Sameer Ahmed

John Bull is the personification of Great Britain, or at least used to be in the days of the Empire. He is a corpulent, middle-aged man with a Union Jack waistcoat, much like Uncle Sam. Both figures stand for the political and cultural dominance of their respective countries. Uncle Sam, of course, is the more […]

That is right. That is her name. Not Nanny, as in the woman employed to look after children. It is Nunni, the Punjabi word for tiny. She is white all over with a ginger tail and ginger spots on her ears. She is not a pedigreed cat but a wild, domestic hybrid. She divides her […]

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” says George Orwell in his chilling novel Nineteen Eighty Four. As members of a race, or inhabitants of a region, we are defined by our history. History is important because it provides us with an identity. But what happens if some […]

In Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (1998), the hero, Truman Burbank, lives a normal life in an agreeable middle-class neighbourhood. He has a house, a job, a wife, a neatly settled routine — only none of it is real. From his infancy, Truman was brought to live on the set of a reality television […]

She is at the butcher’s with her father. The two are there to get their sacrificial Eid meat minced. When it is time to go, the father picks up two plastic bags stuffed with ground meat and climbs onto his motorbike. Surprisingly, he adjusts himself to the rear of the seat and lets the 10 […]

On Friday, last week, a freshman from my FSc pre-med class requested I not mark him absent while he skipped college to attend an important ceremony. His school was offering certificates of recognition to its ‘high- achievers’, a term coined to refer to candidates who obtain exceptional scores in the annual matriculation examinations. It reminded […]

I teach Shakespeare at a public sector university in Lahore. In a recent end-semester examination, I asked my English Literature class to respond to a question that was basically in the ‘whose fault was it all’ category. The replies were interesting for what they did not offer. Albeit the academic setting, the responses yield some […]