What’s with the South Asian inferiority complex?
As a Pakistani who has lived most of his life in Canada, I have had many experiences in which I have observed the often bizarre and complex ways of the South Asian (Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh) community. One of the most prominent of these is their ability to deny any connection with their background. Now, keeping in mind that this does not apply to all the people in the group mentioned earlier, it certainly does cover several of them. Once, when I had just entered my teenage years, I had a Pakistani girl tell me that all the people who lived ...
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To ban or not to ban …Shezan juice
A couple of weeks back, the Jamaatud Dawa held a well-attended rally in Rawalpindi to remove an Ahmadi religious centre from Satellite Town. Even though neighbours claimed to have no issues with its presence, the assault on this myopically-perceived menace seems far from over. Just take the little-reported effort to ban a local cell phone company due to its ‘questionable ownership’. Although proven to be non-Ahmadi owned, the company still raises suspicion because it starts with the same letter that a derogatory term for Ahmadis does. Apparently, a flaw in their phones’ Urdu dictionary which made it impossible to type the ...
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When Twitter gets it wrong
I spend an average of 14 hours online every day. During this time, I monitor stories on different news sites, wires stories, Twitter and various other sources. Being in the news business, you can gauge where the news is wrong and where factual inaccuracies are coming from, which (newsflash) happens often. From politicians to opinion makers to senior journalists, factual errors and incorrect news is nothing new but it isn’t only media folk who are to blame. The online community itself is also part of this phenomenon. While ordinary citizens are never short of spreading rumors or incorrect news online ...
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Namaaz: Not just a personal matter
Call me conservative, call me old, call me a buttoned-down bore or call me whatever you like – in the end I am the only one who can define my identity because I know what I am. I am not a very good Muslim and I don’t belong to a religious or extremist community. However, personally, I would be absolutely mortified to say “No, I don’t pray Jummah“. Once I too used to believe that prayers and religion were a personal matter but I have come to the conclusion that religion is very much shared and communal. Growing up, every Wednesdays after ...
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‘My kidneys are not for kafirs’
A Pakistani runs our local mini-cab service in north London. This means we get fantastic rates when a cab is needed to get around. It also means I get an odd assortment of Muslim drivers from different parts of the Muslim world. Sometimes, conversations with cabbies reveal a lot about their community politics and general worldviews. It was one such conversation with an Algerian cabbie that got me thinking about the uniformity of hate and anti-western sentiment across the Muslim world. It also made me realise that I have justified reason to feel angry with the many Muslims settled in the United Kingdom ...
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Revival of baithak culture
Those lamenting the loss of the Pak Tea House in Lahore, look around you. The baithak culture is back. Baithak: a place to sit, eat, share ideas, create change, and most importantly, a place to just be. The trend is not just to have a restaurant, a cinema or a book store, but to have an amalgam of these under one roof. They are not exclusive clubs but open houses, requiring no membership, nominal, if any, entrance fees and operating on a first come first serve basis. Designer outlets like Melange now house cafes on the side, as do art galleries like Nomad; similarly, ...
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Historical mosques of Bhera
“Every mohallah (locality) of Bhera town has a building that can boast of belonging to a historical period; like many Hindu and Sikh monuments, a number of buildings of the Muslim period also grace the landscape of Bhera town,” says Professor Yousuf Chauhan, a teacher of Bhera Town. There are many historical mosques in Bhera town of which the mosques of Tughlaq, Khilji and Suri periods are quite prominent, he said. The list of historical mosques in Bhera is long. Qazianwali mosque, Haafizani mosque, Peeranwali mosque, Gondianwali mosques, Hakimwali mosque, Jamia Masjid Mohajirin in Pakhiwaran Mohallah are some of Bhera town’s ...
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Why job creation alone isn’t going to save Pakistan
Pakistan is a land of opportunity, but also has many needs. It is critical to create jobs in this country, but it would be an error to believe that jobs alone will solve the issue of poverty. An article from Business Week titled, “A silver lining in Pakistan’s floods” states that “this natural disaster may have given the country an opportunity to tackle a recurring point of contention in Pakistan—feudalism.” The author states that aid money going to Pakistan should focus on job-creation strategies in addition to housing. She argues that the provision of jobs in relief work and an emphasis on business training ...
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WikiLeaks: Gossip on a global level
We like to pretend that we’re indifferent to it. The fact of the matter, however, is that it exists all around us. Sometimes in the shape of a tete-a-tete, at other instances as an intelligence report or espionage leak, it all boils down to the same idea – information generated across the circles where it has no business being. Simply put, it is just the good old strangely satisfying thing we call gossip. “Log kya kahain gey” – a maxim we’d lived under all our lives, explains perfectly the very human desire to talk, converse, and ...
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Fashion could save Pakistan!
In the year 2010, several things have gone wrong in our country and our beloved city Karachi. We’ve had our fair share of bomb blasts, floods, robberies and murders. Let’s face it; this hasn’t exactly stopped us from having our fun. Karachiites, are strong, determined individuals who tend to have a “c’est la vie” kind of mentality, which is not likely to change in the near future. Of course, it is likely that we will donate to a good cause and proceed to the Karachi Press Club several times a year to be involved in a safeguard of human rights campaign, but ...
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