Chronicles foretold
A piece that I wrote with Asad Sayeed for The Friday Times. This piece was written before the long March and the subsequent developments…
Capitulating Rajas: why Taliban might not be resisted
My new piece for The Friday Times South Asian history is a tale of capitulation of local elites before external invaders. Be it the…
Casteism is alive and well in Pakistan
What do you expect of a country where the aboriginals are known as janglis, asks Raza Rumi It is a cliche now to say…
Lost Imaginations
Sixty one years have gone by but the creation of Pakistan is still a heated debate: contested, fractured and bitter. That history has been…
Rediscovering Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941-1999)
Raza Rumi asks if Pakistani state and society are ready to reclaim the great artist on his tenth death anniversary Ten years ago, on…
Imagined homeland
It irks me when I hear simplistic platitudes on Pakistani society, state or people. The heterogeneity of Pakistan is by itself an anthropologist’s dream,…
We shall overcome the trap of violence
As clouds of war hover in the skies of Lahore, I am missing Delhi and lamenting the relatively difficult venture to visit the city.…
Remembering Benazir Bhutto
I am reposting my piece that was written a year ago. It seems that not much has changed in these twelve months It was…
Unfullfiled Civic Longing
Written for The Friday Times, Pakistan After Mumbai, I have stopped watching television. I will not participate in the senseless jingoism of the Indo-Pak…
Data Ganj Baksh: Lahore’s oldest guide
Perhaps the greatest of the experiences at Data Darbar is to find oneself connected to a stream of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, with a…
Islamabad: This too shall pass
Bemoaning Islamabad’s fall from grace Not long ago, Delhi and Lahore were vulnerable to hordes of foreign invaders. The Mongol fear was overwhelming and…
The words of others
My piece published in the Friday Times last week For decades, Pakistan’s poets and writers have defied conventions and the almighty establishment. Rooted in…
Pakistan: IMF Programme needs to be debated
Debating the aid plan The not-so-inevitable is about to happen. After weeks of groping in the darkness of global financial mess, the Pakistani government…
Ajoka Theatre and the Caucasian Chalk Circle
Who is entitled to keep the child – one who is a better, nurturing mother, or the one who may be the natural…
Ode to Benaras – Ghalib’s grand vision
The cancer of communalism and bigotry in South Asia continues to haunt us. These days, the Muslims are once again a subject of intense,…
The pampered Islamabadites
My piece published by Himal Southasian Islamabad is a very peculiar urban space. Though no longer a town, it is still struggling to become…
Living Lohawarana – a Lahori rambling
My piece for Himal Magazine’s October issue There was a Lahore that I grew up in, and then there is the Lahore that I…
Through a screen, darkly
Pakistani cable operators, following the cyclical escalation of imagined hatreds, discontinued the transmission of Indian satellite channels in 2002. The absence of Indian TV…
The Zardari conundrum
By all statistical estimates and anecdotal evidence, Pakistan’s middleclass has grown during the last decade. The visible manifestation of this historically significant trend was…
Utopia for me- Pieces of my heart
My piece published in the News on Sunday yesterday – Karta hun jama phir jigare lakht lakht ko (I seek to gather the scattered…