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1 month ago | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Abbas Nasir |Nida Kirmani |Muhammad Amir Rana
Many years ago, the late poet, critic and broadcaster Qamar Jameel scribed his poetry collection Chahaar Khwaab [Four Dreams] for me and wrote: “Khwaab mein jo kuchh dekh raha hoon, uss ka dikhana mushkil hai/ Aaeney mein phool khila hai, haath lagana mushkil hai [What I see in my dream is hard to show to others/ A flower blossoms in the mirror which is hard to touch].” This couplet immediately came to my mind when I picked up Ghalib: Flowers in a Mirror, A Critical Commentary by Mehr Afshan...
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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Abbas Nasir |Muhammad Amir Rana |Naeem Sadiq
At the 16th Karachi Literature Festival (KLF), the two incisive keynote speeches in the inaugural session, by F.S. Aijazuddin in English and Asghar Nadeem Syed in Urdu, set the tone and tenor for the three-day festival — the exchange of critical ideas between speakers and their audiences, courageously and freely, and raising matters related to culture, history, politics and economy that are seldom discussed in mainstream media.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Amin Ahmed |Abbas Nasir |Ahmed Bilal Mehboob
We know that the first claim to fame for Syed Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973) is the founding of the Indian Progressive Writers Association (PWA), followed by being the first secretary-general of the erstwhile Communist Party of Pakistan, which resulted in him serving a prison term for more than four years in Pakistan. In 1935, in London, he drafted the manifesto for the PWA with M.D. Taseer, Mulk Raj Anand, Pramod Sengupta and Jyoti Ghosh.
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Nov 3, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Abbas Nasir |Muhammad Amir Rana |Muna Khan
The prolific and leading English author from the past century E.M. Forster famously wrote: “Two cheers for democracy, one because it admits variety and, two, because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”From my earliest meetings with Rahat Saeed I remember him raising his cup once and saying: “Three cheers for socialism, one because it distributes wealth and, two, because it brings dignity to all.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Abbas Nasir |Ahmad Maudood Ausaf |Muhammad Amir Rana
Out of the three principal centres of Indo-Persian civilisation that evolved from a fusion of multiple Vedic and Arabo-Persian cultures over centuries, Delhi and Lahore continue to be celebrated, while Lucknow is both celebrated and mourned. During the last millennium, all these cities enjoyed their share of primacy, glory, splendour and opulence, but also experienced bloodletting, conquests, loot and plunder.
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Aug 10, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique
On August 11, 1947, the founder of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, gave his most important official speech — not to a political gathering, but as the president of the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. Almost at the beginning he said: “The Constituent Assembly has got two main functions to perform.
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Jul 21, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Umair Javed |Maleeha Lodhi |Nazir A. Jogezai
In the 1990s, I first met Rana Abdul Rehman. His body was found a few days ago in a canal near Faisalabad. On July 9, he was kidnapped in Lahore by unknown people after he had left home for his publishing house and bookshop called the Book Home. It is one of the few publishing houses in the country that promote enlightenment and critical thinking.
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Jun 29, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Zulqernain Tahir |Ashraf Jehangir Qazi |Tariq Parvez
Ustad Amanat Ali Khan, the celebrated scion of the Patiala gharana [clan] of our classical music, did wonders when he took to singing geet and ghazal. When young, I regularly used to listen to Khan’s classical and semi-classical renditions, including ghazals, on those audio cassettes that needed to be flipped over manually inside the metal or plastic chamber of the tape recorder after every 30 or 45 minutes.
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May 18, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Ahmad Fraz Khan |Ahmed Bilal Mehboob |Abbas Nasir
I wish to begin this piece with the lines that Hasan Zaidi quoted to end his essay on Paul Auster in Books and Authors last Sunday (May 12): “Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.” These are words from early 19th century French memoirist Chateaubriand, translated into English by Auster, which appear as an epigraph at the beginning of the novel The Book of Illusions.
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Apr 6, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Harris Khalique |Mahira Sarfraz |Asfa Sultan |Ali Khayam
The British actor, director, playwright and critic Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) writes in one of his famous prefaces to Shakespeare’s work: “The artist transforms and multiplies experience by imagination, and may even come to think that what is true of his art will be true for the world it mirrors.”Art mirrors the world and Shakespeare turns himself into a polished mirror to reflect what is inside a human soul and what exists outside.
