Aisha Fayyazi Sarwari

I recently returned from Istanbul where the streets in Taxim were choked with protesters rallying against the mismanagement of the mining tragedy that killed hundreds in western Turkey. There erupted a Twitter campaign against a person close to the government who was pictured kicking a protester in the head. Twitter, previously banned there, was still […]

I had the opportunity to meet Meena Menon at a close friend’s house in Islamabad many months back. She was sociable and inviting. We talked about The Hindu where she worked as its Pakistan correspondent. The paper holds the reputation of being among the region’s most balanced papers with high editorial standards. We discussed how […]

In 2011, I penned a column in this paper on Imran Khan: ‘Imran Khan: why I’m a believer’ (Daily Times, November 1, 2011), linking him to the greats like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Iqbal for giving us then what seemed like hope. Digital technology has made a tomb of that tribute. Three reasons were what […]

There is an Urdu columnist whose content is oddly blinkered in its focus on historical revisionism, whipping the liberals for being immoral and chastising women who are not invisible. However, a few days back, he wrote about press freedom and that Pakistan needs all sorts of voices from right to left. Badly written but clever […]

Pakistan will be the last place where polio and rabid right wing discourse will exist in the world. The rest of the world is fighting both while we are being overpowered by the forces that want to make them proliferate. In a bloody campaign to shoot polio workers and halt their efforts against the crippling disease, […]

Women’s status in Muslim societies creates a pulviscular cloud of religious discourse that surrounds it, but always results in shaking off the dusty image of an emancipated woman as a model. It is no surprise that Pakistan is making its women suffer so insidiously for being women. Let us look at some recent examples from […]

Both Christine Lagarde, director of the International Monetary Fund and Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe believe there is one way of saving Japan from the slowing growth rate because of an aging population and shrinking labour force. The only way is to increase the number of women in the workforce. The recent IMF report, […]

Appeasement knows no bounds in Pakistan. The interior ministry has released Taliban prisoners in a ‘goodwill’ gesture. As we have it, there is no uproar that these mass murderers will roam the streets our children play in. Instead, the Speaker was asked by the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) to call the Information Minister’s attention to obscenity in […]

I was at a social media event in 2011. In it an expert from the US was talking about how he follows news in Pakistan: “I just follow @razarumi and I know what is going on in Pakistan — what is going right in Pakistan and what is going wrong in Pakistan. I do not […]

The chaos, disorder and mayhem the country finds itself in is mostly because many did not attend a formal classroom, and those few that did were coached on a curriculum that left the raison d’être of our country to be interpreted by bigots and war addicts. It is Pakistan Day; on this day 74 years […]