start gearing up to celebrate Pakistan’s birthday, if we can call it that.  The emotional patriot that I am, the whole “green” thing works for me. It is my time to re-visit the qaumi taraanaas (patriotic songs) and hoist a flag on my roof […]

Pakistan- a word I’ve been hearing since my first day but every single time I hear it and interpret it, the familiar sense of belonging and feeling of love is rejuvenated. I’ve heard it under muffled voices as my grandparents would narrate their childhood stories; we would squeeze beside them under the blankets and awe […]

What happens when events recur so often that we become accustomed to them? They end up becoming a part of our lives and we learn to live with them. Pakistan came into existence because it was seen as the sole solution to safeguard the rights of the minority i.e. Muslims. However, the very basis of the creation of […]

Change is one of the most popular themes in contemporary Pakistan. But what exactly do we mean by ‘change’, and even more importantly, why do we need it so badly? This is something that we should all learn to question. When we demand something, we should be conscious of what it is exactly. This question […]

Every day, the news channels give an estimated figure of deaths due to target killing, bomb-blasts, sectarian barbarism etc. But those figures are inaccurate. There are more deaths than we can fathom. Each day, we all die as a society, nation and as human beings. We turned off our humanity a long time ago. We […]

We are humans, thank God, for we have the ability to suppress animal instincts. It is this nature to control raw flares of often unwanted behaviour that makes us human. Of the animal instincts most abhorred in our being, it is not the unnecessary and unheeded violent behaviour that I want to highlight; it has […]