At a local ladies book club in Columbus Ohio, during a talk on my eBook Obscure Women Obscure Stories: A Pakistani Trilogy, the following passage from Purani Kahani, one of the stories, came under discussion and a question was asked. “Bhaag Bhari would go…
Rimsha Masih, an 11 year old Christian girl has been arrested on blasphemy charges. According to some reports, she is suffering from Down syndrome and is a minor, between 11 to 16. Even if she is 18, it is laughable.…
To compare the recent reopening of the Afghanistan route to the US/NATO traffic with an event preceding the First Anglo-Afghan war sounds so hackneyed. In its simplest sense it may be a repetition of history, a déjà vu; in a…
The recent news about the restoration of the defaced Buddha’s images in Swat is a strong message to those who had been on a spree of vandalizing the pre-Islamic heritage in the region. Beginning in 2001 with the destruction of…
The old shrine and its rustic environs looked the same when I last visited it in 2007. Pallid walls topped with a fading green dome and a tattered flag, a few trees around it laden more with ribbons than leaves. …
After recent years of self-inflicted brutality, barbarism, and bloodshed in Karachi, the Supreme Court finally weighs in. It had been Pakistan’s pride and joy, its shining capital, its economic engine, its multicultural Petri dish. But as it had during the 1990s,…
Food and energy prices soared, the population and bombs exploded alike, floods set new records, populations were displaced and minorities massacred, angry protestors took to the streets and democracy, poor thing, was imperiled by the confluence of it all – a few…