Tribes and terrorism
Rustam Shah Mohmand, a member of the team appointed by the government to negotiate with Taliban, ignited a debate this week through an article contributed to a national English daily,…
AAP’s own Gandhi
The news that pacifist-scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, has joined India’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will further confound political punters. Some of them were already watching the…
The doctor and the saint
India’s feisty Dalit leader Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar scarcely finds place in our historical consciousness, having been airbrushed from much of the discourse about the freedom movement though he has been…
Our neglected have-nots
The killing of an Indian fisherman Naranbhai Sosa reportedly by the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency on Oct 11 last has again highlighted the enormous suffering caused to the subcontinent’s have-nots…
China’s ambitious handset makers face tough sell in US
LG Electronics executive Frank Lee bounded onto a Las Vegas stage this week to show off a new phone for the US market, the 6-inch G-Flex, which boasts a curved…
The violence of Mandela
In the hour after hour of coverage given by the BBC and other mainstream news channels to the late Nelson Mandela, we have seen a certain image unrolled before us.…
To the Punjabi intelligentsia
Even when Pakistan had not been dismembered and Bengalis were the largest ethno-linguistic group within the state –outnumbering all other groups and nationalities combined – the Punjabi elite and middleclass…
Choking funds to suppress dissent
Perhaps no other country has as complex a maze of laws and rules – that give arbitrary powers to the state – as India. And no other state has abused…
Our rooms and their streets
Use your brain before May 11 – this meme, one of many that are doing the rounds on the Pakistani blogosphere in the run-up to the general elections, comes as…
Naya Pakistan: Building a Pakistani nation
Over sixty five years after Pakistan came into being, we are a state with a fading sense of the nationhood that inspired the Muslims of the subcontinent to rally behind…
