Abandon all hope ye who enter here on March 21, 2018Every change, Cesar Aira says, is a change in the topic. But the distinguished writer probably missed the point that in a world where piety reigns supreme even the topic refuses to change; what changes is the tone that outstrips the taste. When the economic unrest forces the ruling class to change, it begins to […]
Life but a walking shadow on March 9, 2018One can only wonder about Shakespeare’s cataclysmic state of mind when he wrote the lines that gave life an authentic aura. In Macbeth, he defines life a possibility of which inexorably terminates at the impossibility, ‘a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more’. Was Shakespeare […]
Honeymoon of death on February 18, 2018“A heretic is a man,” GE Lessing says, “who sees with his own eyes”. “…the greatest beauty lies in the clarity of things”. If one has the courage to see the reality with clarity, one must look to the land of the pure where life finds itself in the death throes. The battle to protect […]
Eros and being on January 26, 2018In a recent statement, the ISPR chief said that Pakistan considers its nuclear capability to be a “weapon of deterrence… (The) only thing stopping them (India) is our credible nuclear deterrence…” If it does not offend the Pretorian guards, may one ask what if the nation of ‘pious’ decides to commit hara-kiri by dropping a […]
Iran — thus spoke Zarathustra on January 19, 2018For all the wrong reasons Iran is once again in the news. Wrong, because the patriarch of death and destruction, the former president of the hegemonic power who ‘liberated’ Iraq through its annihilation, condemned the Islamic republic as an ‘axis of evil’, hence it can do nothing good. Before turning into an Axis all these […]
The destructive tolerance for bigotry on December 11, 2017The words in the land of the pure are spoken yet the ears have not gone dumb. The flabbergasted Zarathustra held hostage to silence kept wondering about the fate of sanity while the clergy jigged, lisped and danced as it inflicted its wanton wrath on God’s creature with impunity and might. According to the established […]
Better to be red than dead on November 18, 2017On a rare, frosty yet a breezy morning when the golden light of a mellowed sun was still lightening the street of Vienna, a young doctor dreaming about his post-graduation studies came across a thin but an organised procession marching on one side of the strasse, as the traffic peacefully moved on the other. Scared […]
Striptease of freedom on November 3, 2017If human life is an archetype of freedom, civilisation is all about repression. Sigmund Freud stated these words without having bare minimum knowledge that his psychological analysis would bring comic relief to those who would suppress human thought for their own ends. Nietzsche was the other victim of same tragedy whose idea of free-will became […]
The subversive past on October 18, 2017While excavating an interred past a thorough search in the heap of eclipsed memory brings home some faint shadow, which could be frustrating but a productive and qualitatively different outcome is equally possible. On a cold and grey night, shivering with the chill in the air a child clad in warm clothes, sitting beside his […]
Faithless face behind the religious mask on October 10, 2017Planet America, this is where the American people live in a state of denial, indifference and Alzheimer’s. For an indoctrinated majority, which suffers alienation, apartheid, and apprehension, the inherent anarchy of the system, the dream of a ‘land of opportunity’ has come to a halt. It is a universe of an abstract freedom, where domination […]