Owais Mughal

I recently came across this wonderful website about the Wildlife of Pakistan. It is seldom that I come across a website which I feel obliged to share with our readership, but this one is indeed the trend setter. What impressed me that most is that it displays a very well researched material, which is also very up to date. It is a rarity in my opinion, to find this unique topic about Pakistan on the web, hence here is my piece of spreading the word around.

OK, now without further ado, here it is: Wildlife of Pakistan: Journey from the Karakoram to the Arabian Sea. The site is run by Sheikh Nausherwan Sarshar Ahmed who currently lives in Iowa, USA.

Adil Najam

Found this very interesting older PTV documentary on Swat (3 parts) from only a few years ago (maybe 3 or 4). Ordinarily it would not have been noteworthy. Slightly slow moving in typical PTV style. But view it today – knowing what is happening in Swat today – and tears swell up in your eyes and rage rises in you veins. This is the Swat that was. The Swat we knew. The Swat that is being destroyed.

Here are just a few highlights from the documentary that would have sounded mundane only a couple of years ago, but in light of today’s reality which seem like they were spoken in another life, another century.

Part III: “Miandam ki khaas baat yahan ka sakoon hai. Jitna sakoon, peace, tranquility mein nay Miandam may daikha hai shayed hi kaheen hou!” (“Miandam’s special trait is its tranquility. The amount of peace and tranquility that you see here, it is difficult to imagine anywhere else”).

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Adil Najam

Daniya Meenuddin’s book ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’ which releases today (Feburary 9), is the most anticipated work of fiction by a Pakistan author since Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’. It promises to be equally engrossing.

The book is already getting rave reviews. William Dalrymple, writing in the Finanical Times, says that the book “is quite unlike anything recently published on the Indian side of the border, and throws the gauntlet down to a new generation of Indian writers.” The New York Times calls it “mesmerizing”:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, is like watching a game of blackjack, the shrewd players calculating their way beyond their dealt cards in an attempt to beat the dealer. Some bust, others surrender. But in Mueenuddin’s world, no one wins.

Mueenuddin who practiced law in New York for some years after studying at Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, now lives on a farm in Pakistan’s Southern Punjab. His short stories have been making waves recently, and have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008.