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Colonial ‘chai’ and capitalist ‘coke’
A few days ago, a guest at my house enquired why I don’t drink tea. I mentioned that at some precarious juncture of my youth I irrevocably replaced ‘chai’ with ‘coke’ as my daily conduit. He expressed...
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Learning from China
Pakistan is plagued by a feudal system which has taken the entire nation hostage. According to a rough estimate, there are about 50,000 feudal lords in Pakistan. Transparency International published a...
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Capitalism need not apologise
To those who have watched the financial crises of the United States and Europe unfolding with glee and pronounced with unabashed joy that capitalism is about to die, or at the very least, humbled, I...
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Life outside my safety blanket
Before I begin, I’d like to make a few things abundantly clear. You are about to embark on a dark and depressing road. Even though the purpose of this article is to vent, the means used are painful....
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Occupy Islamabad!
For decades, we have heard, and chanted, slogans against the evils of capitalism. We have witnessed the monopolization of multinational corporates and intensifying ratio of starvation, growing side by...
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The significance of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring
It’s difficult, as a social scientist or otherwise, to recognise when history is in the making. Will the events we’re living through make it to our children’s textbooks? Here is what I mean by “the...
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Capitalism: A deal with the devil
It has been the greatest success story in the history of mankind. It has fuelled unprecedented economic, social and cultural growth, alleviated millions of people around the world from poverty and...
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Capitalism: A blessing in disguise
The word ‘capitalism’ — or sarmaya darana nizam’ — has always had an unpleasant ring to it in Urdu language newspapers. That’s probably why one rarely finds a politician in Pakistan praising...
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Red Ant Dream: A documentary on naxalism, Moaists and the Punjab revolution
A few years ago, I watched a documentary film. I watched it till the very end. Once finished, I played it again – for I searched for meaning; the meaning of ‘azaadi’ (freedom), which to me, before...
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The confused case of a ‘liberal’ Pakistani
As the claws of fanaticism have dug deeper in our skin during the last one decade, a parallel phenomenon has taken place among some sections of Pakistan’s urban youth – a shift towards liberalism. In...
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Raise against capital
Watch the waves, Rumble as they crash, Crash into the world, Of your bourgeois trash. Feel the ground, Shake you to your knees, Knees that tremble, Like a million plastic leaves. Taste the blood,...
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Is Vladimir Putin responsible for Boris Nemtsov’s death?
A western media headline reads, “Nemtsov, a harsh critic of Putin, murdered” This was soon after Boris Nemtsov’s, former deputy prime minister during Yeltsin’s government, dead body was found on a...
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Does Lahore really need its own Disneyland?
Lahore will have its own ‘Disneyland’ – a recent news item that does not carry significance as far as headlines are concerned, but does carry a ton of significance otherwise. As things stand currently,...
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Making sense of terror attacks anthropologically
On the evening of November 13, 2015, Paris suffered the worst terrorist attack in modern European history, killing over 120 people. The scale and sheer barbarity of the attacks is unprecedented. The...
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Capitalism, the disease that breeds social injustice
A while back, a story went viral on the internet about a young girl, who worked as a house maid. Long story cut short, she asked her employer for an advance because her mother was extremely ill, but...
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Why is PML-N being so secretive about CPEC’s investment plan?
If the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) wasn’t already an enigma, the recent debates regarding its pros and cons have muddled this into an even bigger mess. On one hand, there are the knockers...
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Money Heist: You just cannot stop watching it until it actually ends
Show me a person who claims he is not fond of a heist thriller, and I will show you a liar. For a genre that has extensively been covered on cinema, it somehow manages to keep attracting even the most...
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When clothing brands profit from your grief
In this capitalist world, everything is for sale. Every season, every holiday, every occasion can be commercialised. Christmas Day sales, Black Friday, Thanksgiving sales, Diwali discounts, Eid...
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“A Moses without manifestation, a Christ without a cross”: Karl Marx as...
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” – Karl Marx Europe in the 19th century gave birth to two thinkers who changed everything about...
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Eidul Azha, a distant dream I am stumbling to push into reality
Eidul Azha, in my mind, has always been a ‘lesser’ Eid. It has always existed under the shadow of Eidul Fitr. As a kid, it seemed ill-fitting to call Eidul Fitr a choti Eid because it held greater...
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