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Trees of Thar

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

Non-Alignment as Method

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

The Baloch Yakhjeti Committee and the Struggle for Rights in Balochistan

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

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

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

The Museum as Proximity

The Museum as Proximity

A note on the Gulgee Museum, and the handbook that refuses to settle Gulgee By Narendra Pachkhédé Art history is where a nation’s cultural life becomes a border regime. It grants entry, issues credentials, seals certain practices with the stamp of “modern,” and files others into quiet nonappearance—present in rooms, absent on the page. The…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Le Moment de Bascule: Mallet’s Far-Right France and France’s Quiet Threshold

POLITICS Reviews

Le Moment de Bascule: Mallet’s Far-Right France and France’s Quiet Threshold

Victor Mallet’s Far-Right France is a field guide to how the RN becomes ordinary: centre exhaustion, party professionalisation, media-driven fear, and grievance turned into destiny. France’s “moment de bascule” is not just French; it is a European threshold with Atlantic consequences, and it helps decode what’s unfolding south of our border, where immigration enforcement in…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Fever as Method: On Tribulation 99 and the Venezuelan Kidnapping

Fever as Method: On Tribulation 99 and the Venezuelan Kidnapping

From Cold War montage to contemporary capture, on the persistence of imperial form. Why intervention no longer argues its case, but edits it. “Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin again.” — Julio Cortázar. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Translated by Thomas Christensen.…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Ethics of Staying: Béla Tarr and the Cinema of Endurance

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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Kamber Chakar: The Revolutionary Who Embraced Death and Achieved Enduring Remembrance

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…

ByAzmat Aziz Baloch

Mohammad Bakri and the Custody of Palestinian Cinema

Mohammad Bakri and the Custody of Palestinian Cinema

Mohammad Bakri’s death marks more than the loss of a major actor and filmmaker. It exposes the conditions under which Palestinian cinema has been forced to exist. “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Thesis VI …

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Walking Prophet

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…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé