On becoming a citizen
It seems that in the eyes of the National Data Registration Authority (Nadra), every man in Pakistan is a suspected alien until he proves it otherwise. I went through Nadra’s…
Healthcare battle
Nadya is a frail, frightened 15-year-old whose eyes brim over with tears every few minutes. Unlike most girls her age, a new brightly coloured dress doesn’t make her smile. The…
Bored young killers
A New phenomenon has me rather troubled: bored youngsters embracing extremist ideologies who end up perpetrating heinous crimes. The path to radicalisation of these youngsters is not understood, hence the…
Entrenched inequalities
Do a girl born in a poor household in rural Balochistan and a boy born in a rich household in Karachi have the same or even a similar set of…
An ode to Khushhali women
The key to women empowerment lies in their financial uplift, and this is where microfinance plays its strategic role. Poverty is malicious truth in the country, and the typical banking…
Equal opportunity to women benefits all
As we today mark UN Women's Day, it is worth considering what the inequality between men and women costs South Asian countries and what can be done about it. One…
Works in progress
Is there some strange or symbiotic relationship between Operation Zarb-e-Azb and incidents of honour killing? In other words, would the success of an operation against terrorism and violent extremism be…
Reproductive violence
Two things happened in Islamabad on the same day recently, one pertaining to the Council of Islamic Ideology and the other to Pemra, the electronic media regulator. CII sanctioned ‘lightly…
A few good men
Living in unhappy times as we do, the landscape of Pakistan often looks formidably backward and resistant to change. With the news full of shocking stories of violence and retrogression,…
‘A light beating’
A Husband and wife in Pakistan can never be alone again. In between them sit the clerics of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). However small the space may be,…
