Deus ex machina
OVERUSED as it may be, ‘revolution’ is the only way to describe what’s happening in Artificial intelligence; OpenAI’s ChatGPT, short for ‘Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer’ has captured our imaginations, with…
Eight lives short
“WHENEVER an elder dies, a library burns down.” When Dr B.N. Goswamy (India’s pre-eminent art historian) died and was cremated on Nov 17 in Chandigarh, a second Library of Alexandria…
The legendary Khushwant Singh
February 2 marks the birth anniversary of Khushwant Singh, a literary personality of our region, who was born 108 years ago in the village of Hadali, Punjab in present-day Pakistan.…
An anatomy of paralysis
Pakistan’s politics has assumed the form of a circular movement which keeps coming back to the starting point after exhausting all possible forms of abuse and invective. There is nothing…
Divided hells
INTERNATIONAL borders emphasise insularity: Litfests are the corrective reminders of our inherent universality. The Khushwant Singh Litfest draws, as Khushwant Singh’s mind did, from skeins of history, literature, poetry, politics…
In analogies we trust
For some two weeks social and electronic media remained abuzz with surprising similarities between Pakistan’s fate in the 1992 and the current cricket world cups. In 1992, starting with a…
From Brahms to Brahmins
BETWEEN silence and music lies imagination. The unspoken rule should apply to every realm of human art. Consider the quandary of a painter who could stare endlessly at his easel…
Outstanding people
Asadullah Khan (Mirza Ghalib) was the best poet of the Subcontinent. In one ghazal, he demanded that the earth tell us what it had done to all those indomitable personalities…
No country for sane voices
The storm of abuse and sheer vitriol that greeted Naseeruddin Shah’s lament over the alarming state of the nation only proves his point. The actor wasn’t even referring to the…
A walk through history
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan is remembered as an educationist and religious scholar who took a keen interest in the social and political affairs of his time. He had a deep…
