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Where Politics Happens

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Where Politics Happens

A Generation in Revolt and the Problem of Political Form Gen Z is often treated as a demographic fact or a media category. From protests against examination irregularities in India and lycée revolts in France to Bangladesh and the American university, young people have challenged institutions that govern their futures and determine the terms of…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

No One Counts Shadows

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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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

AI and Constitutive Power (Or: The Humanities Have Not Yet Entered the Chat)

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AI and Constitutive Power (Or: The Humanities Have Not Yet Entered the Chat)

We are asleep at the wheel. And with "we" I mean those of us who have made the humanities their field of inquiry. While the world is currently experiencing the exponential growth of a technology at least initially based and trained on human language, the debate around the future and safety of this technology is…

ByVincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

The Right to Be Ordinary

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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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Theft of the Present

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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The ‘Other’ Islamabad

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…

ByMuhammad Raiyd Qazi

When the Oar Leaves the Sea

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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Out of Syllabus: Language, Ideology and the New Vernacular Against Political Orthodoxy

Out of Syllabus: Language, Ideology and the New Vernacular Against Political Orthodoxy

India’s Gen Z revolt did not stop at mocking Modi. It entered the home, broke the family relay through which Hindutva reproduced itself, and turned inherited obedience into open political defiance. To understand the language of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), one must resist deciding in advance what kind of politics it represents. The movement…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Disappearance of Dad Shah

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Disappearance of Dad Shah

At around 6:30 p.m. on April 21, 26-year-old Fozia was startled by a sudden commotion inside her family’s home in Abdul Rehman Goth, a predominantly Baloch neighbourhood in Hawke’s Bay, Karachi. Armed men stormed the house, she recalled, their voices cutting through the panic, ordering everyone to remain where they were.Fozia said the men were…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad

The State of Waiting

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,…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

How the Riyasat of Pakistan Rules in Balochistan.

How the Riyasat of Pakistan Rules in Balochistan.

On a late summer evening, my eyes vary from life itself; it's often the case, a cloudy malady. I was on the hunt for writers on Balochistan when I came across a blog by a journalist. It was 2013, the blog was called Terra Incognita. I read the biographical note on the blog first: Sajid…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé