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The Theft of the Present
Gen Z, the Emergency, and the Making of a Usable Indian Past B I have spent enough of my writing life asking history to help me understand the present to know how tempting it can be. An earlier event steadies what feels uncertain now. It gives us names, sequences, people we already know how to…
Uncategorized
The ‘Other’ Islamabad
In recent months, Islamabad has occupied an unusual place in international headlines, emerging as a focal point of global diplomacy as Pakistan sought to mediate between the United States and Iran, hosting negotiations and facilitating dialogue aimed at reducing tensions in one of the world's most volatile conflicts. International media outlets portrayed Islamabad as a…
Uncategorized
When the Oar Leaves the Sea
Christopher Nolan returns Homer to the scale of cinematic spectacle. More than half a century earlier, Sitanshu Yashaschandra’s Odysseusnu Halesu followed the oar beyond Ithaca, using its estrangement to rethink homecoming, poetic authority and the unequal life of world literature. Christopher Nolan has returned Homer to the scale at which contemporary culture most readily…
Uncategorized
The State of Waiting
Paper Leaks, Hunger Strikes, and the Politics of Exhaustion “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”                               —Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 I. The Temporal Constitution Every democracy possesses a temporal constitution. Like every political order, it distributes time before it distributes resources: deciding who must wait,…
Philosophy POLITICS
Falsafa Goes Viral
Pakistan’s YouTube philosophy boom marks the rise of a vernacular counter-university: born of educational failure, religious anxiety, youth precarity, creator culture, and algorithmic theatre. Its promise is access. Its danger is the glamour of certainty before the discipline of thought.  A recent graduation speech by Dr Nauman Naqvi at Habib University gives us a precise…
POLITICS
Arrangements
On Inherited Unfreedom in Pakistan A few days ago I was in Lahore. We walked to Aiwan-e-Iqbal in the evening, air thick with smoke from grills and passing cars. The day wound down with freckles of orange light sprinkling across Mall Road, gentle against the rush of the city. The endless sprawl of asphalt and…
POLITICS
Trees of Thar
All photography by Akash Hamirani Trees and humans are cousins. They are offspring of the same ancestors. They have coexisted since the first day. As time passed, they became more distinct and distant from each other. As the capitalist system commodified nature, trees were also commodified by the system. Now, human beings don’t see the centuries-old…
ART Modern Reviews
Non-Alignment as Method
Atreyee Gupta’s Non-Aligned does not simply recover a forgotten Third World modernism; it asks whether modernism itself must be rethought when decolonization, development, and anti-imperial thought are treated as conditions of form. Modernism’s problem was never simply that it excluded the rest of the world. Its deeper violence was that it made Europe’s experience…