Navid Shahzad

“A plague on both your houses,” spat the dying Tybalt in Shakespeare’s quintessential romance. The state of Pakistan is not dying but it might as well be. Body assailed by multiple stab wounds, vultures stand ready to tear at it while resuscitators transformed into mere voyeurs view the carnage from the vantage point of both […]

Remaining true to rock’s central core, the band courted controversy deliberately and consciously in videos such as Ehtesaab from the album Kashmakash, which included footage of a polo pony dining in a posh restaurant. The powers-that-be were simply not amused and a state ban on television appearances followed swiftly. The band, however, remained undeterred; a […]

Some readers may find it amusing to learn that a 70-year-old woman in Pakistan mourns the passing of rock musicians so far removed from her cultural experience. For me, ‘rock’ is a wondrously exhilarating art form and I have spent a number of decades studying and attempting to understand the ideology that informs this great […]

David Bowie is dead, a simple announcement that has rocked the whole world with grief. It has been a sad start to the year musically. The outrageously sideburned bassist, singer and songwriter Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister of the English rock band Motorhead, whose music was one of the pillars of the heavy metal genre, died […]

As in India and other Asian countries, slowly and painstakingly, the age-old barriers of class are beginning to show signs of fraying at the edges. And as our societies evolve from a state of naïve consciousness into progressive states of awareness and self-knowledge they face the inevitable, bitter truth that without great effort and without […]

Pakistan has a booming hunt on for trained media persons, which has been accelerated with the establishment of a huge number of private television channels. During the period 2006 to 2008, while officiating as the dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, I was informed that the department of theatre, […]

The views perpetuated by an irresponsible media, particularly cinematic narratives, is in part responsible for the creation of stereotypes for women. In film after film, television soaps and dramas continue to ply the image of a westernised woman as the pariah while juxtaposing the image of the traditional ‘good’ woman as a sati savitri or, […]

Outside the family, where the gendering of roles and bifurcation of space is often assumed to be ‘natural’, there is a tendency to assume that institutions are neutral with respect to gender. Despite a small though not insignificant change, women continue to be offered and confined to stereotypical female spheres of activity that are closely […]

“Empowerment is like obscenity; you don’t know how to define it but youknow it when you see it” – Strandberg.When the 21st century dawned, the seeds of a new future appeared to have been planted. Power began a tentative shift from the might of armies to the strength of the intellect in countries that are […]

While appreciating Syed Kamran Hashmi’s op-ed piece, ‘Why is Malala so controversial?’ (Daily Times, July 31, 2015), I believe the issue is important enough to solicit more views. Hashmi has applied his considerable skills to detail the reasons for the west’s penchant for lionising someone like Malala and the subsequent polarising figure that she has […]