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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

A mother endures for her two disappeared sons in a drowning home

On the morning of 19 August 2025, as Karachi drowned under torrential rain, 50-year-old Sabzi stood by the doorway, her chadar wrapped tightly around her head. The water was rising inside her home, but her eyes were fixed elsewhere. That date 19 August, was carved into her mind. It was the day she had to…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad

The Story of Jan Bibi and Abdul Hameed’s Missing Son

In June 2022, during the third semester of my master’s at the University of Karachi, two of our fellow Baloch students were taken—enforcedly disappeared. The news spread like a wound across the Baloch students in the university. With their families, we set up a protest camp outside the press club. I kept posting updates on…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad

Resisting Necropolitics: The Story of the Banuks, Mama Qadeer and the Voice For Baloch Missing Persons

Necropolitics of ‘kill and dump’ of the Pakistani riyasat has been primarily resisted by subaltern working class young women, men and a few older Baloch activists such as Mama Qadeer and Mir Muhammad Ali Talpur. Just sixteen to twenty such people made the world aware of the brutality of necropolitics in Balochistan and set the…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

At the Gates of Democracy: A study of “Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics”

Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Edited, introduced, and annotated by Maël Montévil, (Hurst Publishers, UK; Oxford University Press, USA), 2024. In Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, (hereon IPIR) Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan offer a meticulously reasoned and deeply disconcerting reassessment of India's socio-political…

ByKamran Baradaran

Legalizing Repression: The Anti-Terror Law and the War on Baloch Political Activists

In June 2025, the Balochistan Provincial Assembly passed a controversial amendment to the anti-terrorism law, granting sweeping powers to law enforcement agencies. The amendment allows individuals to be detained without trial for up to 90 days based solely on suspicion. Far from being a measure to enhance public security, the law marks a dangerous shift…

This Threshold We Call Form: Reading No Man’s Land

“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers... Live the questions now.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), p. 35 We met…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Birth of Necropolitics: How the Riyasat of Pakistan Governs Balochistan

Ask any Baloch, and they will tell you: governance here means "kill and dump." They’re not wrong. In academic language, this is called necropolitics - a mode of rule that governs through the power to decide who lives and who dies. Coined by Achille Mbembe, necropolitics refers to a form of sovereignty in which the…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

A User’s Guide to Western Moral Clarity

“Every empire, however grandiose, is a fragile construction, not unlike a literary text, subject to interpretation, rewriting, and even dismantling.” —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 331. Let us begin not with politics, but with a parable. On 13th October 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union's chief diplomat,…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé