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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

A Crooked House in Paris

From Rahbani’s aphorism to Mouawad’s absurd wedding, Lebanon’s stage insists on today when tomorrow never comes. “There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Reading Fanon in Pakistan

I do not have an extensive library but I students who visit my home from Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan or from FATA. Young intellectuals from these areas have long been enticing me to hand over the original books of Fanon. There are three reasons that Fanon speaks to me (as a Sindhi) and to young students from…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

No Morality as Such: Alasdair MacIntyre in the Age of Gaza

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.” — Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 31. Why should an ordinary person, with no taste for philosophy and no patience for academic quarrels, care about a Scottish philosopher who…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment To understand why Sholay (1975) endures after fifty years, one must recall the late Jesuit scholar Father Gaston Roberge's pivotal insight that Indian cinema is best understood as anthropological. In The Theory of Indian Cinema (1985), Roberge emphasised that Indian films should not be judged merely by…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé