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Cacti garden: Desert rose
A garden without leaves can only be a cacti garden. Its striking landscape and distinct architectural form strays away from a conventional one (rich in palms, seasonal plants and creepers), giving the...
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HBO series Girls: Good girls gone bad
When the HBO series Girls first hit our TV screens two years ago, it instantly found an audience for its brutally realistic and bold take on life after graduation. The show gives you a glimpse into...
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PCOS: Ovar[l]y cautious
Puberty can be challenging, but combined with the polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) it can become unbearable. It is a hormonal imbalance that occurs in women, mostly teenagers, causing unwanted...
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Mela Chiraghan: Let there be light
The heart of Shalimar town, Lahore, beats in sync with the dhol, its arteries clogged with thousands of people, shoving each other in a hurry to reach the alao (huge fire) at the center. The flames...
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Formula One: Titans on speed
There is little in sight aside from the signature black and white chequered flags as leading racers Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel whiz through the final two laps of the Formula One...
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Movie review: Non-Stop - plane pleasure
There have been a number of airplane hijacking movies with an all-too-familiar plot, but Non-Stop, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, takes it to a whole new height, with some bumps of course. With...
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Book review: A God in Every Stone - an unusual treasure hunt
Twenty minutes into Kamila Shamsie’s session at the Lahore Literary Festival had me convinced of her eloquence and brilliance as a writer. And as a reader I expected nothing less in her latest...
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Festivities: Have an egg-ceptional Easter
Easter is more than a festival of decorated eggs; on this well-attended Sunday service of the year, Christians celebrate the resurrection of their lord Jesus Christ after he was entombed following his...
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Islamabad sabzi mandi: A [un]usual day at the market
A crate of guavas planted with five kilogrammes of explosives wreaked havoc in the lives of hundreds of families in the federal capital on an early April morning last week. The blast not only claimed...
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Ayesha Jalal: Borderline politics
Working with competing narratives of the biggest and bloodiest migration in recorded history has always been a formidable venture. But in Ayesha Jalal one beholds a scholar of grit, who even as a...
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Urdu Times: The News Room
In the basement of a brightly lit South Asian video and DVD store situated in a busy thoroughfare of Jamaica, Queens, 61-year-old Khalilur Rehman adjusts his print glasses as he feverishly edits a...
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Book review: The Muslim League in Barabanki - perplexities of partition
A collection of 11 polemical essays on Indian Muslims and the Partition, mostly reprinted or revised short articles, make up The Muslim League in Barabanki by Indian-American scholar CM Naim. Using an...
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Book review: The Almond Tree - under the shade
The Almond Tree by Michelle Cohen Corasanti provides a welcome break in an age when wars are fought like videogames and bodies of children blown to bits are brushed under the carpet as collateral...
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Caught in the net
Reality morphs into ‘second life’ with studies claiming that an average Internet user spends a staggering two hours in cyberspace every day. And distraction gets costlier as society adjusts more and...
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Movie review: The Past - six degrees of separation
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has followed up on his 2011 Academy award winner A Separation with another solid domestic drama The Past. Although in the long run it won’t be known as Farhadi’s best,...
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Waiting on providence
‘A media black hole,’ is how Balochistan, the largest province in terms of landmass, is often described by members of the press. Therefore, when the Pakistan Navy invited a group of journalists for a...
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The ageless ajrak
The ajrak is a fabric with motley colours, chiefly variants of red and blue and black and white for outlines, infused in a distinctive block print pattern, but it shoulders more burden than it can...
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Listen to your heart beat
Not all heart attacks are sudden, intense and obvious. Symptoms can be varied and signals can be mistaken. Many people are unaware that they have coronary artery disease until a heart attack strikes....
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Movie review: Divergent - Out of line
Divergent, directed by Neil Burger, is an adaptation of the 2011 novel written by Veronica Roth while she was still an undergraduate. The film is set in a post-war, dystopian Chicago and shows a...
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