Skip to content Skip to footer
Larry the cat
Dave the Rave has all the moves. Verily, is he the Lord of the Dance. Yet no one or their cat noticed the sky turning black upon his return. Only I saw the devil on his back as he leads us towards post-Brexit temptation.  But something is afoot. Mark my words. These tea-guzzling-biscuit-gobbling Fat Cats…
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…
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…
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…
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…
When the World Waited on a Sentence
A personal meditation on Trump’s threat of civilizational death, and on what it means when power turns catastrophe into speech. It was one of those evenings when waiting ceased to feel passive and became an ordeal. I felt it first in the body: a recoil, a fatigue, a kind of emotional depletion that seemed…
Satire’s Border: English, Urdu, and Who May Laugh
The state wrote the best epigraph for Mohammed Hanif. A Case of Exploding Mangoes lived happily enough in English for years, mixing offence and admiration. Then it reached Urdu, the national language, the ungated room. Men arrived at the publisher’s office and took the books away. The message did not require a memo. Rebel English…
The Museum as Proximity
A note on the Gulgee Museum, and the handbook that refuses to settle Gulgee By Narendra Pachkhédé Art history is where a nation’s cultural life becomes a border regime. It grants entry, issues credentials, seals certain practices with the stamp of “modern,” and files others into quiet nonappearance—present in rooms, absent on the page. The…
×