Media Watch: Vindication and virality
The Republican candidacy of Donald Trump – what to speak of his victory in the presidential election itself – was such an outlandish prospect, that it had been completely written off from…
Media Watch: Here’s to good manners
It is election time in India (do read up on a tidy piece on why Indian elections take so damn long in The Economist) and electioneering is in full swing. All the…
Media Watch: Sensitivity training
The death of a child is something that would invoke a sympathy for the worst of your adversaries. Or for the politicians whom you oppose. But Kamar Zaman Kaira isn’t…
Book review: The end of a journey
Book review: Journey into Europe, Islam, immigration and identity: Akbar Ahmad , third edition,OUP, 2019,Pp 497, Rs 1295) This is the fourth book of a quartet of studies authored by Akbar Ahmad …
Media Watch: First, they came for someone else
Anchor Farieha Idrees isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Still, one would have thought she would have known better than to tweet out some pure, unadulterated chutzpah. On the surface,…
Behind the Mist
The unimaginable cruelty of Human Trafficking “I am doing a service to the people. I don’t force anyone to go abroad. People come to beg me to send them abroad” said Ashraf…
Media Watch: ‘Hail to the Chief’
There is talk, as their often is, of bringing in a presidential system in the country. Now, I do believe that in most cases, the simplest explanation is the correct one, Occam’s…
Media Watch: NY Times Leaks?
The nation and its news media (broadcast as well as the supposedly more cerebral print) have infamously short memories. A shockwave of sorts had hit the airwaves a couple of years ago,…
Media Watch: Another ticking time-bomb
Much humour going around about the PTI’s choices for members of cabinet. They’ve selected a finance minister who doesn’t understand the economy, and an information minister who doesn’t…know how to talk? This…
Media Watch: One-dimensional expectations from victims
Not a day goes by when one doesn’t read of crimes against women in the country, but it is only the more bizarre ones (of those reported in the first place) that…
Media Watch: And then, they came of the display photos…
It was a bad year, 2018 was, as far as freedom of speech in the news media was concerned. A pivot that continues well into the current year and one that shows…
Media Watch: To play the keera’s advocate
It’s gone viral, the Kingtox insect repellent advertisement has. The ad ticks all the boxes. It’s funny. It’s relevant to the product at hand. It stays in your mind. And, like (most)…
Finger on the trigger – Make way for Pandemonium
Lahore based poet Afshan Shafi, after her recent success with the launch of her ‘Quiet Women’ – a poetic collaboration with female visual and graphic artists from around the world –…
Media Watch: On public suicides
It’s a dreadfully sad case. Retired Brigadier Asad Munir, a former ISI veteran, a former CDA officer and, ironically, a former NAB Deputy Director General, committed suicide in the wee hours of…
The question of the South Asian ‘matriarchate’
– Book review – Widows and Daughters: Gender, Kinship and Power in South Asia by Anna Suvorova On Friday simultaneous ‘Aurat Marches’ took place in major cities all over the country to…
Media Watch: No questions, not even obvious ones
We were never at war with Eurasia. We were always at war with Eurasia. Such were the uncontested narratives of the Ministry of Truth in 1984, with no one, least of all…
Media Watch: Screeching versus dead
There has been an air of despondency among the liberal democrats of Pakistan during the ongoing tension with India. No, it is not because they love India and resent the upper hand…