Skip to content Skip to footer
The Ethics of Staying: Béla Tarr and the Cinema of Endurance
Béla Tarr’s films transformed slowness into an ethical demand. Refusing narrative relief and political optimism, he made endurance of time, history, and looking the condition of cinema itself. “There is no way out.” —László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance, trans. George Szirtes (New York: New Directions, 1998), passim. There are filmmakers whose deaths feel…
Kamber Chakar: The Revolutionary Who Embraced Death and Achieved Enduring Remembrance
"Even today, in difficult times, the movement’s ability to stand firm owes much to martyrs like Kamber Chakar. Without their ultimate sacrifice, future generations would not inherit such a strong spirit of resistance." —Darapshaan Baloch, former chairman, Baloch Students Organization (Azad), 2024 Kamber Chakar (1987–2011) remains one of the most iconic figures in Balochistan’s struggle…
The Walking Prophet   
PART TWO In this intimate conversation, Sultan Somjee traces a quiet revolution in how peace is understood and practised, drawing on the philosophy of Utu to challenge bureaucratised reconciliation and recover peace as a relational, embodied act grounded in memory, land, and communal life. READ PART ONE The Path of Peace I asked…
The Walking Prophet
Sultan Somjee, an African humanist’s quiet revolution in how we walk, remember, and reconcile, grounded in a relational humanism rooted in the philosophy of Utu. The step, trivial and unremarked, is a small act of covenant. To walk is to re-enter that covenant again and again, each stride a renewal of belonging. The…
End of Islam?
Reading Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, 280 Pages, 2025, that traces how Islam ceased to function as a political actor, why the Muselmann reveals the truth of our age, and what forms of Muslim agency may emerge once ideology dissolves and ethical life returns to the centre. For almost a…
Aki Nawaz and the Politics of Sonic Citizenship
A short film opens a long-buried chapter of postwar Britain, where music became argument, Nation Records became counter-infrastructure, and Aki Nawaz refused to let multiculturalism settle into décor. Britain has begun to look and sound like its own archive. The recent 'United the Kingdom' march, fronted by Tommy Robinson and swelling beyond 110,000, was…
Two Poems by Shahalam Tariq
Iqbal's Dream The mosque in Cordoba stands symmetrical, linear — like the progression of History in the Imam's khutba on Friday. The dreamlike Spain glorious still home to the righteous pours out of his dream and the ink flows onto the page placed on the desk (….) The unleveled still broken road gaping at every…
The Mamdani Moment : Politics After the Age of Performance
Zohran Mamdani’s election isn’t just a win for the left, it’s a generational revolt against rhetorical politics, moral evasiveness, and the exhaustion of governance by performance. History rarely announces its turning points. It can arrive as spectacle or as slow erosion, as collapse or quiet reordering. The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New…
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.…