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A Crooked House in Paris

From Rahbani’s aphorism to Mouawad’s absurd wedding, Lebanon’s stage insists on today when tomorrow never comes. “There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Reading Fanon in Pakistan

I do not have an extensive library but I students who visit my home from Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan or from FATA. Young intellectuals from these areas have long been enticing me to hand over the original books of Fanon. There are three reasons that Fanon speaks to me (as a Sindhi) and to young students from…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

No Morality as Such: Alasdair MacIntyre in the Age of Gaza

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.” — Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 31. Why should an ordinary person, with no taste for philosophy and no patience for academic quarrels, care about a Scottish philosopher who…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment To understand why Sholay (1975) endures after fifty years, one must recall the late Jesuit scholar Father Gaston Roberge's pivotal insight that Indian cinema is best understood as anthropological. In The Theory of Indian Cinema (1985), Roberge emphasised that Indian films should not be judged merely by…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

A mother endures for her two disappeared sons in a drowning home

On the morning of 19 August 2025, as Karachi drowned under torrential rain, 50-year-old Sabzi stood by the doorway, her chadar wrapped tightly around her head. The water was rising inside her home, but her eyes were fixed elsewhere. That date 19 August, was carved into her mind. It was the day she had to…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad

The Story of Jan Bibi and Abdul Hameed’s Missing Son

In June 2022, during the third semester of my master’s at the University of Karachi, two of our fellow Baloch students were taken—enforcedly disappeared. The news spread like a wound across the Baloch students in the university. With their families, we set up a protest camp outside the press club. I kept posting updates on…

ByHazaran Rahim Dad

Resisting Necropolitics: The Story of the Banuks, Mama Qadeer and the Voice For Baloch Missing Persons

Necropolitics of ‘kill and dump’ of the Pakistani riyasat has been primarily resisted by subaltern working class young women, men and a few older Baloch activists such as Mama Qadeer and Mir Muhammad Ali Talpur. Just sixteen to twenty such people made the world aware of the brutality of necropolitics in Balochistan and set the…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

At the Gates of Democracy: A study of “Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics”

Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Edited, introduced, and annotated by Maël Montévil, (Hurst Publishers, UK; Oxford University Press, USA), 2024. In Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, (hereon IPIR) Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan offer a meticulously reasoned and deeply disconcerting reassessment of India's socio-political…

ByKamran Baradaran

Legalizing Repression: The Anti-Terror Law and the War on Baloch Political Activists

In June 2025, the Balochistan Provincial Assembly passed a controversial amendment to the anti-terrorism law, granting sweeping powers to law enforcement agencies. The amendment allows individuals to be detained without trial for up to 90 days based solely on suspicion. Far from being a measure to enhance public security, the law marks a dangerous shift…

This Threshold We Call Form: Reading No Man’s Land

“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers... Live the questions now.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), p. 35 We met…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé