Autocratic legalism
Legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele defines her term ‘autocratic legalism’ as instruments of law being repurposed as weapons of control. An insidious loosening and dismantling of constitutional constraints, it subverts…
A struggle to not forget
With so many thoughts jostling in my mind, I want to begin with a favourite Milan Kundera quote: “Man’s struggle against power is memory’s struggle against forgetting”. Why am I…
Changing the past
Here’s a riddle for you. Why do I think of Milan Kundera when I drive past the Teen Talwar roundabout in Karachi and am in a pensive mood? Naturally, when…
The struggle against forgetting
A country so breathless with excitement about the potentially transient matters of the moment is likely to lose its ability to comprehend the larger issues that are rooted in its…
Cinema of resistance
If you want to learn how to challenge authoritarianism with creativity, film directors and writers during post-WWII Europe can serve as role models. Be it Gunter Grass and Milan Kundera…
The deepening crisis of scholarship
One’s view is primarily that of a creative writer. But since one’s interests straddle history, politics, culture and society, there is an inherent compulsion to comment on issues that surround…
Pakistan’s place
"All predictions are wrong; that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind".-Milan Kundera International Monetary Fund's celebrated quarterly journal Finance & Development (September 2014) did a bold work by asking…
How we lost the plot – again
What's the litmus test to tell you that the managers at the helm of a company have lost the plot? From a bird’s eye view and in layman terms that’s…
The only way forward
I don’t know where and how he articulated it exactly, but Milan Kundera has described the singularly human capacity to overcome grief as the art of forgetting and living. It…
Four years here
Milan Kundera once said that he is a hedonist trapped in an intensely political world. Perhaps that is true for any artist, writer or aesthete. Humanity to a large extent…
