Owais Mughal

Following photo is courtesy of _tunnel_. The photo was taken on May 14, 2008 in Malir, Karachi. Private educational institutions have become big business in Pakistan, but this picture is also about so much more. What comes to your mind when you see this?

Bilal Zuberi

I now live in Boston, USA and among the personal things I simply have to find time for (besides eating and doing my laundry) is getting a haircut every few weeks or so. I got a haircut today and despite paying many times more than what I would typically pay back home in Pakistan, I came back disappointed.

The whole experience was a disappointment – no personal connection, no conversation with anybody else at the shop, and a blank stare at a wide mirror is all I got for my 45 minutes worth.

And that reminded me so much of my local hajjam or naai (barber) from Karachi. Actually I remember two barbers from Karachi. One we called Khalifa (my dad once told me all hajjams in the Urdu speaking parts of India were called Khalifas) and he used to come to our house for a mass hair-trimming every month or so.

Adil Najam

The cowardly suicide attack on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad which has led at least eight people dead is not just an attack on a foreign embassy in Pakistan, it is an attack on Pakistan.

There is and there can be no excuse for this dastardly action, and to make excuses is to become part of the apparatus of validating the terror itself. There are those who will make misplaced claims about this being an act of ghairat (honor). Let us be very clear, this is a bay-ghairat (dishonorable) act, no matter what the concocted excuse or justification might be.