For over 70 years, the vision of the founding father Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah has been a matter of intellectual debate, where points and counterpoints are made by writers in order to prove validity of their own personal views and vision of Pakistan. Dialogue, discussion and even debate always helps in at least understanding the […]

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, When he beats his bars and would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he […]

Love Conquers The World (محبت فاتح عالم) I thought of contemporary love as a feeling of deception that you have for somebody, enslaving you to inferior desires. It was not until I read عشق کے پانچ درجے1 by Khurram Ali Shafique and discovered Iqbal through his Marghdeen2. This change introduced me to that powerful love […]

So, August arrives again. Like every year, channel logos change to green. Youth begins placing flags on their roof tops, buying badges and flags only to find them on the floor beneath our feet the next day. More deceitful promises and more lies by dearly loved leaders; more national songs and a load of new […]

In a society stricken by war, insecurity and poverty, where everyone seeks a safe and prosperous life for themselves and their families, and people live lives day to day, we have somehow become self-centered feeling relieved if our families are safe, no matter what disasters are befalling in the other parts of the country. The […]

We gloat over carrion; we gather to pick up the pieces. We discriminate between dead bodies under labels of ‘halak’ (merely killed) and ‘shaheed’ (martyred). As we do so, we don God’s hat, partaking of what is exclusively His right with a self-righteous audacity. Our opinions on the dead may not be worth a shred […]

Feminism (Oxford definition) – the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. EQUALITY! Not supremacy.  Feminism is all about advocating women’s rights not advocating their supremacy above any other human being and certainly not about loathing men like some sort of filth. Then why exactly do some self proclaimed “feminists” […]

Parallax errors of selective historical and contemporary view points A simple definition of Parallax would be “an apparent change in the position of an object resulting from a change in position of the observer”. By some accounts on October 12 Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas [1]. 521 years later a girl, Malala Yusufzai, from Swat, Pakistan […]

Hatred is a scam. Just like a lot of stuff Capitalism and its globalizing effects want to sell us. This is what they do right? They come at our doors and they sell stuff. We buy stuff. But we also buy into stuff. Into the ideology of stuff. The ideology of stuff isn’t your next […]

The catalogue of bloodbath in the Muslim world is harrowing and sickening. I want to know who is responsible for it all. It has been a bloody week – the Westgate shopping centre massacre in Nairobi that left 67 people dead, the killing spree of students in North Eastern Nigeria has left 50 students dead, […]