The military establishment attempted to make Imran Khan irrelevant by jailing him, cracking down on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and propping up arch-rival Nawaz Sharif
The idea of Pakistan was dismissed as ‘chimerical and impractical’ in the 1930s, but it gathered steam with tacit British support as payback for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s backing of their war effort before the colonizers quit India, leaving Indians at each other’s throats after India’s Partition
The British divided resource-rich Balochistan to secure access to Afghanistan, where the colonialists fought wars to maintain a buffer zone against Russia, frustrating the ethnolinguistic nationalism of the Baloch people scattered across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran
Pakistan and northwestern India have many commonalities in terms of languages, food, culture, social norms, history, etc, and one needs to look further—South India—to understand the real difference between the two countries
A chance meeting catapulted General Rani into the highest echelons of power as she emerged as the real power behind the throne when Ayub Khan quit in the face of a Leftist movement and handed over power to Yahya Khan in 1969
Revolutionary poets Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Habib Jalib, and Ahmad Faraz’s anti-establishment resistance in Pakistan influenced progressive voices, which included the Leftist Laal band that revitalized protest poetry during military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s reign in the noughties
The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh continue to endure worsening conditions, facing a grim choice between staying in miserable conditions or returning to the insecure environment that caused their exodus
What makes The Other Side of the Divide an impressive read is that it combines a literary extraction of experience with years of reading to produce a nonfiction work that has elements of travel, history, conversation, and journalistic observation
The 2023 Amazon Prime Video show Made in Heaven promoted the myth of Polygamy among Muslims, although census data shows its negligible prevalence among all religious groups, and has more to do with class and education rather than faith
Bitter fruits of British colonialism—India’s division in 1947 and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland for Israel’s creation a year later—informed Indian policies towards Palestine until the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 2014
