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POLITICS Fiction Uncategorized

Larry the cat

Dave the Rave has all the moves. Verily, is he the Lord of the Dance. Yet no one or their cat noticed the sky turning black upon his return. Only I saw the devil on his back as he leads us towards post-Brexit temptation. But something is afoot. Mark my words. These tea-guzzling-biscuit-gobbling Fat Cats…

ByMiranda Husain

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

This is not a curse: On the Iranian people

The destruction of the third world continues with the illegal and potentially genocidal attack on Iran through the American instrument of Israël. Both Israël, and its controllers, especially the United States of America, have been unambiguous in their declaration of intent to strike and cause calamity upon the nuclear sites of Iran. It is certainly…

In the Shadow of Sovereignty

“The world has turned its order upside down; Time has traded one fate for another.” — Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ca. 1010 CE, trans. Dick Davis, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (Penguin Classics, 2006) Vali Nasr's Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History arrives not a moment too soon. With a nuclear…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Why Gilgit-Baltistan Is Rising Against Pakistan’s Land Seizures

India and Pakistan exchanged aircraft and missile fire under the cover of darkness. The short war, which followed the Pehelgam attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir, cast a long shadow—one under which political repression and elite plunder intensified. While attention turned to airstrikes and patriotic soundbites, the Pakistani state used this moment to unleash a brutal crackdown—not…

ByHaider Buluk & Qalandar Bux Memon

The Cross-Examiner of Memory: Marcel Ophuls and the Documentary as Moral Reckoning

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.” — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947) Marcel Ophuls died on May 24, 2025, at the age of 97. His death passed with quiet headlines, but the silence belies the magnitude of his…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: A Liberator of the African Imagination

“Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.” — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics: Essays (Heinemann, 1981), p. 72. As the sun sets on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's life, what vanishes is not just…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Witness and the Wound: Seeing with Sebastião Salgado

“I photograph to testify, not to preserve.” - Sebastião Salgado, quoted in Lélia Wanick Salgado (ed.), Genesis (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 14. It was Fall 2005, and I had made my way to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to see Sebastião Salgado: Territories and Lives. More than an exhibition, it was a map…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Lawyer vs the Oligarchy: An Interview with Ehsan Ali Advocate

Below we present a composite write up of three interviews with Ehsan Ali by Qalandar Bux Memon, Haider Ali, and Sonia Qadir. The interviews took place between 2015 and 2022. Comrade Ehsan Ali is a Marxist leader from Gilgit-Baltistan and member of Inqalabi Communist Party. He is the founder of Gilgit-Baltistan Awami Action Committee and…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

Art History’s Unfinished Argument with Itself

"Which art history should I teach in Khartoum?” —Salah M. Hassan, an art historian, critic, and curator, Cornell University. Art history occupies a unique position in the longue durée of intellectual thought. It is a narrative of images and a history of ideas inscribed in pigment and stone, language, philosophy, and shifting regimes of visibility.…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé