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2 weeks ago | 
dawn.com | Muhammad Amir Rana |Abbas Nasir |Muna Khan |Muhammad Siddiqi
Of Reason, Romance and Ruin: A Conceptual History of the ‘Pakistan Ideology’By Nadeem Farooq ParachaVanguard BooksISBN: 978-969-402-682-4170 pp. It is generally professed in our country that ours is the one of the two (the other, arguably, being Israel), ideological states in the world. However, almost all states utilise ideology — liberal democracy, social welfare, secularism, socialism or Hindutva — to legitimise their existence and inspire people’s allegiance.
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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | Zohaib Majeed |Abbas Nasir |Muhammad Amir Rana |Muna Khan
Kashmir: The Unfinished Agenda of PartitionLt Col (r) Syed Iftikhar AhmedRoyal Book CompanyThe book provides the complete history of Jammu & Kashmir, from the rule of the Mughals followed by the Sikhs and Britishers and how the latter left the Subcontinent after dividing it into two dominions, Pakistan and India, while leaving Kashmir in limbo. Kashmir, which has a Muslim majority, has since then remained the main source of friction between Pakistan and India.
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Feb 8, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Mehr Afshan Farooqi |Muhammad Amir Rana |Abbas Nasir |Muna Khan
The pronoun ‘hum’ or ‘we’ is added to many of Farsi-Urdu nouns to create poetic, evocative compounds such as humsafar [fellow-traveller], humraaz [sharer of secrets], humdum [sharer of breaths] and so on. While each compound is poignant in its own way, none perhaps is as heartwarming as humzubaan [sharer of one’s language], especially if one lives in a foreign land.
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Feb 1, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Faisal Bari |Muhammad Amir Rana |Abbas Nasir |Muna Khan
Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in LahoreBy Manan Ahmed AsifThe New PressISBN: 978-1-59558-907-1373pp. Walk down any prominent street in London, New York, Istanbul or Montreal — talking only of cities I have had the opportunity to spend time in — and you see a few things for sure. The street will tell a story of the city through the buildings. A lot of the buildings will be dated.
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Feb 1, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Muna Khan |Rafia Zakaria
I WANT you to watch a documentary that will infuriate, pierce your heart, make you weep and cause sleepless nights — as it did for me. Because it’s not enough to imagine what Palestinians endure every day as we catch snippets of images on TV or social media feeds, desensitising us as constant exposure to violence can do. We must watch No Other Lands to understand what it is like to live in fear of Israelis — soldiers and settlers — coming to evict you from your home.
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Jan 18, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Muna Khan
ELON Musk wants us to believe he cares about women. His concern for vulnerable women in the UK under attack by ‘grooming gangs’ — a term only used for sex crimes by South Asian men — comes off as a cruel joke given how he profits every day from the misogyny on the X platform. This is especially true for women journalists who face harassment, threats, abuse and do not have any access to any reliable redress.
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Jan 11, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Muna Khan |Shahid Mehmood
AS luck would have it, I streamed A Real Pain the night before Kieran Culkin received an award for his supporting role in Jesse Eisenberg’s film about two cousins visiting Poland to honour their grandmother’s dying wish. Initially, I didn’t want to watch it because the film’s topic was about the Holocaust, and after watching a genocide live on our screens, I wasn’t in the mood for pretending events in Palestine don’t qualify as genocide.
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Dec 7, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Muna Khan
I WROTE to three different friends to tell them a video clip they shared from journalist Talat Hussain’s vlog on Nov 30 was edited and a misrepresentation of facts. I can understand its shareability factor: the thumbnail says “116 confirmed dead” and in the video he says he can confirm 116 deaths, use of excessive force and devastated families burying their loved ones. But the video published was about Kurram.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Muna Khan
I AM proposing a new ailment unique to Pakistanis: Perpetual-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I am not making light of our situation. On the contrary, I’m asking we recognise how this PTSD unites us, irrespective of income or political affiliation or even a lack of interest in politics. It requires recognition and then treatment, one of which is mobilising powerful nations to impose change on social media platforms and AI companies’ incentives. They will not self-regulate.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Muhammad Suhayb |Muhammad Amir Rana |Abbas Nasir |Muna Khan
Filmi TabsirayCompiled by Shaukat Ali ChinnaMaqsood Publishers322pp. The history of Pakistani cinema, particularly its early years, suffers from a glaring lack of comprehensive documentation. This lack has only widened over time, due to several factors, including the absence of proper archiving, the deterioration of old film prints, and the general neglect of Pakistan’s cinematic legacy in cultural discourse.
