A voice from a Lahore of bygone days on June 9, 2014Nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for people, events and places. Most human beings tend to romanticise and idealise their past, because reminiscing on bygone days and the associations they evoke furnish them with a personal history and identity markers with which they construct their distinctive profiles. The relationship between people is organic and ruptures between […]
Lahore again after 40 years on June 2, 2014In the early hours of August 14, 2013 I arrived at the Lahore Airport. As I have written in the past, each time I touch Lahore’s soil it feels like I never left. I am not sure if any other place so effectively erases the impact of time as does Lahore. Or, let me correct […]
Forced conversions and targeted killings on May 19, 2014Forced conversions and recurring bloody attacks on the Hazara Shia minority of Balochistan are currently in focus in the international media. It is now extensively documented in the annual reports of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) that forced conversions take place when locally the police and administration connive at it or remain indifferent. […]
Narendra Modi and the Indian Constitution on May 19, 2014Indian voters have now given their verdict: a majority wants the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form the next Indian government under the premiership of Narendra Modi. According to the latest count, the BJP has won 282 of the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha. Along with its allies, it can probably achieve 337 seats, […]
Narendra Modi and the Indian Constitution s on May 19, 2014Indian voters have now given their verdict: a majority wants the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form the next Indian government under the premiership of Narendra Modi. According to the latest count, the BJP has won 282 of the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha. Along with its allies, it can probably achieve 337 seats, […]
It all started in and around Rawalpindi on May 12, 2014It has been a sheer pleasure to read the autobiography of Kailash Puri, written largely in Punjabi and rendered into very readable English by Professor Emeritus Eleanor Nesbitt. We learn that Kailash was born in Arya Mohalla, Rawalpindi, just next to Gordon College. Being the fifth daughter in a family of Khatri Sikhs who longed […]
Writing about Lahore and its forgotten history on May 5, 2014One is constantly learning and one should always keep learning. At 67, I can claim to know much more than I did when I was 17 but, like all those wise men in the past who devoted themselves to finding out the truth but realising how little they were able to achieve in that endeavour, […]
The LUMS experience on April 7, 2014I have now been teaching at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), for more than six months. It all started when, last summer, I received an invitation from Dr Anjum Altaf, the dean of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at LUMS, to teach there. Having lived in Sweden for more than 40 years, and […]
Iqbal and Jinnahs visions of Pakistan IV on March 31, 2014On March 23, 2014, I happened to be at the Pak Tea House. Around three o’clock in the afternoon a procession arrived from the direction of Gol Bagh. I learnt that it had originated at the Minar-e-Pakistan where 74 years ago, on the same day, the demand for separate Muslim states/state had been made. However, […]
Iqbal and Jinnahs visions of Pakistan III on March 24, 2014On August 11, 1947, Jinnah made a speech in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly that declared equal rights for all Pakistani citizens irrespective of their religion or ethnicity. It was a major rupture with his statements since 1940. The refrain during those seven years had been the impossibility of Muslims and Hindus being part of one […]