Sameer Ahmed

That Shakespeare’s work is remarkable — for he reinvigorated old tales by punctuating them with significant questions and lasting observations about the human condition — is a fact for audience members or readers of his works to explore, debate, and perhaps even question. Oftentimes in countries with a colonial history — particularly Pakistan — the […]

The 4th of May usually goes unnoticed in the Pakistani calendar. On that day in 1799, a company of the army of the East India Company led by Col. Arthur Wellesley, another by Gen. Harris and another by Maj. Gen. David Baird, along with men and arms provided by the Nizam of Hyderabad, entered the […]

Public places can present a fairly genuine picture of society. Liberty Market Lahore is one such place. At Liberty, you will find people who regularly frequent the market for shopping, boys who come to ogle at women, those who own fancy expensive shops, those who encroach upon the pavement to sell their wares, and those […]

Trust me when you’ve taught English at a public sector institute for 10 years, you’ve got to have a soft spot for Taher Shah. His lyrics are an affront to the English language, but you do get a faint sense of what he’s trying to enunciate. It has something to do with man being an […]

It’s kind of corny. It comes from the family, one of those tales you find in sentimental, memory-based accounts of the events of 1947. But here it is. It was August in Amritsar. And yes, there was a lot of violence, hell turned inside out. Most of the family made it to the border and […]

It hasn’t been an ordinary week. And that doesn’t even begin to qualify as an understatement after the tragedy that befell families in Lahore on Sunday. But go back a few days. Although it’s hard to keep track, it seems to have begun with the T20 cricket extravaganza. Shafqat Amanat Ali, having goofed up the […]

I’m routinely asked why I prefer to stage Urdu plays over English ones. Then I’m asked why I prefer to stage plays written either by me or my protégés over those penned by established playwrights from around the world. It is a small theatre group at a public sector university we are talking about. The […]

It happened in the outdoor ward of a hospital some years ago. A family was there to visit some relatives. There was the husband, the wife and two children, a boy possibly of six and a girl a year or two younger. It was a sweltering June evening in a hall sans air conditioning. There […]

Pakistani television abounds on cable news networks. This means that the airwaves are dominated by hourly news headlines, current affairs analyses and political talk shows. It is also largely true that cable news channels do not always abide by professional principles of relaying developments without ‘shaping’ them. But that is something even the BBC and […]

Living in Pakistan, most of us are familiar with the historical figure of Tipu Sultan. He was the South Indian ruler of the state of Mysore who died fighting the East India Company in May 1799. But Tipu Sultan has differing legacies in India, England and Pakistan. In November 2014, South Indian playwright Girish Karnad […]