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…
Focus on the game
American astronaut Neil Armstrong when he placed his foot on the surface of moon for the first time said “That is one small step for man, one giant leap for…
The roots of Pakistan
The lived experience of Muslims participating and in some places leading the near impromptu uprising in 1857 against the British in the Subcontinent reflected Muslim passion, anger, reactiveness, assertion, confidence…
