Victims, not smugglers on October 3, 2016On September 29, 2016, Saudi Arabia executed Amjad Hussein Ashraf Shah, a Pakistani national, for allegedly smuggling drugs into Jeddah. Shah’s execution brings the total number of Pakistanis Saudi Arabia has beheaded since 2014 on charges of drug trafficking to 42. There are over 2,390 Pakistanis imprisoned in Saudi jails, a significant number of whom […]
The Imdad Ali case: executing the mentally ill on September 17, 2016Imdad Ali is a 50-year-old death row inmate who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. On September 20, 2016, he is set to become the 420th person to be executed by the Pakistani state since December 2014. A poor, mentally ill individual, unable to afford proper medical care or competent legal counsel, facing an imminent […]
The misogyny of bold advertisements on December 21, 2015When a significant number of feminists and members of the patriarchal moral outrage machine — mortal enemies, in almost all scenarios imaginable — find themselves on the same side of an issue, one can assume something truly remarkable has transpired. Alas, the issue in question is something as banal as a newspaper advertisement. The Pakistani […]
Universities in name only on December 14, 2015Due to a depressingly familiar turn of events one of Pakistan’s most famous universities, the Punjab University (PU), found itself becoming the subject of newspaper headlines late last week. Though the details are sketchy, the basic facts of the incident repeat themselves so often that we can fill in the blanks: male and female students, […]
The tragedy of being Christian in Pakistan on December 7, 2015In its badly spelled official response to an inquiry by the Supreme Court (SC) on the spate of katchi abadi (slums) demolitions, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) shamelessly betrayed the ignominious bigotry deeply ingrained in the institutions of Pakistan. Amidst the plethora of poorly articulated and illogical assertions, one despicable ‘justification’ for this energetic trend […]
Cricket and the city on October 16, 2015Cricket is in the news once again: on the field the Younis Khans and Shoaib Maliks are earning accolades aplenty while behind the scenes the Pakistan Cricket Board’s (PCB’s) marketing department is in overdrive to sell its latest multi-million dollar venture, the Pakistan Super League. The regularity with which cricket dominates the headlines and captures […]
The Qadri verdict and death penalty debate on October 9, 2015The recent Supreme Court (SC) verdict in the Qadri case inspired in me what seemed to be dangerously close to a moment of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I, like many others gravely concerned with the state’s capitulation to forces of religious intolerance and violence, was overjoyed by the apex court’s landmark ruling, which […]