Ishtiaq Ahmed

The news that matinee hero Dev Anand died in London on December 3 as a result of cardiac arrest saddened fans all over the world. A very large number among them are Pakistanis. Dev Anand was born on September 26, 1923, not in Lahore, but less than 50 miles from. His ancestral village, Gharota, was […]

Last Sunday, I wrote about an upbeat mood pervading Pakistan with regard to peace and cooperation between India and Pakistan. I had suggested that Lahore qualified uniquely to symbolise the spirit of peace and solidarity between the two countries because demands for a free India and Pakistan were raised in this great historical city — […]

A visit to Lahore for us who have settled in another part of the world, out of free will or under duress, is a pilgrimage. Each time I step on its soil it feels that I never left, though to my very great surprise my Lahore exists west of the Lahore canal while the younger […]

Tariq Malik is a Canadian of Pakistani-Punjabi descent who lives in Vancouver. He made his debut with a collection of short stories, Rainsongs of Kotli, in 2004. I had the occasion to read them and was impressed by his talent for storytelling. In 2010 his first novel, Chanting Denied Shores (Calgary: Bayeux Arts), was published. […]

The origins of the Urdu language is a subject on which not only linguists and political historians cross swords, but even ideologues and Gramsci’s state-intellectuals, representing a supposedly ‘Pakistani’ and an ‘Indian’ point of view, clash incessantly. Considered in the light of this highly contentious and charged academic and intellectual environment, the publication of Distinguished […]

The Bombay film industry or Bollywood is the biggest producer of dreams on celluloid in the world. Such dreams define standards of beauty and aesthetics, good and bad, identity — historical and contemporary. Considering the fact that Islam and Muslims have been present in the Indian subcontinent for at least 1,300 years, and the Muslims […]

The government directed by Asif Ali Zardari and formally headed by Prime Minister Gilani is said to be both corrupt and incompetent. It lost majority support in the National Assembly in recent weeks. The JUI-F withdrew its seven members from the government side and placed them on the opposition benches, apparently because the prime minister […]

The Pakistani media gave a lot of attention to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent visit to India and then Pakistan. Since we consider our friendship with China to be higher than the mountains and deeper than the oceans, it was understandably a matter of concern for us how such a friend would relate to […]

So, after one day another year will be gone. 2009 will be remembered as the bloodiest since 1947, if we exclude what happened in the former East Pakistan in 1971 and if in 2010 we curb terrorism successfully and build peace. On March 3, 2009, the unthinkable happened in Lahore. Terrorists opened fire on the […]