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Cotton Queen: How a Girl Burns the House of Empire

A girl in a cotton field, a bungalow set alight, a nation in exile that still insists on seeing itself. In Cotton Queen, Suzannah Mirghani turns Sudan’s most familiar landscape into a site of refusal, memory, and fragile futurity. Cotton in Sudan has always worn a mask. At dawn, a field looks harmless enough: wisps…

ByNarendra PachkhédéNovember 29, 20250Comments

Uncategorized Poetry

Two Poems by Shahalam Tariq

Iqbal's Dream The mosque in Cordoba stands symmetrical, linear — like the progression of History in the Imam's khutba on Friday. The dreamlike Spain glorious still home to the righteous pours out of his dream and the ink flows onto the page placed on the desk (….) The unleveled still broken road gaping at every…

ByShahalam TariqNovember 25, 20250Comments

The Mamdani Moment : Politics After the Age of Performance

Zohran Mamdani’s election isn’t just a win for the left, it’s a generational revolt against rhetorical politics, moral evasiveness, and the exhaustion of governance by performance. History rarely announces its turning points. It can arrive as spectacle or as slow erosion, as collapse or quiet reordering. The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New…

ByNarendra PachkhédéNovember 15, 20250Comments

The Prince of the Mountains: On Agha Abdul Karim and His Guerrilla Foco

The mountains, as a symbol of guerrilla resistance against the riyasat of Pakistan, have played a crucial part in the politics and life of Balochistan. “To take to the mountains” is a euphemism for starting or joining a guerrilla war. There have been at least six significant “takings to the mountains” since 1948. The first was that…

ByQalandar Bux MemonNovember 8, 20250Comments

A Quiet Epic of Absence

"I am cold and I think / I will never feel warm again." — Forugh Farrokhzad's poem Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar, 1964). Premiered in Competition this Fall at the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Isabelle Kalandar's debut feature Another Birth marked the arrival of a filmmaker whose vision is at once intimate and elemental.…

ByNarendra PachkhédéNovember 6, 20250Comments

The Genius of Bacha Khan

Most geniuses have one masterwork for which they are famous. For Che and Fidel, that work was surely the Cuban Revolution and its international humanism, just as it was for Lenin, the Russian. For CLR James, we can list "The Black Jacobins” as an extraordinary work of genius, as well as the underground Marxist group…

ByQalandar Bux MemonOctober 19, 20251Comment

The Peace That Played Itself: Sharm el-Sheikh and the Spectacle of Power

“Peace is the coded continuation of war by other means.” —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15. It was wall-to-wall Trump. Donald Trump’s Peace 2025 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh resembled a television production more than a peace…

ByNarendra PachkhédéOctober 16, 20250Comments

The ‘Anti-Imperialism’ of Idiots: Pakistani Left Edition

(inspired by Leila Al Shami) Once again, we see a familiar pattern: a section of the self-declared anti-imperialist camp in Pakistan rushes to defend the Pakistani state and its imperial backers in the name of resisting “US hegemony” or “Western imperialism.” But strip away the slogans and the socialist jargon, and what’s left is a…

ByFarhad BalochOctober 4, 20250Comments

Top “Universities” in Pakistan Are Turning into Trial Rooms for Baloch Students

The Toll Plaza The bus was crawling toward the Islamabad toll plaza when the silence cracked. Masked men, rifles slung across their chests, stormed inside. They switched off the cameras, collected the passengers’ phones, and commanded stillness. Saeed’s hands trembled. He knew this was no ordinary security check. In Pakistan, being Baloch is like carrying…

ByChangaiz NazeerOctober 4, 20250Comments

Versailles in Gaza

“The Versailles settlement did not so much end the war as prolong it by other means.” — Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 493. On September 29 2025, Donald Trump stood beside Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, a map…

ByNarendra PachkhédéOctober 3, 20250Comments