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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

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

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.

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

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

Necropolitics in Balochistan: Memories, Emotions and Identity

In this paper I will try to answer very important questions related to the Baloch struggle and the toll it has taken on lives and the importance those lives have gained for they sacrificed not for personal benefits but for the Baloch nation. Questions were proposed and posed by Saeeda Mengal w/o Shaheed Faisal Mengal.…

ByMir Mohammad Ali Talpur

Arrangements

On Inherited Unfreedom in Pakistan A few days ago I was in Lahore. We walked to Aiwan-e-Iqbal in the evening, air thick with smoke from grills and passing cars. The day wound down with freckles of orange light sprinkling across Mall Road, gentle against the rush of the city. The endless sprawl of asphalt and…

BySyed M. Abubakr

Trees of Thar

All photography by Akash Hamirani Trees and humans are cousins. They are offspring of the same ancestors. They have coexisted since the first day. As time passed, they became more distinct and distant from each other. As the capitalist system commodified nature, trees were also commodified by the system. Now, human beings don’t see the centuries-old…

ByMehtab Rajput

ART Modern Reviews

Non-Alignment as Method

Atreyee Gupta’s Non-Aligned does not simply recover a forgotten Third World modernism; it asks whether modernism itself must be rethought when decolonization, development, and anti-imperial thought are treated as conditions of form. Modernism’s problem was never simply that it excluded the rest of the world. Its deeper violence was that it made Europe’s experience…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

balochistan POLITICS

The Baloch Yakhjeti Committee and the Struggle for Rights in Balochistan

On the night of March 19, 2025, 13 unidentified bodies were buried in Quetta's Kasi graveyard in darkness, days after a train hijacking incident by separatist groups some 117 km from Balochistan’s capital. No names. No families present. No explanation. In a video that was circulated across social media, a man is heard saying the…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad and Somaiyah Hafeez

When the World Waited on a Sentence

A personal meditation on Trump’s threat of civilizational death, and on what it means when power turns catastrophe into speech. It was one of those evenings when waiting ceased to feel passive and became an ordeal. I felt it first in the body: a recoil, a fatigue, a kind of emotional depletion that seemed…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Satire’s Border: English, Urdu, and Who May Laugh

The state wrote the best epigraph for Mohammed Hanif. A Case of Exploding Mangoes lived happily enough in English for years, mixing offence and admiration. Then it reached Urdu, the national language, the ungated room. Men arrived at the publisher’s office and took the books away. The message did not require a memo. Rebel English…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé