Sabeen Mahmud Week 2
Two headlines loom large on my timeline. Labour Day and the Duchess of Cambridge’s going in to labour. And I am sitting here thinking, how are these two events changing…
Sabeen and Perween’s Pakistan
On this last Sunday of April, with the weekend heat wave lashing Karachi, I intend to deflect my thoughts from the after-shocks of the Panama Papers, leaked three weeks ago,…
Sabeen
Out of my head Bol, ke lab azaad hai tere Bol, zabaan ab tak teri hai Tera sutwan jism hai tera Bol, ke jaan ab tak teri hai Second by…
The silencing of Sabeen
In my long career as a columnist, I have been constrained to chronicle the sorrows of this unfortunate country. And the focus mainly remains Karachi where I have grown up.…
Ban the gun
ON March 1, a burst of gunfire snuffed out the life of a gentle soul in Washington D.C. He was a social worker helping the mentally challenged and drug addicts.…
Opening of minds
“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” THESE words, from the preamble of Unesco’s…
What have we become?
From the murders of Mashal Khan, Priyantha Kumara, Rashid Rehman, Sabeen Mahmud, Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti to the targeting of localities belonging to religious minorities and the attacks and…
An elegy to music
“If music be the food of love, play on,/Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken, and so die.” – Twelfth Night Act 1, Scene 1, 1–3 Shakespeare…
Collective amnesia to controlled minds
The country will soon be 73 years old. That's the age you enter a room looking for something and forget what you had come looking for. Your memory becomes more…
Ripping away our future
Pakistan has only one hope. It lies with the younger generation that has grown up in the years after the dark dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq, and which may bring…
