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THOUGH not from a very religious family, I take the 9th and 10th of Muharram pretty seriously. It’s a sombre time — and one that has been observed...
OH, to have been a fly in the room as Democrats watched the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They were quick to shoot down...
I CANNOT count the number of times I was made to give up my bedroom for a relative visiting wherever we were living as expats in the ’70s to ’90s....
I WAS at brunch a few weekends ago at a packed cafe when I saw a TV anchor, dining, presumably, with his family. This person has been on our screens...
IN the mid-1980s, our English teacher at school in Kuwait got us to read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. It’s set in rural America in the 1960s and...
WHAT did you have for lunch last Sunday? What about 10 Sundays ago? Or 10 years ago? What thoughts run through your mind as you try to answer these...
I AM not alone in worrying about the future of journalism. I learned this in my conversations (in person and online) with journalism instructors in...
ONE of my high school teachers, an American middle-aged man, used to poke fun at us for being clueless. He would often reference student protests in...
I WAS looking for Botox in all the wrong places. In my quest to find a doctor who uses the neurotoxin for pain management, I came across a lot of...
ON my travels in the last two years I noticed a new accessory: large water bottles. You know the ones with the straw protruding from its top? The most...
THE only movie I wanted to watch on my trip to the US last month was Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. I was blown away by the trailer and was curious how...
I HAVE a distinct memory of sitting at my dear friend Duc’s cafe-cum-gallery in Hanoi watching CNN discuss Barack Obama’s foreign policy right...
AN old, rickety house in upstate New York has served as a landmark since I began visiting family here in 2017. It is hard to miss because it has a...
I AM assisting my youngest sister in the US on a documentary, which is part personal narrative, part investigation on the closure of a bank in the...
IS there such a thing as unprecedented conspiratorial thinking? I feel the word ‘unprecedented’ is often abused, especially by Pakistanis unaware...
SOMETIME in the mid-2000s, while moving house in Karachi and sifting through things to keep, I came across an old briefcase filled with our school...
REALITY TV shows are my on/ off guilty pleasure. I should be more embarrassed to admit this, but here we are. It began with a curiosity for The...
I LOVE getting my students to watch a movie about journalism. I usually give them an assignment wherein I ask them to examine how or whether the film...
WHEN I was teaching at a journalism programme in Karachi a few years ago, former editor of The News, and columnist Ghazi Salahuddin would give a...
A LINE from a piece I quoted a few weeks ago has stayed with me: “Does social media cause this anger or does it reveal it?” This was from a 2022...
I UNDERSTAND that politics is the art of compromise, but why must women’s bodies be sacrificed at the altar of deal-making? This question weighs...
IMRAN Khan and his supporters, according to the Twitterati, are ‘the worst thing to happen to society’ — they’ve ruined tehzeeb, family...
COULD you forgive your daughter’s murderers, and then hire two of them to come work for the organisation set up in her name? This is what Linda and...
LAST year I felt a bit stumped when students in my news media literacy class told me they knew who Altaf Hussain was but didn’t really believe the...
YOU can’t get all your news from headlines. I was reminded of this last month in the US, when reading stories about Harvard president Claudine...
QUARANTINING during Covid in another country without your tools of comfort is tough. Of course, I am grateful for the support system I did have, like...
I TESTED positive for Covid on the first day of the new year in New York. It is not an ideal start to the year, or holiday, but the period of...
PAKISTAN has given me citizenship and an autoimmune disease. This is my assessment, not my doctor’s obviously. I am aware of my privilege and how it...
MANY of us are likely to know someone who travelled to another country to give birth and secure that country’s citizenship for their child. It’s...
IN my lectures about audience metrics — who and how audiences view and share stories — I always bring up Freaks and Geeks, a 1999 TV show that was...
HAVE you watched a show, movie, press conference and then heard someone talk about it and wondered whether you both saw the same thing? It is not...
LATELY, I’ve been wondering what I’m worth. I don’t mean this just from a self-esteem perspective or a religious one. I’m thinking, instead,...