Marium Irshad

I have travelled abroad after a long time. It was Pakistan and its various cities that had consumed me all these years. As the culture of intolerance and selfishness evolved in Pakistan, we blamed the west for incarnating us into this new self. We find every Pakistani lamenting the country going to the dogs. Many […]

The media has played a significant role in the formation of a new attitude in Pakistan. The country has opened up and it has attained a progressive aura. The traditional gap between the rulers and the people has shrunk to such an extent that governments are forced to change their way of working to sustain […]

We are in the midst of electing local governments both in Sindh and in Punjab. The call for elections at the grassroots level remained in limbo for 10 years before the Supreme Court (SC) intervened to interrupt the slumbering rulers. The winds of change have been blowing ever since the 2008 general elections, with an […]

We have two rather well-known terrorists from Pakistan serving jail time in the US: Aafia Siddiqui and David Headley. Both Aafia and David have al Qaeda in common but had been caught doing different things to defeat the enemies of Islam (according to their definition of Islam and its enemies). Mr Headley was one of […]

Here we are, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Defence Day of Pakistan. Clarification is awaited though as to what we defended during the 1965 war. Was it Pakistan or its respect in the comity of nations by sending discreet messages to the US, USSR and China to get us out of the mess we […]

The Kasur incident was shocking. Nowhere do children deserve to be treated with such brutality. That the children, both girls and boys, in Hussain Khanwala village in district Kasur had been sexually molested for the last eight years gives some clue of a state deprived of any sensibility of real governance. The debate about the […]

Are the Taliban disintegrating? Are we witnessing the natural process of the aging of an organisation that has done little ideologically to maintain itself except for fighting through a number of commanders and obscure leadership? The Afghan Taliban never accepted the US invasion of their country after 9/11. Afghanistan was never directly complicit in the […]

Not until I read this absorbing book Working with Sharks by Dr Fauzia Saeed did I realise that not I but all those men who had tried to harass me in the workplace or in the public space were wrong. Freed from the feeling I have become surer about myself. The book revolves around the […]

Since his wedding, Imran Khan has been in the spotlight for tying the knot with a woman having an ‘objectionable’ past, which appears to be contradictory to the aura of Islamic values the PTI leader has carefully created around him and the party. Videos of Reham Khan dancing, wearing miniskirts, at festivals held in the […]

I received an advertisement recently on WhatsApp that read something like this: “Saying no to the beverages produced by Ahmedis is the least one can do to honour Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).” A few years ago, I happened to stumble upon a similar advertisement exclusively printed on a poster to be put up in the Lahore […]