111 510 510 libonline@riphah.edu.pk Contact

The fanfare and hullabaloo

Opposition parties have slammed India’s ban on a new BBC documentary about the Gujarat pogroms of 2002, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the new chief minister of the state, having won his laurels…

Education for all?

PAKISTAN is a signatory to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of which obligates the country to provide inclusive and equitable education for all. Once again, the question has…

Imperial ideology

AT its zenith, the British Empire was celebrated by its ideologues as the dominion upon which the sun never set. When it came, however, the end was eye-catchingly inglorious —…

Wider aperture to a truer world

RENOWNED actor Amitabh Bachchan made unusually bold observations recently about the problems with film censorship in India. He spoke of the perennial hardball played between filmmakers and the state since…

Breaking the status quo

CIVIL servants are the backbone of any state structure. They enforce the rules, provide services, and set governance standards. In Pakistan, commissions have repeatedly been formed to enact civil services…

Too famished to sing paeans

A QUAINT Hindi metaphor nicely describes the results from the Karnataka state polls that saw Prime Minister Modi’s religious bigotry roundly thwarted. “Bhookhe bhajan na hoey, Gopala.” In other words:…

Fear of a mysterious majority

ACCORDING to popular history, Mahatma Gandhi’s proposal to make Mohammad Ali Jinnah the first prime minister of independent India to thwart partition was opposed directly or obliquely by Jawaharlal Nehru…

Debt: a longer view

“INSANITY is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” is a saying intended to suggest that such behaviour is stupid. Is that interpretation correct in the…

The works of Jamal Abro

The Sindhi short story is nearly a century old now. In the early decades of the 20th century, writers such as Mirza Qaleech Baig, Lalchand Amardinomal, and Jethmal Parsram started…

Absolute victory

August 30 has a special significance in modern history. Exactly 102 years ago, the founder of the modern Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, managed to achieve a decisive victory against…