Blog Classic with sidebar - NAKED PUNCH

Skip to content Skip to footer

The Prince of the Mountains: On Agha Abdul Karim and His Guerrilla Foco

The mountains, as a symbol of guerrilla resistance against the riyasat of Pakistan, have played a crucial part in the politics and life of Balochistan. “To take to the mountains” is a euphemism for starting or joining a guerrilla war. There have been at least six significant “takings to the mountains” since 1948. The first was that…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

A Quiet Epic of Absence

"I am cold and I think / I will never feel warm again." — Forugh Farrokhzad's poem Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar, 1964). Premiered in Competition this Fall at the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Isabelle Kalandar's debut feature Another Birth marked the arrival of a filmmaker whose vision is at once intimate and elemental.…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Genius of Bacha Khan

Most geniuses have one masterwork for which they are famous. For Che and Fidel, that work was surely the Cuban Revolution and its international humanism, just as it was for Lenin, the Russian. For CLR James, we can list "The Black Jacobins” as an extraordinary work of genius, as well as the underground Marxist group…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

The Peace That Played Itself: Sharm el-Sheikh and the Spectacle of Power

“Peace is the coded continuation of war by other means.” —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15. It was wall-to-wall Trump. Donald Trump’s Peace 2025 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh resembled a television production more than a peace…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The ‘Anti-Imperialism’ of Idiots: Pakistani Left Edition

(inspired by Leila Al Shami) Once again, we see a familiar pattern: a section of the self-declared anti-imperialist camp in Pakistan rushes to defend the Pakistani state and its imperial backers in the name of resisting “US hegemony” or “Western imperialism.” But strip away the slogans and the socialist jargon, and what’s left is a…

ByFarhad Baloch

Top “Universities” in Pakistan Are Turning into Trial Rooms for Baloch Students

The Toll Plaza The bus was crawling toward the Islamabad toll plaza when the silence cracked. Masked men, rifles slung across their chests, stormed inside. They switched off the cameras, collected the passengers’ phones, and commanded stillness. Saeed’s hands trembled. He knew this was no ordinary security check. In Pakistan, being Baloch is like carrying…

ByChangaiz Nazeer

Versailles in Gaza

“The Versailles settlement did not so much end the war as prolong it by other means.” — Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 493. On September 29 2025, Donald Trump stood beside Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, a map…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Banality of Watchability: Nuremberg and Western Moral Failure

Nuremberg restages justice as heritage cinema—grand sets, solemn tones, clever repartee—yet in doing so, it reveals the deepest irony of accountability: law as theatre for a heritage conscience, hollow where it should confront. “The indeterminacy of legal argument means that international law is less a set of determinate rules than a practice of presenting claims…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Language as a Dictionary of Humanity

Because language matters. Because it is in and through language that the world is shaped. Also, because language is in itself a theory of beginnings, new ways of seeing and owning this world. As Karen Lord rightly asserts in her groundbreaking book, The Best of All Possible Worlds, “When you’ve been almost exterminated, language is…

ByOm Prakash Dwivedi

Dear Dad: In Your Absence, Sorrow Lingers

Dear Dad: In Your Absence, Sorrow Lingers My friend, I am jotting down these lines for you with the intention that I could write; you are unwritten, and with the hope that one day someone would write my story too. Who is Allah Dad? Allah Dad, son of Wahid, hailed from Turbat, Balochistan. He completed…

ByNabeel Armaan