Aisha Fayyazi Sarwari

Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man had a young girl in it called Lenny as its central character. The only one good thing that came out of this girl contracting polio was that she got to stay home and listen in on all the grown up conversation. There is no other benefit. There are only […]

This is not a piece about finding justice for Aasia Bibi. God knows it would be very costly if that were so. Aasia Bibi has indirectly cost Pakistan a brilliant governor in Salmaan Taseer and a valorous minority’s minister in Shahbaz Bhatti. This is a piece that argues the opposite: that we give up on […]

From Gaza to Kobane, the devastation being caused by Zionist and Islamist reactionaries shows the crisis of capitalism plunging the whole region into an abyss of bloodshed, mayhem and barbarism. The Islamic State’s hordes are closing in on the besieged town of Kobane on the Turkish-Syrian border. Thousands of terrified Kurds have fled to Turkey […]

Anyone who is oblivious, callous or uninformed about how crucial Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is to Pakistan should be awarded the kind of treatment tribals reserve for adulterers. This delicate thing we call FDI has raised many countries from South Korea to Bangladesh out of the pit of abject poverty, injecting fuel into the economy, […]

Pakistanis have the equivalent of a drug addict’s deviated septum when it comes to overdosing on simplicity. Recently, a graphic image has been designed and can be seen on social media that compares India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) to the metro bus project in Pakistan. It goes something like this: India spent $ 75 million […]

Forgive me for not sympathising with the passengers of the Karachi to Islamabad Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight that got delayed for hours because an ex-minister arrived late. In all the rejoicing going on about how VIP culture got a kick in the shin by the people of Pakistan, who threw Rehman Malik and another […]

It has been 13 years since the 9/11 attacks. Since then, many paths have been set upon their tangents. The event also established one key fact: nobody knows what is going on. From the US administration and its intelligence bodies to those of the rest of the world, no one can be credited for pointing […]

The politics of protest orchestrated by Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri have defined many chasms between the well-governed society of our dreams and that of the real facts on the ground. The worst thing about it is that it has disclosed this chilling absence of women in the consultative process between the government, the opposition […]

As if we needed anything to be left to the imagination of what constitutes an Islamic state and what ultimate end it will have, ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has already had a couple of executions via beheading to its name, most recently that of a Kurdish man. […]

For Imran Khan’s supporters, taking bravado, uncompromising positions is a virtue. For others not blinded by the cult of the ex-cricketer it is what has caused a loss of over 600 billion rupees to the brittle economy, weakened a frail democracy that had just begun crawling, locked down the cities of Islamabad and Lahore for […]