AI and the fear of losing the pen
AI is a reality, and as everyday people gain access to writing tools, a palpable discomfort has emerged among some. The concern is often expressed in arguments about authenticity, creativity…
Remembering Ali Baba
Ahmed Shah and Ayub Sheikh of the Arts Council Karachi have taken a commendable initiative to honour prominent intellectuals and writers from Sindh. On August 2, they organised a commemorative…
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…
Silencing the war drums, amplifying her voice
On May 7, India launched Operation Sindoor, a retaliatory strike on Pakistan to ‘avenge’ the terror attack in Pahalgam that killed more than 30 civilians. Touted by the Indian government…
Ziedan’s ‘Azazeel’ and the haunting of Hypa
The most prominent name that comes to mind while discussing modern literature from Egypt is Naguib Mahfouz. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 and remains the first…
The third pillar
ONE would need more than 10 fingers to count the number of lawyers who have governed Pakistan since its inception. Our founder was a lawyer; our first prime minister a…
A tale of literary events
Hardly a month passed since the World Cultural Festival enthralled the denizens of Karachi when the Arts Council offered another fairly successful ‘Aalmi Urdu Conference’ coupled with ‘Jashn-e-Karachi’ from December…
The mighty caste system: Part – II
Roy believes the statistics Singh cited may be flawed, but are unlikely to be drastically flawed. She notes, “They are a quarter of a century old now. Some new census-based…
Food, with thought
IT is not a novel idea: which interesting personality would you want to share a meal with? From 2012, The New York Times has run a weekly column ‘By the…
Fiscal pollution
IN some ways, modern Islamabad is akin to 15th-century Ferghana in Central Asia. The novelist Lytton Strachey wrote of the first Mughal emperor Babar, who was born there in an…
