Adil Najam

Daniyal Noorani’s song and video – Find Heaven – has a thought-provoking but eerily disturbing quality to it. Anything that makes you think hard is bound to be disturbing. And for that reason alone this is worth a very careful listen, and an even more careful watch.

Given the news and events of the last few days this song and video take on a profound relevance and poignancy. But then, that relevance and poignancy could have come from the events and news of just about any week in recent memory. And that, really, is the whole point.

Here is a song that takes on the subject of violent extremism head on. With introspection and thoughful analysis rather than with mere slogans and platitudes. It is straight-forward and it is simple. But it refuses to make the complex simplistic and it does not simplify that which is, in fact, profound.

The song does not require any commentary; it is commentary itself. For me, the animation speaks as profoundly as the song; if not more. So let me urge you, once again, to take a careful listen, and an even more careful watch. This is not meant to be ‘background music’; nor are these stock visuals. This is a ‘package’ that needs to be seen and heard as one.

And then – once you have done that – it needs to be pondered upon. Pondered hard.

Adil Najam

Pakistan remains at war. Whether it is schoolgirls in Lower Dir or Shia mourners and those waiting outside Jinnah Hospital in Karachi. All Pakistanis everywhere are targets for these murderous enemies of Pakistan.

It may be true that we do not have many friends abroad. But it is certainly clear that our cruelest enemies are all amongst us.

Day in, day out, they kill and maim and terrorize Pakistanis all across Pakistan. No city is safe. No Pakistani is safe. The ritual is now well entrenched. We mourn our dead. We cry. And just as the tears begin to dry, we are called upon to mourn some more. To cry, again.

The tears are unavoidable, and maybe even necessary. But they are no longer sufficient.

Bilal Zuberi

Somewhere around class 6 I realized that I needed to have a hobby?

Playing cricket on the streets or reading Ishtiaq Ahmad novels were not considered real ‘hobbies’ in my peer group. Popular hobbies were: stamp collecting, coin collecting, paper plane making, collecting dinkie cars, or drawing transformers in your school notebooks.

Well, I chose stamp collecting to be my hobby for two simple reasons: (a) an aunt gave me a stamp collecting book as a birthday present, and (b) I realized I could start a collection right away by simply going through letters mailed to my family over the past few years.