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No One Counts Shadows
Uncategorized
No One Counts Shadows
Tabish Khair’s Gothic reckoning: a refugee returns as a shadow to haunt the ruins of liberal orthodoxy. A review of Tabish Khair, Drown All the Refugees (HarperCollins India, 2026)1 The loudest sentence in Tabish Khair’s new novel is its title. It is designed to offend, and it does. The quieter sentence comes a few pages…
The Right to Be Ordinary
Uncategorized
The Right to Be Ordinary
Jason Arday and the Racial Politics of Britain Now Professor Jason Arday’s tragic story sits where three racial logics collide: the declining solidarities of British political Blackness; the corporate and institutional representationalism that followed Black Lives Matter; and a restorationist Right that treats conspicuous Black advancement as presumptive evidence that merit has been displaced. B…
The Theft of the Present
POLITICS
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…
The ‘Other’ Islamabad
POLITICS
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…
When the Oar Leaves the Sea
ART
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…
The State of Waiting
POLITICS
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,…
Falsafa Goes Viral
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…