Educating the nation
By Anjum Altaf The Single New Curriculum (SNC) is the latest big thing and, like many of the big things before, it will end with a whimper, losing air and falling limp…
Review: BBC’s A Suitable Boy
By Kabir Altaf Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy has long been one of my favorite novels– like literary comfort food. As I wrote in an earlier piece, the novel is an epic…
Book review: Transgressions: Poems Inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Transgressions, by Anjum Altaf, is a book of poetry that is a comment on the nature of translation more than anything else. This commentary is made all the more poignant since the…
Why do we find TikTok cringy?
We have all have friends who share TikTok videos on their social media timelines just to hate on them. This is an interesting dilemma for TikTok creators, where on the one hand…
Spoiler: the politician is a douche
I get it. Militaries the world over make PR films. One cannot hold this fare up to higher standards of art. It is, literally, propaganda. One cannot expect an American film, produced…
Genuine, genuine everywhere…
“The most important thing in the world is sincerity……once you learn how to fake that, you have it made.” Waseem Bhai – or ‘seem paai, as he is known to the Lahori…
Citizens join hands to revive Children’s Library
Healthy societies have spaces for learning and connecting, and there is no better institute to facilitate this than libraries, which have the potential of becoming useful hubs of community activities. Keeping this…
Rest in Peace, Bloom Bardolator Brontosaurus
In the summer of 2018, a friend who was until then still majoring in English literature alongside me at the Lahore University of Management Sciences wrote to Professor Harold Bloom asking for…
Peekaboo, I see you!
Relationships contribute in many ways to who we are and how we see ourselves. They may bring us the greatest joys or be our hardest battles. Some relationships tend to go way…
Media Watch: If there was one thing worth watching this week
The legitimacy of the electoral process after which the present government has come into power used to stoke a lot of emotions. The supporters of the ruling party – subdued of…
Azadi aur Bandookein
ProperGaanda take a lighter look at Indo-Pak relations in the past 73 years ProperGaanda, a local news and digital media publishing platform, recently released a two part series titled “Azaadi aur Bandookien”…
Pakistan’s options for climate geo-engineering
It is the right time that Pakistan starts exploring the research and governance options regarding climate geoengineering (CGE). Although Pakistan has a tiny share in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is considered…
Rethinking water and urban design
With the monsoon season now in full swing, residents of major urban centers in Pakistan will have to see sights they are all too familiar with – choked sewerage, overflowing gutters, blocked…
Media Watch: Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?
Our story today starts with an American gentleman who goes by ‘Lenny.’ One evening, he was sitting at a bar on election night, 2016. “And I turned to the guy to my…
Media Watch: On letting ‘monsters’ speak
Not too long ago – much lesser than a decade, actually – this very column was a tad critical of the MQM in an edition. That, too, only tangentially. After a…
Media Watch: Haha, a mistake, a MISTAKE!
Readers might have seen a video clip of a talk show doing the rounds these days. In a program presumably about the economy, a gentleman is marvelling about how large a business…
Media Watch: ‘Ungrateful Afghans’
This writeup (titled ‘Patriotic Racism’) was written back in 2016, but the conversations that make their way to the airwaves and the press are identical, so it merits a replug. Back in…