Raza Rumi
On the flourishing ‘column’ industry despite the slow growth of readership’
What is so peculiar about the Pakistani media opinion factories churning out problems and solutions products day after day? Frankly, they are self perpetuating oligarchies and boring at best. The slightly discerning mortals who browse the daily newspapers in English and vernacular languages or […]

Raza Rumi
Karta hun jama phir jigare lakht lakht ko
(I seek to gather the scattered pieces of my heart)
Not long ago, say two decades ago, we the Zia’s children yearned for a country that treaded the Malaysian path for prosperity; and somehow were to transform a tolerant, inclusive society. Such were the dizzying dreams. We wanted […]

Raza Rumi
Much has been said on how the election results are a referendum against the policies of General Musharraf. While there can be little disagreement with this, there is a clear lesson for Pakistan’s urban intelligentsia that had been screaming about the futility of this election.
True, Pakistan’s troubled polity will not transform overnight, nor will […]

Raza Rumi
Decades of imperialism have left Afghanistan and its people devastated. But the fall of the Taliban, and the much touted “liberation” of Afghanistan, has produced a new spate of novels, films and other artistic media dealing with the “Afghan victim.”
And when I say “Afghan victim,” I mean a nauseating overdose of burqa-oppression, Taliban brutality […]

Raza Rumi
Fahmida Riaz is Pakistan’s premier female poet. She became a sensation in the early 1970s when her bold, feminist poetry created a stir in the convention ridden world of Urdu poetry. Riaz was expressive, sometimes explicit, and politically charged. She created a completely new genre in Urdu poetry with a post-modern sensibility. Later, she […]

Raza Rumi
God, You created the night, I made the lamp
You created the earth, I made earthen pot out of it
It is me who created the mirror out of stone
It is me who made elixir out of poison

Today Pakistan celebrates Allama Iqbal’s birth anniversary with the usual lip-service. The key messages of Iqbal seem to have […]

Raza Rumi
The other day when my spouse complained for the umpteenth time about the peculiar attitudes of men towards their female counterparts in Pakistani workplaces, I had no option but to be blunt.
“You need to get real,” I yelled. “You must shed all notions of human complexity when dealing with the Pakistani male. He’s a […]