Cartoon

“Papa, please help me. Look how worried I am. What has happened to me? What kind of a disease is this? No doctor has a cure for it! When I try to tell people about it, they start laughing..."

Creepy Chemicals

This Holiday season, toys containing harmful phthalates, which are known endocrine disruptors, will fill up the shelve space in the markets.

Leprosy : The Shadow Lingers

Medically, leprosy is detected early and thanks to a multi drug regime, cured early too. And yet piles of archaic legislation keep those infected on the margins of society.

Fathers and Daughters

When Abu liked to talk of the moon, sitting by the sea, he was quite the man. He would tell me complicated things about life, and how to live it as a running clock with no hands. To feel its essential present.

Global Warming: Green with Controversy

Its effects will happen 30 years down the road, and then you say, "Okay, do something about it."

Mosquito Music

That’s one form of music
That makes me quite sick,
whose notes are malaria,
dengue or filaria.

Pakistan's Universities - Problems and Solutions

300% jump in research publications, nine new engineering universities with European faculty, 3000 Pakistani students sent overseas for higher-degrees...self-serving lies, half-truths and deceit.

Foreign Factor in our Higher Education

Our whole system of education is working in such a way to produce good high-tech workforce for European and American markets. Irony is we do this at our own expense.

The Seasons

Versified version of an Urdu story by Farhatullah Beg

Punjab: The Land of Five Rivers

Its waters have seen life being quenched since centuries. Its trees have embraced the wind that was fragrant by the immortal stories like Heer Ranjha, Sohni Mahiwal and Mirza Sahiban

The Quality Of Pakistani Research

A first glance at the publication lists that are now popping up will lead anyone who is not a domain expert to believe that the HEC’s strategy of throwing money at the dismal state of higher education in our country is bearing fruit. However, a clos

Leprosy

Urvishi is unhappy and silent, walks sluggishly. Did ever Sahil before it watch her slothful? No, no, no. Might a humorous girl grow worried? And much distraught too. She is a silly girl. Silly, silly, silly. Sahil announces.

Religious Conservatism and Science

Those who seriously object and obstruct the stem cell research do so on moral grounds. They know that the embryo from which the cells are obtained is destroyed in the process. Destruction of an embryo is tantamount to killing a human being.

The Export of Disease

India is among the countries with the highest number of polio cases and it is suspected that Indians travelling abroad are spreading the disease.

The Balloon Seller

Chutki fondles its sand-ridden scabby skin. Rani responds with an effusive wagging of it’s balding tail. Dog and girl sit together for sometime. With a brisk movement Rani aims at one of the balloons

Opaque Particles of Sunlit Sand

omnipresent, the eyes shift naturally
and we envisage a future with crimson skies
she whispers words of irrevocable honesty
and we follow each other into the sea

Autumn Harvesting

with ever so trembling hands
he felt for his back pocket
in a gesture reminiscent
of slow motion pictures

Karachi Odyssey II

those fishermen were true
               to their sea
these days it helps not
               being true

Promoting Research in Pakistan: A Few Ideas

This article was presented in National Policy Dialogue Series initiated by Virtual Think Tank Pakistan in collaboration with MoST.

Dance of the Seasons / American Amavasya

Diya dances light
From jack-o-lantern
On our American
Amavasya

Teaching and Research on India in Pakistan - A Conspicuous Absence

One would have thought, that like other adversaries in the world India and Pakistan too, would have studied, researched, taught, understood and analyzed each other almost to extinction.

Needed: A National Dialogue on Science, Technology, Research and Higher/Basic Education

Prioritizing Science and Technology

This article presents a few ideas about bringing positive changes in science and technology sector of Pakistan.

Moving Beyond Talk: A Roadmap for Quality Education

This proposal provides a pragmatic mechanism aligned with the role of HEC (Higher Education Commission) as a supportive watchdog - providing reason, resources, and recognition for quality higher education in Pakistan.

Fishing

Thoughts strike alike the living and the frozen. Innocent or enigmatic: they provide the wind in sails, passion in emotions. The magic potion between irresistible dreams and impossible logic: thought. And thinking? One a wind and the other cloud?

Coins

Why am I alive and not dead? I let my body fall freely, the eyes fixed to the sky. A big splash. And all my questions answered.

Warped

Breathing in and out still alive without a doubt between truths true to themselves trying hard not to warp

The Visitor

If aliens came to Earth, why would they come, and how?

Under the Hill (part 1)

Do not enter, for you may not like what you will find...

Frost Bite

The Case For and Against The Satanic Verses

Evaluating Diatribe and Dialectic as Art

The Music Of The Song Of Life

Everyone knew there was something seriously wrong with it

San Salvador

The lander stood like a giant gleaming egg against the orange sky.

Search for Identity -1, Saeed Anjum’s Short Stories

The day you kill me.
in my pocket you will find
a ticket to Loveland.

Whose Iqbal — Ours or Theirs?

As if I am the traveler as well as the destination itself

Top Ten South Asian Pieces of Music

What to take in the event of natural disaster

The Virgin Bride

The idea of doing that with some sophisticated American bombshell...was paralyzing

The Evolution of Urdu Literature in the 20th Century

Literature is the narration of time

The Magician and The Dreamer

Trust me and all this can be yours

The Sage

forget Plato’s cavemen

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - The Last Prophet of Qawalli?

A music lover describes, and traces the origins and reasons of his love for Nusrat fateh Ali Khan and the genre of qawwali

Porn for Girls

Low budget film on channel 40

Three Bombay Poems

Street death has a peculiar habit ...

Banyan Tree

a lone boat on the sea of the universe

The Dream

The door opened stealthily

Last Orders

I sense your distant presence as a sign declares ‘standing room only’...

Touch

In the West, by the way, that is where our son will eventually go to study...they brutally electrocute an animal to death...

Enchanted Forest

Enter the magical realm

Misty-fying Haze

Thoughts on a poetry recital at The Cafe Blue

For S

A love poem

Bats

When they come to feed

Oxygen

This is Karachi... there is no... fresh air

Vanishing Point

... if by chance our lives, unmolested, had been allowed to continue

The Life Hereafter

And just when we shelter under death, life comes at us sideways

Calligraphy of Coils

A conversation with Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali

The Friend

To those who think in worldly terms
This search confounds all reason....

Azadi

A woman in Tehran intervenes when her husband becomes a smuggler of alcohol

As Long As It Does Not Affect You

So a woman needs to get married but a man doesn’t?

Akbar’s Hospital

Old Akbar...He had followed the exodus out of his country in search of the fabled streets paved with gold and silver. What has the poor guy found? A new life in Toronto...

Reminisce

Our first entry in The Leafy Glade Inn’s Victorian Study, is one in which the author softly remembers people in a place far, far away in the past.