When the Baby of the Family Got Married

“You just watch when Monty gets married,” he’d said as he brushed away his tears, “Then I’ll really cry.” This was vintage Sher Alam. Over the years, in multiple retellings of this incident, which happened when the eldest of our four siblings got married, the love and genuineness that Sher Alam, self-titled as Baati, the baby of our group, wanted to convey has never been lost amidst the laughter and mirth. As sisters and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews came, they all developed their special equations with ‘Baati Dada’. I won’t lie; when the announcement of Sher Alam’s wedding finally came, there were definitely mixed emotions.  On the one hand, there was elation, excitement and curiosity even as to how the erstwhile kid, who, until recently, […]

BOOK LAUNCH: HOME #ItsComplicated

Each time I come home, it’s with a foreboding sense that this time I won’t experience the same ecstasy and bliss of returning to an innocent and purer cocoon that still binds and bonds me to my childhood. Each time, I’m happily mistaken. The airports and points of departure continue to keep pace with my journey of self-discovery, but my mooring, my anchor, remains steady as ever. Despite the changes to the scenery and the people, there’s a part of Pakistan that all of us carry within us. It’s that part that calls us when we’ve been away for too long. And it’s that part that always makes me feel like I’m walking back in time to an era where everything seems to stand still. […]

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 […]