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Book review: Granta 124: Travel - Shared landscape, multiple accounts
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt...
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Kot Addu: The organic dream
Fame and misfortune have swept across Kot Addu in equal measure. The city that is home to one of Pakistan’s most iconic folk singers, Pathaney Khan, and a victim of the 2010 floods that occurred after...
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Namakmandi in Peshawar: Worth your salt
Taming the flame on a charcoal grill is perhaps easier than suppressing your appetite in Namakmandi, Peshawar. The brain is involuntarily overwhelmed with thoughts of food as you stroll past tikka...
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3G and 4G: Twin Technologies
Long after India, Bangladesh, Nepal and even Afghanistan introduced the third and fourth generation (3G and 4G) of mobile telecommunications technology, Pakistan has finally followed suit. The higher...
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A Renaissance of faith
The chants of “Hallelujah, Hallelujah” resonate from the Burt Hall field tucked away in an obscure part of Garhi Shahu, Lahore. The field is flooded with nearly 40,000 anxious Christians who have...
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Book review: Don’t Lose Out, Work Out! - break a sweat
FEver wondered what it takes for the likes of Bollywood stars Kareena Kapoor Khan, Saif Ali Khan, FPreity Zinta and business tycoon Anil Ambani to flaunt their fabulous, super-fit bodies? All of them...
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Film review: The House is Black - the other face of beauty
To find beauty in human suffering may sound almost sadistic and even more so if it is in the form of the stunted limbs and rotting flesh of lepers. But the late Persian poet, Forough Farrokhzad’s...
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Framed: Maternal ties
As the world celebrates Mother’s day today, it is worth acknowledging women who live and busy themselves with the company of not their own, but strangers. For most of them, the traditional social...
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Visiting cemeteries: The living dead
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, Let’s choose executors and talk of wills —William Shakespeare, Richard II...
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Infectious waste: Health (s)care
Prof Noman Ahmed of NED University of Engineering and Technology shares information from an ongoing research project into the lack of healthcare waste management in Karachi, a city of about 19m...
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Sensors vs sensibility: Unmanned utilities
Guided by sensors instead of sensibility, unmanned systems have been designed to carry out a mission. Now whether the mission is destructive or constructive is determined by motives not machines....
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Show review: Game of Thrones - crowning glory
“I will answer injustice with justice,” replies the exiled Daenerys Targaryen at the suggestion of her advisor to spare the lives of the slave masters. She then proceeds to crucify them in the same...
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Vertical vegetation: Hanging gardens
When living is restricted to small spaces, especially in an urban landscape, gardens and foliage are the first to get the axe. But decades ago, an American professor of landscape architecture, Stanley...
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Australian football: Kick start
To an outsider, the athletes practising ‘footy’ or Australian football at the Carlton Football Club in Melbourne, Australia, might appear like a bunch of misfits. The group of sweaty players, some of...
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Aftershocks of trauma: The war within
In the post-9/11 world, Pakistan and America share a mutual enemy and a mental health disorder. The war that has raged on for more than a decade now has left in its wake plenty of demons and debris on...
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Movie review: Jinn - fear factor
People in Pakistan had many reasons to be excited about Jinn. For one, the Hollywood flick has two Pakistani-Americans in dominant roles: actor Faran Tahir, who has some A-list Hollywood movies and...
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Movie review: The Grand Budapest Hotel – a case of hollow grandeur
Filmmaker Wes Anderson generates extreme reactions in his viewers. He is either a master like no other or overrated and boring. Though he has been above average for the last couple of years, every...
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Guggul tree: The endangered saviour
The Guggul tree is nothing short of legendary. The apparently unassuming shrub that dots the deserts and hills in this part of the world holds immense medicinal value. It has been used in Ayurveda, a...
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Attabad Lake: Teardrop miracle
Popular myths surround the formation of several geographical landmarks in Pakistan. The lake at Katasraj, Choa Saidan Shah in Punjab, is said to have formed from the teardrop of Lord Shiva mourning...
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Tuition industry: A class act?
There is a fine line between help and dependence, and Pakistan’s rapidly growing tuition industry seems headed towards the latter. Over the past decade, tutors and tuition academies in the country...
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