Aisha Fayyazi Sarwari

The frequency with which you get to know how phenomenal a person was by reading their eulogy is increasing. First it was the marketing director of a popular English daily, Masood Hamid, for whom there were only words of admiration: the people he mentored and the professionalism he brought to an industry where that is […]

For a country that shuns sex education on the basis that it erodes moral values, the number of unwanted pregnancies in Pakistan are staggering. According to a 2012 figure by the Population Council, 4.2 million of the nine million pregnancies were unwanted. As much as 54 percent of these resulted in back alley abortions. As […]

Just like Edward Said in his work Orientalism talked about a distance and patronisation with which the west referred to the east as servile to power, German anthropologist Johannes Fabian penned the concept of the “denial of coevalness”. This is when anthropologists defined people they studied as if those people belonged to another time. In […]

Pakistanis turn vicious when forced to conform to the diktat of the US. They call any such attempt to alter Pakistan’s foreign or domestic policy imperialist and hegemonic. Yet strangely, replace the US with Saudi Arabia and it almost reads like it is supremely ordained by a power that is both respectable and honourable. Historically, […]

In the four minutes that the Vogue #MyChoice video was played online, many critics missed the 3.8 or so minutes that talked about various options women exercise over their bodies: to have children, to travel, to love or to eat in quantities they like, and instead focused on those few seconds Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone […]

It is odd that the protection this country provides its citizenry is directly proportional to their power. The most vulnerable are left to the mercy of chaos: the Ahmedis, Shias, Christians and those random trespassers who are falsely accused of blasphemy either because they did not pay their dues or upset someone more powerful than […]

The modifications outside my children’s school are seemingly significant: fortified walls, concrete barriers, barbed wire and the ageing sniper who is often caught scratching his ear, but the reality is different — the walls are just as penetrable and the children just as susceptible to a terror attack just like the Army Public School (APS) […]

There was another terror attack in Pakistan. The gods have forgotten to reshuffle our fate; week after week we are brought from a crawl to a standstill. This was possibly a suicide blast in Shikarpur, Sindh, a place that is known more for Sufi Islam, a softer Islam, not the kind that is available more […]

It does not inspire much confidence in the government to have the counterterrorism plan acronymed NAP; they should have at least rolled it on their tongue to make sure the name does not give terrorists a psychological advantage. This National Action Plan (NAP) claims the government will root out not just terrorists, the good and […]

There was so much blood in Peshawar, the blood of children. It was painful, painful but apparently replaceable. Replaceable. The outrage of the Peshawar attack should spin the country into a vortex of mourning for years. Each of those 132 children could have held Pakistan’s future in their hands — one of those children could […]