On objectification of women on April 23, 2022It is rancid and desperately unpleasant that women face objectification at all levels in society. But what truly precipitates that objectification? If we turn a serious gander at history, we see that history is primarily commandeered by men and women could only be seen as mere objects. The question which rears its head is that […]
When she said, ‘Let’s write a book’ — a moment of innocence on March 19, 2022JJ Rousseau has written somewhere that human beings are internally innocent but what makes them corrupt is the outside world. Innocence has much more and deep meanings than being without a sin and clean in character. Most people think and consider innocence in crime and goodness binary. But it is much more than that. Innocence […]
Philosophy of friendship — what does it mean to be friends? on March 3, 2022Greek dramatist Sophocles once sanguinely wrote, “To throw away an honest friend is, as it were, to throw away your life.” I wonder what is so significant in an honest friend whose throwing away is equal to throwing away one’s life. Lately I have been to Gwadar to attend a book fair. An honest friend […]
Absence of drama and spectacle — a brief study on February 7, 2022“She might be a great person, but life is so much bigger than just loving someone,” writes Kazuo Ishiguro. We often hopefully say this place is great, this thing is great and this person is great. We also say that this field is great and will prove to be propitious for you. This person is […]
On a bench, near the sea, they were talking about what makes human beings so important on January 15, 2022The sky was pathetically blue. English is a very mercurial language. Blue is this colour we always see while looking at the sky but blue has another meaning of pathos. This another meaning of blue is marked by melancholy. However, the sky was pathetically blue and Razzak who was flanked by his yet-to-be girlfriend was […]
A happy new year is a pipe dream so far on January 2, 2022“In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.” Slavoj Zizek. The happy New Year is little less than circumventing the unimaginable blunders the tech and industrial magnates of the world have done […]
Jacques Derrida and Antonio Gramsci — poets who were never actual poets on December 26, 2021“Everyone is born a poet – a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?” writes American poet William Stafford. I can now vaguely remember something that I had read some […]
Time does not exist: Jorge Luis Borges idea of time on December 20, 2021Albert Einstein once wrote: People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. However, before Einstein, the time concept was a linear concept of time pioneered by Isaac Newton which said more or less time is universal and same for everyone everywhere. […]
The dilemma of being a poet — Leo Tolstoy and Rainer Maria Rilke, a brief study on December 17, 2021What should a poet do when he is really a poet of apotheosis and what would be his responsibilities as a poet? Some critics write that society and the following exigencies create poets and decide what type of poet he should be but it needs deep probe how a poet should reconcile with society being […]
Literature resides beyond the give and take shibboleth on December 10, 2021Eastha in the flagship novel of Arundhati Roy, one of my favourite thinkers, the God of Small Things, has two thoughts: one is anything can happen to anyone and second is; it is best to be prepared. Life is fraught with tensions and irresolute junctures and there is no elixir to this malaise as Samuel […]