A little kid wearing a fake moustache and glasses while his mother looks on.

Accepting Who I Was Allowed Me to Change My Life

For the longest time, I kept a secret from everyone, including myself. I always wanted to be a writer but felt that sweeping it under a rug would allow me to be happy. I was so wrong.  Don’t you sometimes wish there was a chance to go back and rewrite history? Granted, if that were possible, one would want to give Hitler a wedgie or prevent colonization. But if there really is such a thing as the ‘butterfly effect’, I’d rather start small and just change my own past. Or, at the very least, one teeny tiny decision.  Out of Sight isn’t Out of Mind Our brain is a funny animal. It plays tricks on us all the time. And the way it does that […]

A man standing in front of tank

True Power Lies in Never Having to Use Force

Let’s talk, for a moment, like the armchair analysts we are, not like the Pulitzer prize winners we pretend to be. Let us ignore the precedents it would have set and the precedents already extant for it for a moment. Let us try to differentiate between de-politicizing a situation and dehumanizing it. Let us fade out the colored lines. Forget red, blue, green. Let us revert to black and white. Let us all take a collective step back. Exhale. Let me recount an incident that happened a long time ago. When I was thirteen, I got a room of my own for the first time. It was the high point of my existence until then. I was the master of my domain, the king of […]

A collage of black music images

A Trip to A Museum Made Me Rediscover Melody

Melodies have woven a deep cultural thread in my life growing up in Pakistan, where songs and lyrics carry the weight of family histories, blessings and prayers. Whether at weddings, celebrating a new birth, or marking Independence Day, every occasion has its song, passed down through generations, binding us to tradition and memory. When I moved to London last year with my family, I was unnerved by the absence of a symphony in our lives. It was a balmy summer evening in London when I finally realised what our new lives were missing. It was the sound of music. I was reminded of the words of the great French Romantic poet, novelist and dramatist Victor Hugo, who said: “Music expresses that which cannot be said […]