Loving Marquez

The great South American writer and Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez celebrated his 84th birthday on the sixth of this month.

 Marquez, lovingly known as “Gabo”, has been a special favorite of mine for many years now, ever since a dear friend introduced me

Yallingup by Omrite

I should right out confess that I’ve never been to Australia. Indeed, I know very little about the place per se, beyond what little I can remember from school geography lessons, long ago. Thus, like the redoubtable Messrs Sellars & Yeatman (who wrote those great classics, 1066 and All That, And Now All This), all that I do know about Australia (oddly referred to as ‘Oz’ by its natives) is all that I can remember.

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Pakistan's Sexy Revolution

Two days back, a video of a well-provided but confused kid arrived on facebook. The boy starts of with saying that "We are all good people shouting slogans and our police is pushing us. For whom? Raymond Davis- an Englishman?"

He adds that our women observe parda at home but came out for the revolution today, just for all of us and our country and that Imran Khan up there is so moneyed thet he doesn't even need to do all this. Behind this maverick, you can see the flags of a religious party floating.

Landmark turned crisis

The land dug up for what was planned to be Pakistan’s highest tower has caused huge cracks in buildings near it

The construction of “Mubarak Centre”, a huge commercial plaza on Lahore’s Ferozpur Road, close to the Muslim Town area, was started in 2006. According to the Environmental Impact Assessment report of the project, the main building was going to have 74 floors (thus making it the tallest building in Pakistan); the other three annexes were

The Kinnaird years

Places hold us, whether we like it or not…rather like barbed wires…we leave little bits of ourselves there.

— Katherine Mansfield.

Last week, Kinnaird held its 74th convocation. Almost one thousand graduates converged in the Amphitheater behind Kinnaird’s buildings and next to its famed hockey ground. I was one of the black and maroon robbed women, in those mortar board caps.

Learning to ride

Journalism without training is like horse riding without practice. You tend to fall every now and then. And each time the fall hurts more. Keeping all these thoughts in mind, I joined a short course on media in the South Asian Free Media Association last December, which lasted two months.

Our class was quite diverse --a few journalists, students, housewives, one retired officer and one student leader who couldn’t stay away from his female class fellows.

Remembering Taseer

It has taken me exactly two months to come up with this. Taseer was usually very controversial during his lifetime. He was the front-man in PPPP, fighting the opposition with often colorful, humorous, sometimes malicious comments. His in-your-face politics frequently took the limelight. 

His death was shocking. It was sudden and too brutal for a man of good taste. However, what surprised me