When your boss breathes down your neck
It’s not fun. It’s not helping, and no, it’s not okay. Please leave me alone. I did a sales job about a year ago. It was probably the worst experience ever. It galls me to even speak of it as the memories haunt me till date. But, after being in denial about my skills for a good five months, and falsely assuring myself, “If he can do it, then so can I” or “If she can do it, I can definitely do it”, I finally realised, it wasn’t my cup of tea. Dealing with customers was not painless; it came down ...
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Pakistan needs a leader like Margaret Thatcher
“If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and would achieve nothing.” Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Hilda Thatcher embodied these words. To some she was an icon of assertiveness and conviction, to others, she was just a bossy old lady. Perhaps no other prime minister in the history of Britain has been loved and reviled at the same time as she has been, but that is who Margaret Thatcher was. To judge her on her political and economic beliefs solely would be to overlook her love for her country and her superhuman steadfastness ...
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Badam Zari: The first Pakistani tribal woman to stand for elections
The much-vaunted democratic transition has taken place in Pakistan. Caretaker set-ups have settled in the centre and the provinces are to hold free and fair elections. Similarly, candidates have also swung into motion, filing nomination papers, appearing before the Election Commission staff for pre-poll scrutiny and, most important of all, arranging funds for the election campaign. However, one event stands apart, amidst the din and uproar, of the initial phase of the election campaign: A female candidate has filed nomination papers to stand for NA-44 constituency, falling in Bajaur Agency. Badam Zari has made history by daring to move out of the confines of ...
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Maria Toor Pakay: Defying tradition to play sports
It was in 2009 when the world first learned about Maria Toor Pakay – the brave, talented 22-year-old Pashtun female squash player, who hails from the tribal region of South Waziristan – an area that is considered to be the most conservative, and is hence dubbed as the ‘most treacherous place on earth’. It is not very often, if at all, that we hear about women, especially from this part of the world, who have managed to break strict cultural norms and traditions in order to pursue a career in sports, much less a career in anything. I admit that when I first heard Maria’s ...
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Someone else’s daughter
My daughter is a young lady now, A ‘woman of the time’, Geared up to conquer the world. With all the support and confidence, Of her family, And above all, Her father, Behind her. Her questions have also matured, She is perplexed to see, My diplomas and degrees, Talent and dreams, Gathering dust in musty, dog-eared folders, Packed away in dusty, yellowing, cardboard boxes; A graveyard of evidence, That I, too, was a woman of my time. She is confused at my non-existent existence, An email-less, Facebook-less, cell-phone-less, near-servile existence. ‘My father is the best man in the world’, She proclaims proudly, Then questions, The different boundaries, That define the identities, Of two women, In the same house. I know I can put an ...
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Shoot me, I’m a social worker
Parveen Rehman, a long-time director of the renowned Orangi Pilot Project was brutally killed this past Wednesday night in Karachi. She was targeted while travelling in her car near the Banaras flyover. Rehman was an architect by profession, but left her job to work on the OPP. She was given the honourable task of improving the lives of the residents of Orangi, which she performed sincerely for the past two decades. She kept a low-profile in the media and lived a simple life with her mother in the neighbourhood of Gulistan-e-Johar. She had been receiving death threats for a while ...
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Parveen Rehman’s death has left me heartbroken
An impish smile, one that reached her eyes and made them twinkle; the way she’d intertwine her arm with yours, like school girls do; her intelligent conversations; her wry humour that was always interspersed with chortles of laughter – there was a sort of joie de vivre about Parveen Rehman that suggested a new lightness of being. She exuded warmth and a gentleness that is hard to find these days. So why was her life snuffed out in that terrible manner? Was it because she was a messiah for the poor or was it due to her attempts to make people ...
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I am a victim of the infamous Black Prado: Here is my story
They followed me. They stopped my car. Is this the Prado incident everyone is talking about? It was past midnight on a cold November night in 2012. I was returning home when my car crossed main Ittehad and went straight into Phase VIII, some 20 meters away from the first newly placed barrier. It was then that a policeman stopped our car, flashing his torch incessantly at the driver’s window. Being a woman, I did not expect to be stopped and I thought the minute the cop realised that I was in the car, he would gesture for us to go ahead. Strangely, this did not ...
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What men can expect when a woman is expecting
The news of conception can be kind of alarming for many fathers-to-be. While the mother-to-be is busy enjoying the extra attention, the poor father isn’t given the time of day. I believe that the dad-to-be is affected a lot more due to the added pressure of looking after two people now, from when the test comes positive to the time of the baby’s delivery. I remember collecting the pregnancy test results on the way home from work in 2003. ‘Positive’ it read. I immediately felt an adrenaline rush on reading it. As was expected, my wife turned into the eighth wonder of the ...
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The rishta brigade
The show started around 10am. The room wore a very neat look with the curtains being freshly washed and couches from the adjacent room placed next to the sofas. The arrivals comprised an elderly woman and two young girls, welcomed very warmly by Ashraf and his wife, Atifa. There was a clear demarcation of positions on the either side of the table — to its left were seated the guests, and to its right, the hosts. The latter wore forced smiles which did little to hide the tense anticipation gnawing at their faces and sunk into the worn-out seats like pleading, grateful ...
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