Sacred Games: India comes to Netflix on July 13, 2018Sacred Games (SG) is not your typical Bollywood rom-com. For starters, the series’ opening scene shows a small dog that has been thrown from a high rise building fall to its death, splattering into a bloody mess. It also almost has enough explicit nudity to rival HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ The eight-episode series is India’s […]
Violence and aggression: is it all monkey business? on April 30, 2018I have always found it puzzling when people label violent criminals as ‘animals’. Why? Because to label violent individuals as non-human is to claim that violence is something separate from human nature. A brief glance at any history book shows us that this is simply not the case. A 430,000-year-old fractured human skull — showing […]
‘Muslim community should look forward instead of remaining obsessed with glorious past’ on February 26, 2018A session discussing Christopher de Bellaigue’s book Islamic Enlightenment: modern struggle between faith and reason was held on the second day of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) on Sunday with the author – an accomplished journalist who has covered the Middle East, Turkey and South Asia since 1994. Other speakers included Iraqi journalist and recipient […]
Where does Pakistan stand seven years later? on January 4, 2018It has been seven years since Salman Taseer was assassinated by his own security guard for raising his voice against Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws and for a Christian woman who remains incarcerated over blasphemy allegations. Taseer knew about the implications of his principled position on blasphemy. He was well aware that a number of clerics […]
Shortsighted currency devaluation on December 11, 2017It seems like the days of the central bank stepping in to maintain the overvalued exchange rate might be over. This past Friday, the rupee plunged against the dollar, falling down to 107 to a dollar by the close of trade. Apparently currency dealers were in shock, many of them largely clueless about the reason […]
Pakistan and the Golden Crescent on November 24, 2017Pakistan, along with Afghanistan and Iran, comprises what is known as the Golden Crescent. This is one of Asia’s most notorious opium drug routes in terms of both production and trafficking. According to a recent report by the United Nations Office on Drug Crime (UNODC), things are not looking good. The latter has found that […]
MBS — the Middle East wild child on November 10, 2017Tensions are running higher than usual between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Over the weekend, Riyadh said that it had intercepted a ballistic missile close to the city’s airport, which it believed had been launched by Houthi rebels from across the border in Yemen. And to top things off, the Saudis said that the Iranians were […]
The legacy of Communism in Pakistan on November 5, 2017The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) held the second session of the workshop titled, ‘100 years of Soviet Revolution: A South Asian Perspective on Saturday. The event was hosted in the VC Office’s Faculty Lounge at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences. The first seminar began at 9:30 AM, and the […]